New urbanization construction is important for promoting sustainable economic growth in resource-based cities and can help resource-based cities achieve a sustainable development model with efficient resource allocation and green and low-carbon industrial transformation. Based on the background of the comprehensive pilot policy of new urbanization, we examined whether new urbanization construction promoted the economic growth of resource-based cities using 2011-2017 data on prefecture-level cities and the difference-in-differences (DID) method. It was found that new urbanization construction significantly promoted the growth in GDP per capita of resource-based cities, with a coefficient estimate of 0.1330, and this result passed a robustness test. The mechanism test indicated that new urbanization construction promoted the economic growth of resource-based cities by improving the efficiency of resource allocation and promoting industrial structure upgrading, with interaction term coefficient estimates of 0.1465 and 0.2929, respectively. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the policy effect of new urbanization construction was stronger in resource-rich cities than in resource-poor cities, significant in energy-based resource-based cities but not in metal-based and other resource-based cities, and significant in resource-based cities in the eastern and western regions of China but not in the central region. This study provides government departments implementing new urbanization policies with the results of a policy performance assessment of new urbanization construction for resource-based cities and feasible policy recommendations for the sustainable transformation of resource-based cities.
Keywords: New urbanization construction. Resource-based city. Difference-in-differences method. Allocation efficiency. Industrial structure.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.