Research On The Innovation Spatial Structure Of China Urban Agglomeration And Its Effect On Quality Of Economic Growth

The construction of urban agglomeration is the dominant direction of global urbanization,and it is also the core space carrier for promoting regional innovation and stimulating economic growth.Innovation-driven development is one of China's major strategies,and high-quality economic growth is another major real problem that China is facing in the new era.With the decline of China's economic growth,the arrival of Lewis Turning Point and the “demographic dividend” tending to disappear,the traditional model of depending on factors to drive economic growth will be unsustainable,and the key of economic development pattern transition and growth power shift lies in achieving high-quality economic growth.The innovation spatial structure of urban agglomeration has always been one of the core topics in the research of regional economics and innovation geography,and the quality of economic growth has gradually become a hot topic in recent years.The research on the innovation spatial structure of urban agglomeration has focused on the description of the innovation spatial structure and the influencing factors,ignoring the attention to the economic effects of the innovation spatial structure of urban agglomerations.The input of innovation factors and the choice of innovation mode(independent innovation or imitative innovation)are the “prescription” that scholars generally suggest to promote the quality of economic growth.There is still a lack of “dialogue” between the innovation spatial structure of urban agglomerations and the quality of economic growth.Considering the superposition of three national strategies(urban agglomeration,innovation-driven and economy high-quality growth strategy),the following questions are put forward in this paper: China's urban innovation has achieved certain achievements,but what kind of innovation space structure has been formed at the spatial scale of urban agglomeration? How to use new perspective to measure this innovation spatial structure? How to construct a theoretical model for the evolution of urban agglomeration innovation spatial structure pattern under the background of local government support,national policy support and economic globalization? What is the relationship between the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration and the quality of economic growth? Is it possible to find a new “prescription” for the high-quality growth of China's economy from the perspective of innovation spatial structure pattern adjustment and optimization? There is an urgent need to answer these questions theoretically empirically.In order to answer these questions,the following six main contents are studied deeply in this article:First,the theoretical framework of the formation mechanism of innovation spatial structure pattern and its economic growth effect is studied.Through the combing of related literatures,the perspective of measuring the innovation spatial structure pattern is focused on the innovation monocentricity and polycentricity dimension.The relevant core concepts are reanalyzed based on that dimension,and the spatial structure is defined as “innovation-based spatial structure”.Based on the monocentricity and polycentricity perspective,the connotation of innovation spatial structure is redefined.The concept of innovation monocentricity model and innovation polycentricity model is conceived concisely.The theoretical framework of this paper was built by absorbing the basic research paradigms of economic geography,regional economics,innovation economic geography and the structural functionalism theory in sociology.The theoretical hypotheses of this study are proposed according to the theoretical framework,which lays a theoretical foundation for further research.Second,the measurement of the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration and the realistic investigation of economic growth is studied.Thirteen typical urban agglomerations in China are selected as research samples.First,the patent data is used to conduct a preliminary investigation of the status quo of urban innovation.Then,the order-scale rule is used to measure the innovation polycentricity index of China's urban agglomerations based on the monocentricity and polycentricity perspective in order to reveal the innovation spatial structure pattern characteristics of urban agglomeration.The spatial visualization tools and methods such as Arc GIS and nuclear density are used to study the different characteristics and evolution trends of the innovation spatial structure pattern between different urban groups and different urban groups.Using the data of per capita GDP and total GDP,the scale and speed of urban agglomeration economic growth are investigated.This part lays the foundation for the next quantitative empirical research.Third,the effectiveness of the impact of city innovation space on the quality of economic growth is empirically studied.National hi-tech zones are chosen as the typical representative of city innovation space.The quality of economic growth is measured based on the view of resource dependence.The difference in difference method is applied in this article to study the effect,mechanism and spatial differentiation of the city innovation space of National hi-tech zones on resource dependence using the panel data in resource-based cities.Fourth,the influencing factors and mechanism of the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomerations are empirically studied.Local government science and technology support,national high-tech zones and foreign direct investment are used as the proxy variables of local forces,state power and global forces respectively.The impact of three kind of forces on the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration were studied empirically by use of econometric model such as fixed effects and difference-in-difference from 2001 to 2016.The knowledge-intensive service industry gap is used as a mediator variable to explore the mechanism of the three forces' role in the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration.Furthermore,the regional heterogeneity of the influence of the three forces on the spatial structure of innovation in different regions was examined empirically by dividing the urban agglomeration into two categories: the east and the midwest urban agglomerations.Fifth,the non-linear effects of innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration on the quality of economic growth was studied empirically.The intrinsic non-linear relationship between innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration and the quality of economic growth was examined to test the inverted "U" relationship between them.Furthermore,the industrial structure was introduced as the threshold variable to test the threshold effect of innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration on the quality of economic growth using panel threshold model empirically.In order to ensure the stability and reliability of the test results,the robustness test of the empirical results was also carried out by changing the calculation method of the core independent variable and replacing the dependent variables with labor productivity.Finally,countermeasures for the quality of economic growth based on the optimization of innovation spatial structure was studied.Some policy recommendations for the optimization of innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration and the quality of economic growth were specifically studied according to the conclusions of this paper and China's practice of promoting innovation-driven and high-quality economic growth strategies from the perspective of innovation monocentricity and innovation polycentricity.The conclusions of this paper mainly can be as follows:First,with the exception of one city cluster that show innovation polycentricity spatial structures,the rest of the city clusters still show the characteristics of innovation monocentricity,but the trend of innovation polycentricity is increasing.There are significant differences in the degree of innovation polycentricity among city clusters of different levels and zones.Second,the local and global forces both have significantly inhibited the improvement of the innovation polycentricity degree in China's urban agglomerations,intensifying the imbalance of innovation among cities within the urban agglomeration.In other words,local and global forces both promote the evolution of innovation monocentricity of urban agglomerations.The national power has promoted the innovation polycentricity of China's urban agglomerations significantly.National High-tech Zone is an important institutional force to promote the evolution of urban agglomerations to the innovation polycentricity spatial structure model.The improvement of the development level of knowledge-intensive service industry can repair the suppression of the impact of local forces and global forces on innovation polycentricity spatial structure model so that the inhibition role of local forces and global forces on innovation polycentricity can be reversed.The influence of local force,state power and global force on the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration has significant regional heterogeneity.The local power and state power have more obvious effects on the promotion of innovation polycentricity in the east urban agglomerations,and is not significant in midwest urban agglomerations.But the global force have significant inhibition on the level of innovation polycentricity spatial structure both in east and midwest urban agglomerations.Third,the city innovation space of national hi-tech zones significantly reduce the resource dependence of the cities and has obvious effect on the quality of economic growth.This effect is strengthened by enhance the technology innovation ability.In addition,the effect of national hi-tech zones on resource dependence shows spatial differentiation.The hypothesis of cumulative causal effect is untenable.It shows that the city innovation space of national hi-tech zones has the largest effect on reducing the resource dependence in Middle China,but the effect is the smallest and insignificant in East China.It presents the spatial difference feature of “large in the middle and small in the middle”.Fourth,there is an inverted “U” relationship between the innovation space structure of urban agglomerations and the quality of economy growth.The impact of the innovation spatial structure pattern on the quality of economy growth will undergo a transition from an innovation monocentricity driven to an innovation polycentricity driven.The impact of the innovation spatial structure pattern on the quality of economic growth has a clear threshold effect.The innovation spatial structure pattern is only conducive to the quality of economic growth when it matches the level of industrial structure.The innovations of this paper are mainly reflected in:(1)A new perspective of monocentricity and polycentricity was focused on the research of the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration;(2)The theoretical framework of "behavior-space structure-function" for the dynamic and economic effects of innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration was built.Based on the structural functionalism theory in sociology.The specific theoretical framework of "innovation activities-innovation space structure-economic growth" is put forward.The "dialogue" between regional innovation and structural functionalism theory is enhanced deeply,and the practical cognitive field of innovation geography is also broaden.It is believed that urban innovation activities shape the urban space innovation spatial structure pattern,and the innovation space structure model is influenced by local forces,state power and global forces.The feature of innovation monocentricity is decreasing and the feature of innovation polycentricity is increasing;(3)The relationship between national institutional power and the evolution of innovation spatial structure pattern was bridged and new empirical evidence for the optimization of national institutional power space embedding strategy was provided.This paper separated the national high-tech Zones from the national institutional forces,and used the difference in difference method to study the role of national high-tech zones in the innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration and its regional heterogeneity.Thus it is helpful to reveal the evolution mechanism of innovation spatial structure pattern of urban agglomeration from the perspective of exogenous system,and provide a new empirical evidence for the layout of spatial strategic of the national high-tech zone;(4)The economic efficiency of urban innovation space as the logical premise of the economic effect of innovation spatial structure of urban agglomeration is interpreted and verified,and a new path of high-quality economic growth based on the adjustment of the innovation spatial structure model was proposed.This paper proposed a new path of high-quality economic growth based on the adjustment of innovation spatial structure model based on the empirical exploration enriching and expanding the strategic system of high-quality economic growth.