Regional coordinated development has become an important way to achieve common prosperity, build a unified market, and seek social stability. It is an inevitable choice to change the development mode and develop new quality productive forces, which is of great significance to overall development and security. Regional integration policy can affect the level and pattern of regional development at the same time. It is usually used as a “visible hand” to complement the market mechanism and jointly promote regional coordinated development. The promulgation of the “Yangtze River Economic Belt Development Plan” in 2016 marks that the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt has been formally incorporated into the top-level design of national regional integration. Evaluating its coordination effects and mechanisms is the premise of continuing scientific governance. While cities serve as crucial carrier for the formation and development of economic belts, existing research has primarily focused on factors influencing coordinated development between cities. The impact of the regional integration policy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt development strategy on the imbalance of economic development within the city is like a “black box” that few studies have examined.
Based on panel data from 213 cities, this paper uses the difference-in-differences method to evaluate the impact of the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt on the imbalance of urban economic development. The study finds that the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt significantly reduced the imbalance of urban economic development and passed a series of robustness tests. The development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt also reduced the degree of development imbalance between cities, which further proves the existence of policy effects. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effect is more obvious in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, where the economy is relatively developed and the economic development is unbalanced. The results of the mechanism analysis indicate that the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt mainly triggers the “location selection effect” through the construction of the market integration system, produces the “push-pull effect” through the urban-rural integration, and promotes the coordinated development of the urban economy through the “environmental balance effect” promoted by the coordinated protection and governance of the ecological environment.
Compared with the previous literature, the marginal contribution of this paper may lie in: (1) This paper breaks through the limitations of previous studies that mainly focus on the coordinated development level of cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt and its influencing factors, and systematically examines the policy effect of the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in promoting the balanced development of urban economy. (2) Through empirical research, it verifies the remarkable achievements of the “Yangtze River Economic Belt Development Plan” and related policy documents in promoting the innovation of regional coordinated development system and mechanism, and reveals the heterogeneous characteristics of policy implementation effects. It not only provides strong support for the Yangtze River Economic Belt to accelerate the formation of an integrated development pattern, but also provides a replicable and scalable experience for other regions to explore coordinated development paths.
This paper confirms the important role of the regional integration policy of the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in promoting coordinated urban economic development, deepens the theoretical cognition of the interaction mechanism between regional integration and regional coordinated development, and provides valuable practical guidance for achieving regional coordinated development.
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