The influence of civilized city honorary title on the urban innovation capacity

Currently, China has entered a stage of high-quality development due to innovations and improving capabilities of the cities. Being the most valuable urban brand, civilized cities are a symbol of the city’s comprehensive ability. Their construction blueprint coincides with the realization of high-quality development. Therefore, exploring the relationship between civilized cities’ construction and urban innovative development is a matter of great significance for improving national high-quality development policies and strengthening civilized cities’ construction. This paper examined the data from 242 cities from 2003 to 2016, applying the multi-period difference-in-difference model to test the established hypothesis. The results indicate that the pilot policy for civilized cities has effectively improved the level of urban innovation. The results also validate that the title of the civilized city effectively promotes the urban innovation level by promoting the agglomeration of human capital, improving the level of informatization, and increasing investment in scientific as well as technological innovation. At the same time, there are significant differences in policy effectiveness for cities with different urban levels and geographical locations. The construction of future civilized cities should focus on attracting and cultivating high-quality talents, strengthening investment and support in information infrastructure construction, and scientific and technological innovation research and development to adapt to local conditions and resultantly achieve the improvement in urban innovation level.