The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on the Economic Development of Node Cities

In the face of the dual difficulties of economic globalization, unbalanced regional economic development and low resource allocation efficiency, the Belt and Road as an important platform for building a new development pattern in China and promoting international economic cooperation is playing an irreplaceable role. It is of great practical significance to accurately assess the impact of the Belt and Road initiative on the economic growth of domestic node cities. Taking the Vision and Actions for Jointly Building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road published in 2015 as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper constructs a two-way fixed-effect model and empirically tests the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on the economic growth of node cities along the route and its mechanism by using a sample of 274 prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to 2019. The results show that the “Belt and Road” initiative has a significant promoting effect on the economic growth of node cities along the route, which is still robust under the test of placebo test and PSM-DID model. And promoting the rationalization and upgrading of the industrial structure of node cities along the route is an important mechanism. Heterogeneity test shows that the promotion effect is more significant in less developed cities and inland cities.