Study on the Impact of the Establishment of State-level New Districts on Industrial Upgrading

Abstract

As an important carrier of China's reform and opening-up and regional development strategy, national-level new zones undertake the important task of promoting regional economic growth and optimizing industrial structure. As China's economy enters the stage of high-quality development, the role of national-level new zones in promoting the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure is particularly important. Since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was held in 1978 to make the decision of reform and opening up, China's economy has experienced 46 years of high-speed development, and at the important historical juncture of China's economic transformation from high-speed growth to high-quality growth nowadays, the national new zones, as a pioneer of policy experimentation and a leader of economic growth, will inevitably continue to play a crucial role, so this paper utilizes the asymptotic Differences-in-Differences (DID) to assess the driving role of the establishment of national new zones on the transformation of the city's industrial structure and its potential mechanisms from 2013 to 2020. Through a comparative analysis of the changes in industrial structure before and after the establishment of national-level new zones, this paper attempts to reveal the specific contribution of national-level new zones in promoting the advanced and rationalized industrial structure, as well as the role of high-level development of openness to the outside world and government expenditures in it.