Does the Upgrading of Provincial Development Zones Improve the Cities’ Economic Efficiency? Evidence from a Quasi-experiment of Heterogeneous Development Zones

The expansion of China's development zones has already made significant contributions to economic development, as well as provided practical guidance for other developing countries to implement development zone practice. This paper analyzes how industry characteristics, high-technology zone hierarchy differences, regional differences, and openness differences affect the causal relationship between high-tech zones (HTZ) establishment and innovation of information service enterprises. The study constructs a complete empirical analysis framework with the help of the difference-indifference model (DID) and interaction term model. The empirical results show that, compared with the control group, HTZ establishes more innovation intentions and increases the innovation scale, thus significantly enhancing innovation levels. Compared with the non-high-tech zone sample, the HTZ has a significant positive effect on the innovation ability of technology service enterprises in the cities. Meanwhile, through a comparison of the regression results of different regions, it is found that the establishment of high-tech zones has the best effect on enterprise innovation ability in the eastern region, followed by the northeastern, central, and western regions. The following policy recommendations are proposed for optimizing the construction and management of high technology zones and promoting enterprise innovation development.