Abstract:     China′s economic construction will enter a stage of high-quality development during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. With the vigorous development of digital technologies such as big data, blockchain, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, and their accelerated integration with various industries, the digital economy is playing an increasingly important role in economic and social development. How to promote the high-quality development of the digital economy has become the focus of the transformation and upgrading of China′s future economic growth mode.Most existing studies focus on the impact of individual factors on the quality of the digital economy, however, as a new wave of techno-economic paradigm, the digital economy is a complex system that is influenced by a combination of multiple factors. Considering the multiple factors affecting the quality of the digital economy, such as technology, capital, facilities, institutions, and markets, as system elements, helps to comprehensively understand the synergistic effects among the influencing factors of the digital economy. Therefore, based on the paradigm theory of technology economy, this paper further extends its application in analyzing the combination of multiple factor relationships, reveals the complex mechanism of multiple factors linking to influence output, proposes an integrated analytical framework for analyzing the quality of the digital economy in cities, and introduces configuration thinking into the study of digital economy quality at the city level, takes 69 cities in China as case samples, using the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method (fs/QCA) to analyze the synergistic influence mechanism of human capital, financial capital, R&D capabilities, digital infrastructure, government scale, and market scale on the high-quality development of the urban digital economy. Conclusions are as follows: (1) Human capital, financial capital, R&D capabilities, digital infrastructure, government scale, and market scale cannot individually constitute the necessary conditions for a city′s high and non-high digital economy quality, indicating that the explanatory power of single condition to the quality of the digital economy is weak; (2) There are three driving paths for the city′s high digital economy quality: network-capital driven, talent- business environment driven, and R&D-market driven; (3) There are two driving paths for urban non-high digital economy quality: network-market restraint and capital-R&D restraint; (4) The influence of the government scale shows a certain asymmetry, that is, a smaller government scale, when matched with sufficient human capital and a larger market scale, is conducive to driving the high-quality development of the urban digital economy, but a larger government scale will not significantly inhibit the development of urban digital economy.This study puts forward two policy implications as follows: on the one hand, the government should combine regional resource endowments and use a configuration approach to formulate targeted education, financial, industrial, and public policies to take advantage of policy combinations and concentrate strong regional resources to develop key core elements. On the other hand, the government should realize a shift from regulatory mindset to prudent and inclusive mindset at the level of supervision, and provide a relaxed institutional environment for the development of the digital economy while carrying out regulation in various aspects such as data asset identification, network platform governance, industry anti-monopoly, and cross-border data circulation to achieve a balance between development and compliance, competition and innovation, efficiency and fairness, and security and openness.

Key words: high-quality development, digital economy, techno-economic paradigm, configuration analysis, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)