ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
The Impact of Upgrading Administrative Rank on Regional Innovation from an Agglomeration Perspective: A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the Establishment of Chongqing as a Province-Level Municipality
Provisionally accepted
- 1Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macao, SAR China
- 2Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Administrative rank, as an intuitive manifestation of a region's political capital, significantly influences the agglomeration capacity of that region and, consequently, affects its innovative development. This study utilizes Chongqing's promotion to a province-level municipality as a quasi-natural experiment. It employs panel data from 219 counties in Sichuan and Chongqing spanning from 1992 to 2010 and applies the difference-in-differences (DID) method to systematically evaluate the impact of administrative rank upgrades on regional innovation and to explore the underlying mechanisms. The findings are as follows: (1) The upgrade in administrative rank for Chongqing significantly enhances regional innovative development, exhibiting a long-term positive trend; (2) The administrative rank upgrade promotes regional innovative development through spatial spillover effects, which follow an inverse "U" shape trend. These effects are significant within a radius of 30 to 120 kilometers, peaking at 60 kilometers; (3) The administrative rank upgrade primarily fosters regional innovative development through mechanisms of population agglomeration and economic agglomeration, with the economic agglomeration mechanism exerting a greater influence than the population agglomeration mechanism. This paper offers theoretical insights for optimizing resource allocation at the administrative level, advancing administrative system reform, and refining the national strategy for innovation-driven development.
Keywords: administrative rank, Regional innovation, Difference-in-differences, Economic agglomeration, Population aggregation
Received: 11 Aug 2025; Accepted: 23 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 WEI and Bing. 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: Zeng Bing, 120210014@aufe.edu.cn
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.