文明城市评选能否推动城市经济高质量发展?——基于274个城市的准自然实验证据

The Effect of Civilized City Selection on High-quality Economic Development and Testing the Mechanism:An Examination Based on the Dual Perspective of Spatial Spillover and Heterogeneity

文明城市评选是以构建文明和谐的社会环境为导向,以此推进社会经济可持续发展的城市治理新模式。基于2003—2019年274个地级市的面板数据,利用多期双重差分模型考察文明城市评选对经济高质量发展的作用机制。研究发现:文明城市评选推动了经济高质量发展,经试点非随机性、替换被解释变量、PSM-DID及安慰剂等一系列稳健性检验后,上述结果依然成立。机制分析表明,环境规制效应与产业结构升级效应是文明城市评选推动城市经济高质量发展的重要渠道。空间视角下,文明城市评选不仅推动了本地经济的高质量发展,且对周边城市的经济发展质量产生明显的溢出效应;异质性视角下,文明城市评选对经济高质量发展的影响效果因城市区位、城市规模及城市资源类型的不同而存在明显差异。

The selection of a civilized city is a new model of urban governance to promote sustainable social and economic development,guided by building a civilized and harmonious social environment.Based on panel data of 274 prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2019,this paper takes the selection of civilized cities as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a multi-period difference-in-difference model to investigate the mechanism of the selection of civilized cities on high-quality economic development.This study found that the selection of civilized cities promoted high-quality economic development,and these results remain valid after a series of robustness tests including pilot non-randomness,replacement of explained variables,PSM-DID,and placebo.A mechanism analysis shows that the effects of environmental regulation and upgrading the industrial structure are important channels for civilized city selection to promote high-quality economic development.From the spatial perspective,the selection of civilized cities not only promotes the high-quality development of the local economy,but also has a positive spatial spillover effect on the quality of economic development in the surrounding cities;from the perspective of heterogeneity,the impact of civilized city selection on high-quality economic development varies according to differences in urban spatial location,population size,and resource endowment.