First, utilising text quantitative analysis techniques, this paper analyses the smart city pilot policy in depth and clarifies its theoretical mechanism that influence the quality of new-type urbanisation. The revised entropy technique is then used to calculate the new-type urbanisation quality of 276 Chinese cities with a prefecture level or higher from 2007 to 2018. The above action mechanism is evaluated using the Difference-in-Difference model, employing the smart city pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment (DID). The results indicate that the implementation of the smart city pilot policy can significantly enhance the quality of new-type urbanisation, and this conclusion is robust under a variety of conditions, including parallel trend testing, tendency score matching, exclusion of other policy interference and placebo testing. The analysis of heterogeneity indicates that the smart city pilot strategy has a greater impact on the qualitative improvement of new-type urbanisation in historic industrial bases, resource-based cities, and large-scale cities. The mechanism test confirmed that the construction of smart cities has improved the quality of new-type urbanisation primarily through the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure brought about by smart industrial policy and scientific and technological innovation fostered by smart government and smart people's livelihood policies.
© 2023. The Author(s).