Policy Effects of the Establishment of a National-Level Integrated Big Data Pilot Zone on Industrial Structure Upgrading

The construction of national-level big data comprehensive pilot zones has profound implications for promoting the development of China's big data industry and accelerating the upgrading of industrial structure to achieve higher quality economic development.However, the current study has not explored in depth the relationship between the establishment of a national big data comprehensive pilot zone and the upgrading of industrial structure.In this paper, based on the panel data of 284 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2020, we adopt a two-way fixed-effect LSDV model to evaluate the impact of the construction of big data comprehensive pilot zones on the industrial structure upgrading of prefecture-level cities based on the quasi-natural experiment of national-level big data comprehensive pilot zones.The results show that the implementation of the big data comprehensive pilot zone policy can promote industrial structure upgrading, based on which the paper also further analyzes the intrinsic mechanism.In terms of heterogeneity, at the prefecture-level city level, the implementation of the policy has a highly significant positive promotion effect for first-tier cities and fourth-tier cities, a more significant positive promotion effect for second-tier cities, and a non-significant negative inhibitory effect for fifth-tier cities, and this heterogeneity may be related to factors such as the economic base of the cities implementing the policy and the efficiency of the government.The findings of the study provide theoretical support for assessing the policy effects of establishing big data pilot zones to promote the upgrading of China's industrial structure and achieve high-quality economic development in the future.It also provides a literature reference for prefecture-level cities to explore the development of city-level big data industries and to promote the upgrading of existing industries.