Abstract:

    After entering the stage of high-quality development, there is still a serious misallocation of resources in China, which leads to decrease of total factor productivity. Therefore, exploring theoretically the mechanism of the role of resource misallocation is a current issue that needs to be studied in depth by academics. And as an important trend of China′s future economic development, industrial synergistic agglomeration is an important driving force to improve resource misallocation and promote high-quality economic development. In addition, as the leading force in the development of industrial integration cluster, digital technology is not only the fundamental way to enhance independent innovation capacity and improve innovation performance, but it has a strong knowledge spillover capability as well. Therefore, in the context of the deep integration of real economy and digital technology, it is of great significance to improve resource allocation efficiency and transform the economic development mode by scientifically understanding and grasping the intrinsic connection between industrial synergistic agglomeration and digital technology from a spatial perspective, breaking the technological dilemma in industrial synergistic agglomeration, making up the short board of technological spillover and bringing a new round of technological spillover dividend.

     With the iterative upgrading of digital technology, the industrial collaborative agglomeration can not only promote the improvement of the innovation capability of the city by virtue of the function of digital technology, but also drives the innovation capability of neighboring cities through the cumulative release of knowledge spillover effect. And this innovation capability is sequentially enhanced between the central and peripheral cities, which helps the efficient flow of factors and the improvement of resource allocation efficiency. In addition, the implementation of regional integration strategy may strengthen the inter-city cooperation through effective polarization effect and diffusion effect, so that the spatial scope of industrial synergistic agglomeration is expanded to urban agglomeration and larger regional space, which provides an important precondition for the positive effect of industrial synergistic agglomeration on correcting resource misallocation. Therefore, following the basic idea of "industrial association-spatial spillover-institutional environment". In the modern economic system, correcting resource misallocation is the fundamental way to promote high-quality economic development, and collaborative industrial clustering is an important driving force to improve resource misallocation. From the perspective of externality, this paper integrates the variables of industrial collaborative agglomeration, digital technology, and regional integration into a unified analytical framework to build a center periphery theoretical model. Based on this analytical framework, this thesis constructs a spatial panel Durbin model and a PSM-DID model with panel data of prefecture-level cities and above in China from 2003 to 2020. The impact of synergistic industrial agglomeration on regional resource misallocation and its mechanism of action are analyzed by theoretical and empirical methods.

     The research results show that the positive effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration in correcting resource misallocation not only has significant spatial spillover effect, but also presents a complex feature of spatial interactivity. Specifically, the correction effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration on resource misallocation with the help of digital technology functions has an inverted "U-shaped local-neighborhood" spatial effect. When the level of industrial collaborative agglomeration is on the left side of the "U-shaped" curve, the resource misallocation effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration presents an improvement effect of "partnership with neighbors". When the industrial collaborative agglomeration crosses the peak inflection point and falls to the right of the U-shaped curve, the resource misallocation effect of the industrial collaborative agglomeration presents a "beggar-thy-neighbor" worsening phenomenon. In addition, with the iterative upgrading of digital technology, the correction of resource misallocation through digital technology externality by industrial synergistic agglomeration becomes stronger and stronger, i.e., the externality of digital technology expansion can better delay the efficiency loss caused by over-allocation, thus prompting the correction of resource misallocation by industrial synergistic agglomeration to enter the inflection point later. 

     The paper also founds that regional integration strategies further enhance the correction effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration on resource misallocation by increasing the intensity of inter-regional digital technology diffusion. Based on the important conclusion that synergistic industrial agglomeration can correct resource misallocation with the moderating effect of digital technology and the promotion of regional integration, this paper puts forward some relevant policy recommendations to promote cross-regional exchanges and cooperation and facilitate high-quality economic development.

Key words: industrial collaborative agglomeration, digital technology, resource misallocation, regional integration