Bridging the regional innovation policy and entrepreneurship: the role of intellectual capital

Does national innovative city pilot policy promote green technology progress? Evidence from China

This paper aims to examine the impact of the digital economy on urban entrepreneurship and its spatial spillover effects. To achieve this purpose, this research relies on data from 252 prefecture-level cities in China from 2012 to 2019. The findings demonstrate that the development of the digital economy has a positive influence on entrepreneurial activity in cities, with particularly effects observed robust at higher quantile levels. Additionally, the results suggest that urban entrepreneurial activity may be a siphoning effect, impeding entrepreneurship in neighboring cities. Furthermore, further investigation shows regional and policy heterogeneity.

In an era of global economic slowdown, effectively stimulating urban economic development has become a critical challenge for governments around the world. Based on the panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2017, this study adopts the double-difference method to evaluate the impacts of innovative cities pilot policies on urban economic growth, explore the mechanism through the intermediary effect model, and study the heterogeneity of cities with different development endowments by sub-samples. This study shows the following: (1) The policy of innovative pilot cities has significantly promoted their economic growth: GDP growth rates in the pilot cities are 1.14 percent higher than those in non-pilot cities. (2) The innovative city policy can effectively improve technological progress and human capital, thereby promoting economic growth. (3) The promotion effect of the pilot policy on the economy varies by region, city size, administration grade, market level, and government efficiency. Specifically, the policies have the most substantial positive effects in cities with lower administrative levels, smaller sizes, less market orientation, and higher government efficiency. This research, based on the city data from the world’s largest economy, evaluates the impact of government intervention—targeted urban innovation policies—on economic development, providing valuable insights into how innovation policies can be tailored and optimized for diverse urban contexts.

This study utilises panel data encompassing 282 prefectural-level cities in China spanning the years 2007 to 2019. Its primary objectives are to assess the direct and indirect consequences of the National Innovative City Pilot Policy (NICPP) on Green Total Factor Productivity (GTFP) through the application of the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference-in-Difference (DID) models. Subsequently, the research delves into whether NICPP can enhance the GTFP of cities by means of fiscal investments in science and technology, the degree of green innovations, and the level of financial development. Additionally, robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses are conducted to strengthen the validity of the findings. The results indicate that NICPP positively influences the GTFP of cities, primarily via these three mechanisms.

This chapter presents the collective understanding of 'smart urbanism' in the Chinese context. Specifically, the case of Wuhan is used to illustrate the ways that the smart city concept has 'landed' in typical Chinese urban space, since the city is neither a high-profile coastal metropolis nor a remote backwater. After providing brief contextual information about Wuhan and sketching out its current smart city activities, the chapter considers three interrelated dimensions of their recent emergence. First, from a 'vertical' perspective, they are enabled by national policies which adapt and frame the loose global discourse of the smart city to reflect particular Chinese agendas. Second, from a more 'horizontal', municipality-centric perspective, the chapter explores the additional significance and more dispersed agency associated with a Chinese mode of 'urban entrepreneurialism'. Finally, it suggests that the more obvious significance of the smart for daily life is embedded within a much broader embrace of everyday digital technology, which extends beyond the 'smart' label itself.

The assessment of the relationship between the innovative city pilot policy (ICPP) and urban resilience is crucial for enhancing cities’ ability to foresee, endure, and recover from various disruptive events. Despite the widespread implementation of the ICPP in China, it remains uncertain if this strategy will contribute to the development of urban resilience. Starting with data collected from 245 prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2020, this paper initially evaluates the causal effect of the policy intervention using the difference-in-differences (DID) model and the propensity score matching-difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) method. A multi-dimensional urban resilience measurement index and a mediating effect model were constructed. The empirical results show that (1) the ICPP has a significant effect on urban resilience, which remains in force after a series of robustness tests, such as a placebo test and difference-in-differences machine learning (DML) approach; (2) regional R&D investment, technological talent attraction, green innovation capability enhancement, and information infrastructure development are identified as the mediating variable for the ICPP’s impact on urban resilience dimensions; and (3) heterogeneity study results show that the ICPP has a significantly greater impact on medium-sized cities, attributed to their capacity to enhance the resilience of cities with more growing space. Furthermore, cities with lower economic agglomeration saw a greater increase in urban resilience due to the ICPP. Accordingly, it is recommended to prioritize the allocation of innovative resources to non-coastal regions, cities with low economic agglomeration, and medium-sized cities. This study provides crucial recommendations for the enlargement of the ICPP’s scale and coordinated progress of China’s urban resilience.

An accurate assessment of the impact of national low-carbon city pilot policies on urban green transition is crucial for optimizing policy frameworks and laying a solid foundation for achieving long-term national emission reduction targets. In this study, both the temporal and spatial dimensions were incorporated, utilizing panel data from 266 prefecture-level cities in China between 2003 and 2022. A Spatial Difference-in-Differences (SDID) model was constructed from a geographical perspective. To clarify the mechanisms by which national low-carbon city pilot policies influenced urban green transition while considering spatial elements, empirical tests were conducted to examine the interactions among different regional pilot policies and their effectiveness. The key findings included the following: (1) When the spatial layout of policies was considered, national low-carbon pilot policies demonstrated significant positive effects on both the environmental and economic performance of pilot cities and neighbouring regions, fulfilling Porter’s hypothesis and the rebound effect theory. Specifically, CO₂ emission intensity decreased by an average of 0.244 tons per ten thousand yuan, whereas the comprehensive score for economic development quality increased by an average of 0.008. (2) The policies had significant inhibitory effects on the environmental and economic performance of neighbouring cities, where the CO₂ emission intensity increased by an average of 0.448 tons per ten thousand yuan; furthermore, the comprehensive score for economic development quality decreased by an average of 0.031. (3) The impacts of these policies on local and neighbouring areas dynamically changed due to the combined effects of policy delay and cumulative outcomes. Moreover, the influences of pilot policies varied due to differences in location and resource endowments. On the basis of these findings, recommendations for improving green and low-carbon development were proposed, aiming to provide valuable references for China’s urban green transition.

This study used Staggered DID on the panel data of 254 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2016 to explore the promotion effect and mechanism of innovative city pilot policy on urban brand development. The research shows that compared with cities without the pilot policy, the construction of innovative cities can increase the city brand value by 10% and has significantly promoted eastern, non-central cities with large populations and higher levels of science and education. Innovative city pilot policy can promote city brand development through cultural inheritance and innovation and entrepreneurship mechanisms. The results indicate that innovative city pilot policy has a significant spatial spillover effect on city brand development. Our findings add to the field of city brand evaluation by providing policy suggestions and experiential references for evaluating city brand development.

In the last 40years, Chinese cities have seen extensive development across a wide array of spheres. In this study, we applied a power-law and multifractal analysis to characterise 22 indices for 288 prefecture-level cities in mainland China. The data used to characterise the indices is representative of the year 2012. The results show that the Gross domestic product (GDP) is regular and exhibits multifractal spatial characteristics. Specifically, most developmental fields exhibit coupling in conjunction with being chaotic. Furthermore, eight indices with multifractal characteristics clearly reflect the spatial complexity of the corresponding fields and the volatility between prefecture-level cities. Overall, the tertiary industry has undergone nongeneralised development. On the other hand, the construction industry resembles a bubble economy, and the spatial layout of traditional industries has a homogenising effect in Middle and East China. This study examines China's overall spatial characteristics and states based on the above-mentioned analyses; additionally, the study focuses on the early 2010s. The contribution of this study provides a quantitative analysis paradigm based on a multifractal approach.

Cooperation between government and social capital is an important starting point in the supply-side reform of public services. It is also an effective practice in public governance innovation. Based on policy diffusion theory and event history analysis (EHA), this study analyzes panel data from 282 mainland prefecture-level cities in China from 2004–2020 to explore public–private partnerships’ critical diffusion factors. The study reveals that motivation factors, resource/obstacle factors, and external factors affect government and social capital cooperation policies to different extents. The main driving forces for local governments to adopt these policies are population size, level of economic development, government financial resources, the learning mechanism, and the imitation mechanism. This study proposes the following arguments: firstly, that the ultimate goal of policy innovation is to solve social contradictions and meet public demand; secondly, that economic resources can help to adopt policy innovation and proper diffusion; thirdly, that the public–private partnership (PPP) model has been continuously developed by using experience from other projects or cities through a learning mechanism; and finally, that policy publicity and public opinion expressed via the mainstream media are not only an inducement for policy innovation and diffusion, but also a powerful guarantee. The experience of local governments in China can help to verify whether the “positive factors” that are traditionally considered to be conducive to the cooperation between the government and social capital are effective, and to reveal the internal logic of the innovation diffusion of public policies of local governments in China from a more multidimensional perspective.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution can harm the climate, the environment, and human health. With sustainability initiatives receiving increasing attention, whether compact urban development can yield green environmental benefits has become an essential research proposition among urban planners. The compact city theory advocates energy efficiency enhancement through the mutual superposition of urban functions. First, a theoretical analysis framework for the effect of urban compactness on environmental quality was constructed. Second, on the basis of panel data from 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2021, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) was applied to reveal the spatiotemporal nonstationary distribution of urban PM2.5 pollution. Finally, the heterogeneous influence mechanisms of compact urban factors on PM2.5 pollution were empirically studied through the geographical and temporal weighted regression (GTWR) model. The main findings are as follows: (1) From 2010 to 2021, the proportion of cities in China with good air quality significantly increased. The cities with high–high pollution clustering are currently located mainly in Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, Shandong, and Henan. (2) Economic and transportation compactness factors mitigated PM2.5 pollution in most cities, whereas the long-term combined effects of the population and land compactness factors may have exacerbated urban PM2.5 pollution. (3) There was significant spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the effects of urban compactness factors on air pollution. Cities where land-use compactness exerts a pollution mitigation effect were located east of the Hu line. Cities in Northeastern China had the strongest pollution mitigation effect from transportation compactness, followed by the cities in Southwestern China.

Fine-scale forest biological hazard in China show significant spatial and temporal heterogeneity

This paper, based on the panel data of 281 prefecture-level cities in China, applies the difference-in-differences (DID) approach and the propensity score matching DID (PSM-DID) approach to an empirical study on the impacts of the low-carbon pilot program on industrial structure. It concludes that the program has contributed significantly to more rational industrial structures of pilot areas. The study shows that pilot areas have more rational industrial structures than non-pilot areas, recording an increase of 0.058 units in average rational level. This conclusion holds under various robustness tests. Further heterogeneity analysis suggests that the low-carbon pilot program has notably boosted the rational levels of industrial structures of cities in central China and small cities, while less so for other parts of China or other larger cities. Mechanism test shows that low-carbon cities have realized industrial structure upgrading by facilitating urban innovation. In light of this, the low-carbon pilot program should be further put in place steadily with a focus on tailoring pilot policies to local conditions and enhancing their economic adaptability. The role of the program in optimizing industrial structure should be fully leveraged to effectively add to efforts in actively exploring green, low-carbon sustainable development of economy and pulling off the transformation of both economic structure and energy mix.

Has digital technology innovation improved urban total factor energy efficiency? - Evidence from 282 prefecture-level cities in China.

Under the urban development trend of sprawl, improving energy use efficiency is a proper way to promote green and low-carbon construction in cities. This paper uses panel data from 283 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2008 to 2019 to measure the urban sprawl index, and analyze the spatial-temporal evolution law of urban sprawl and electricity consumption. The relationship between urban sprawl and electricity consumption is empirically examined, and the differential effect of urban sprawl on electricity consumption is analyzed. Finally, the impact of urban sprawl on electricity consumption based on a spatial perspective is explored in depth by establishing a spatial error model. We found the following: (1) The levels of urban sprawl and urban electricity consumption are on the rise. The spatial distribution of urban sprawl is more dispersed, and cities with high electricity consumption levels are mostly concentrated in the eastern coastal areas. (2) Urban sprawl exacerbates electricity consumption, and this conclusion is still robust after a series of robustness tests were conducted and endogeneity issues were taken into account. In terms of the influence mechanism, urban sprawl mainly affects electricity consumption by changing the allocation of land resources, increasing the dependence on private transportation, and inhibiting green technology innovation. (3) The incremental effect of urban sprawl on electricity consumption is more pronounced in cities with high sprawl levels, weak environmental regulations, and low green innovation levels, as well as in west cities. (4) Urban sprawl and electricity consumption both have a significant positive spatial correlation. Electricity consumption of cities is not only related to their own regions but also influenced by the adjacent regions, and the spatial correlation is mainly reflected in the random error term. This paper deepens the understanding of the basic laws of urban sprawl affecting urban low-carbon development, which also has implications for new urbanization strategies and green development.