ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Economy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1608214
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Policy and Development in the Global SouthView all 5 articles
Can you have both fish and bear's paw?:The Impact of National Innovative City Pilot Policy on the Urban-rural Income Gap
Provisionally accepted
- Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, China
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In the process of advancing high-quality development in China, the National Innovation-Oriented City Pilot Policy has had a significant and undeniable impact on the urban-rural income gap. Using panel data from 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2018, this paper treats the policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a multi-period DID approach to evaluate its effects on the urban-rural income disparity, as well as the heterogeneity of these effects. The study further explores the underlying mechanisms from the perspective of industrial structure optimization. The results indicate that: (1) the National Innovation-Oriented City Pilot Policy has significantly widened the urban-rural income gap at the prefecture level; (2) the policy exacerbates the income gap through two mechanisms -promoting industrial upgrading while inhibiting the rationalization of the industrial structure-with the partial mediation effects contributing 31.71% and 35.13% to the total effect, respectively. Based on this analysis of the "trade-off" between innovation and income equality, this study offers policy insights and recommendations for constructing an income distribution mechanism that reflects the value of innovation factors and promoting coordinated urban-rural development.
Keywords: the national innovative city pilot policy, the urban-rural income gap, Industrial structure advancement, industrial structure rationalization, multi-period Difference-in-differences
Received: 08 Apr 2025; Accepted: 28 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 张, zhao and zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: xindong zhao, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, China
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