Expansion Of City Group And Regional Innovation

The driving force of a nation’s progress lies in the spur of innovation,and the key to a country’s prosperity lies in the development of science and technology.In order to achieve the goal of higher quality economic development,we must abandon the traditional economic growth model and take innovation as the new engine of economic growth.The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed that,we should adhere to the core position of innovation in the overall situation of China’s modernization drive,and take self-reliance in science and technology as the strategic support for national development.At present,urban agglomeration has become the space carrier of economic activities and innovation activities.Innovative resources are highly concentrated in the city group.Therefore,The future development path of China’s urban agglomerations is to adhere to the development form of urban agglomerations,implement innovation driven development strategy,and improve the innovation ability and comprehensive competitiveness of cities.Under the background of innovation driven development strategy and the steady expansion of China’s city groups,what kind of impact does the expansion have on regional innovation level and what is its internal mechanism?This is a question worth pondering.The Yangtze River Delta is one of the most dynamic,open and innovative regions in China.In order to study the relationship between regional integration expansion and regional innovation level,this paper uses the data of 199 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016 as initial sample.and we use the double difference method to test and compare the impact of the expansion of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration on the innovation level of the overall city and the original city in 2010.At the same time,a series of robustness tests,such as parallel trend test,placebo test,PSM-DID test,replacement of indicators to measure the level of regional innovation,expansion sample test and excluding the impact of other plans in the same period,are used to verify the conclusions of this paper.Furthermore,we also use the Synthetic Control Method(SCM)to evaluate the policy effect of the expansion of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration,which makes up for the subjectivity and randomness of DID in the selection of control groups to a certain extent.On this basis,by means of literature review and theoretical derivation,this paper analyzes and verifies the internal mechanism of capacity expansion and innovation,namely,economic linkage mechanism,foreign direct investment mechanism and industrial division mechanism.The results show that:(1)the implementation of the Yangtze River Delta expansion policy in 2010 significantly promoted the level of regional innovation,and this positive effect increased year by year.(2)In terms of different regions,the expansion has improved the innovation ability of the whole city and the original city,but the impact on the innovation ability of the original city is greater than that of the whole city.(3)In terms of function channels,expansion has a positive effect on the whole city and the original city through economic connection mechanism,foreign direct investment mechanism and industrial division mechanism.That is to say,expansion is conducive to strengthening economic ties between cities,improving the intensity of foreign direct investment and industrial division of labor,so as to promote the level of regional innovation.