创新型地方政府与地区经济高质量发展

Innovative Local Governments With High-Quality Regional Economic Development

创新型地方政府对转变经济发展方式有重要意义,理论上创新型地方政府可能通过优化本地资源配置、引导地区创新活动,进而推动地区经济高质量发展。本文采用“中国地方政府创新奖”作为传递创新型地方政府的信号,利用2001—2013年地级市数据与灯光数据为样本,采用渐进双重差分法评估了创新型地方政府对地区经济高质量发展的影响。研究发现,创新型地方政府提升了地区经济水平,且相关稳健性检验进一步支撑了该结论。机制分析表明,创新型地方政府通过引导当地创新活动的产生、人力资本的形成,来提升地区经济水平,但由于合作类地方政府创新的相对缺失,阻碍了地区资源配置效率的提升,因而不利于地区经济高质量发展。异质性分析表明,高行政等级的创新型地方政府带来的经济效益更高,且创新型地方政府存在先发优势,具体表现为,相对于前期获奖城市,后期获奖城市带来的经济效益有所下降。本文的分析为地方政府转型提供了理论依据。

Innovative local governments are important for transforming the economic development mode.Theoretically,innovative local governments may optimize the efficiency of local resource allocation and lead regional innovation activities,thus promoting high-quality regional economic development.In this paper,we use the"Local Government Innovation Award"as a signal of innovative local governments,and evaluate the impact of innovative local governments on high-quality regional economic development by using prefecture-level city data and lighting data from 2001 to 2013 as samples.It is found that innovative local governments enhance regional economies,and the findings are further supported by relevant robustness tests.The mechanism analysis shows that innovative local governments enhance the regional economy by stimulating the generation of local innovative activities and human capital formation,but the relative absence of innovation in cooperative-type governments hinders the improvement of regional resource allocation efficiency and therefore is not conducive to the high-quality development of the regional economy.The heterogeneity analysis shows that innovative local governments with high administrative levels bring higher economic benefits and that innovative local governments have a first-mover advantage,as evidenced by the decrease in economic benefits brought by later award-winning cities compared to earlier award-winning cities.The analysis of this paper provides a theoretical basis for local government transformation.