This special issue adopts a multidisciplinary lens to examine the rapid transition of China's urban development from traditional industrial agglomeration to innovation convergence. Integrating New Economic Geography theory, spatial economics insights, and policy case studies, it offers a comprehensive overview of China's innovation-driven urbanization. The collection highlights how market-based price mechanisms, targeted government interventions, and cross-regional knowledge spillovers jointly shape emerging innovation clusters. It also surveys theoretical frontiers in the “age of innovation,” including the enduring role of geographic distance, the impacts of heterogeneity and complexity, the integration of endogenous growth frameworks, and the micro-mechanisms of knowledge creation and diffusion. Finally, the issue previews empirical contributions that analyze urban innovation patterns, cross-boundary collaboration, infrastructure-enabled division of labor, and the pressing challenges of equity, sustainability, and methodological development in the study of industrial clusters and urbanization.

We examine whether China's place-based government venture capital guidance funds (GVCs) reshape the spatial distribution of urban innovation. Although China's GVCs have raised over 10 trillion yuan in the past two decades, their role in innovation-led growth remains largely unexplored. Exploiting the central government's fiscal reform and the staggered rollout of prefecture-level GVCs, we implement a spatial difference-in-differences method that distinguishes innovation generation from commercialization and captures spillovers. We find that GVCs promote venture capital agglomeration and cross-city investment spillovers, increasing the economic value of innovation in both host and neighboring cities, while improving innovation quantity and quality in host cities. Our findings reveal previously overlooked spatially asymmetric effects of GVCs, arising from their heterogeneous investment strategies across cities.

Urban agglomerations stand as epicenters of concentrated innovative endeavors, with a nuanced understanding of regional innovation dynamics within urban agglomerations holding profound theoretical and pragmatic implications. Governmental planning assumes a central role in the developmental trajectory of urban agglomerations, yet its nuanced impact on the innovation endeavors of pertinent stakeholders remains inadequately elucidated. Leveraging a distinctive dataset amalgamating urban, industrial, and enterprise patent records, this article employs a robust empirical approach utilizing a Difference-in-Differences model to scrutinize the effects and mechanisms of national urban agglomeration planning on enterprise innovation. Empirical findings underscore a substantive and heterogeneous positive impact of government planning on enterprise innovation output. The results of the mechanism analysis show that government planning affects enterprise innovation by stimulating R D investment, improving market integration, expanding knowledge spillovers, and influencing enterprise internal operations and management decisions. This article contributes to discussions on the intricate interplay between government planning and innovation dynamics within urban agglomerations.

Regarding the role of government in technological and industrial upgrading, one view holds that the market should be left to its own devices, while another argues that government can play an important role. Government and Economics posits that government can play a positive role, but this requires that government behavior have boundaries, be oriented toward promoting economic development, and that government incentives be properly aligned. In the process of technological and industrial development in Shenzhen since the reform and opening-up, the Shenzhen government represents a paradigmatic case in this regard. This paper explores how the Shenzhen government, while maintaining reasonable boundaries, designed correct incentive mechanisms to collaborate with the market in driving technological innovation and industrial upgrading. Shenzhen's successful rise from a city with no industry, no technology, and no talent to a global innovation center demonstrates that the government role must evolve dynamically with development stages: from infrastructure construction in the factor-driven stage, to economies of scale cultivation in the investment-driven stage, and then to ecosystem building in the innovation-driven stage. This role transformation cannot be separated from the design of reasonable government incentive mechanisms. Furthermore, this paper uses the new energy vehicle industry as an example to analyze how government effectively guides market forces and forms innovation networks by eliminating innovation fears, establishing technical standards, funding Ru0026amp;D, and building industrial chains. The Shenzhen experience shows that when government maintains reasonable boundaries, consistent goals, and proper incentives, it can form a complementary relationship with the market, significantly reducing innovation risks and promoting knowledge accumulation and industrial coordination. This provides replicable experience for other regions.

This paper examines how access to household decarbonization is institutionally structured in China and the United States. Using an inequality of opportunity perspective, we focus on the design of household-facing mitigation instruments and shift attention away from mitigation outcomes and individual preferences. We construct a cross-national registry of nationally salient, national-level policies across four household mitigation pathways and evaluate their design features using a twelve-item Access Friction Index that captures eligibility rules, administrative requirements, financial conditions, and delivery and infrastructure constraints. The comparative study indicates that, despite contrasting governance systems, mitigation opportunities in both countries are shaped by dense, policy-embedded access frictions. In China, access is most visibly conditioned by housing tenure, local infrastructure, and place-based implementation capacity. In the United States, it is more strongly gated by income, tax liability, and liquidity, reflecting reliance on tax-based incentives. These institutional patterns are consistent with early mitigation being concentrated among higher-income home-owning households, while renters, migrants, and infrastructure-constrained communities face systematically narrower low-carbon choice sets. Overall, the analysis underscores that household decarbonization operates as an access-structured process and clarifies how institutional design shapes the distribution of feasible low-carbon opportunities across social groups.

Although science plays an ever more vital role in the modern knowledge economy, its influence over regional innovation remains highly uneven across space. Using panel data of 269 Chinese cities from 2000 to 2017, this paper investigates the spatial dynamics between local scientific knowledge and regional technological innovation. Our results reveal that: (1) local scientific knowledge, including applied science and basic science, significantly enhances regional innovation output, with persistent effects diminishing over time. (2) The efficiency of scientific knowledge's transformation varies across city scales: medium and mega cities convert science into innovation more efficiently, while only super cities can turn basic science into highly original breakthrough inventions. (3) Within metropolitan regions, science-intensive cities foster outward knowledge spillover beyond their administrative boundaries thus provide knowledge sources for innovation in much wider areas, whereas industry-specialized cities' innovation benefits from both local and external scientific inputs. (4) Mechanism analysis highlights that regional absorptive capacity and university-industry collaboration are key channels, while interactions with local innovation ecosystems and supporting environments further facilitate such transformation process. This paper offers rich policy implications for fostering science-led regional development through tailored place-based urban innovation strategies.

This paper investigates whether and how income redistribution in China affects inequality of opportunity (IOp), defined as the share of income inequality attributable to circumstances beyond individual control. Using nationally representative data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) and employing an ex-ante parametric approach with Shapley decomposition, we analyze the effects of three redistributive channels: taxation, government transfers, and inter-household transfers. The results show that taxation modestly reduces both inequality of outcome (IO) and IOp. In contrast, government transfers, particularly pensions, increase IOp due to institutional segmentation associated with the hukou system. Inter-household transfers also contribute to higher IOp by reinforcing intergenerational advantages. Additionally, we find that the classification of pensions significantly alters the redistribution’s measured impact. When pensions are treated as deferred income rather than government transfers, the second distribution reduces IOp more substantially. These findings suggest that redistributive policy effectiveness depends not only on the magnitude of redistribution but also on its institutional design and classification logic. The study provides new evidence on how fiscal and informal transfers affect structural inequality and calls for greater conceptual clarity in redistribution evaluation frameworks.

This study investigates the role of government subsidies in reshaping corporate innovation pathways through digital transformation, with a focus on China's regional development dynamics. Utilizing panel data from Chinese A-share listed firms (2007-2022) and institutional theory, we uncover three key contributions to regional innovation scholarship. First, government subsidies significantly enhance corporate innovation outcomes, with digital transformation acting as a critical mediator that amplifies subsidy effectiveness across regions. Second, the mechanism operates through dual channels: subsidies not only directly stimulate R&D investments and cross-sector collaborations but also mitigate regional institutional voids by fostering digital infrastructure for knowledge recombination. Third, the findings challenge conventional assumptions about state intervention inefficiency, demonstrating how regional governments strategically deploy subsidies to (a) compensate for localized financial system imperfections, (b) orchestrate spatially embedded innovation ecosystems, and (c) accelerate technological catch-up within global value chains. By integrating macro-institutional analysis with firm-level digital capability development, this study advances a co-evolutionary perspective on state-corporate interactions, emphasizing the spatial dimensions of innovation policy. The results offer actionable insights for regional policymakers designing Industry 4.0 transition strategies and highlight the importance of aligning subsidy programs with digital transformation initiatives to foster sustainable regional competitiveness.

Innovation convergence is a key concept in studying the innovation gap between different entities. However, existing literature presents significant discrepancies in understanding its driving factors and mechanisms. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to reconcile the divergent perspectives in the current research by conducting a systematic review of innovation convergence literature and summarizing the general principles of innovation convergence. By systematically reviewing the literature on innovation convergence published between 1990 and 2021, this paper provides a comprehensive summary of the theoretical foundations, empirical methods, and key research findings. Additionally, the paper rigorously selects literature covering fields such as economic growth, technological catch-up, and technology diffusion, employing bibliometric analysis to delve into the disciplinary distribution, research hotspots, journal sources, and co-citation relationships in innovation convergence studies. The findings of this paper indicate that the driving factors and mechanisms of innovation convergence differ significantly between the international and regional levels, and in some cases, are even contradictory. For instance, in the international domain, trade fosters innovation convergence by facilitating technological diffusion and enhancing the expected returns on innovation, yet it simultaneously exacerbates regional innovation disparities. On the other hand, in the regional domain, transportation and information and communication technology can expand the boundaries of knowledge spillovers and drive the development of urban clusters, thereby promoting regional innovation convergence. This paper systematically analyzes the driving factors and mechanisms of innovation convergence, effectively reconciling the significant divergences in the existing literature. Finally, the paper not only summarizes the main findings of current research but also proposes future research directions, including further exploration of the roles of technological spillovers and regional policies in promoting innovation convergence. The results provide practical recommendations for policymakers, contributing to the reduction of innovation disparities at both international and regional levels.

Under the background of thriving digital economy and the digitization of port industry, using data derived from port cities in Guangdong, this study intends to investigate the spatial effect of digital economy on the port city coordination. This paper firstly measures the port city coupling coordination degrees and the digital economy comprehensive development levels, then estimates the spatial spill over effect of digital economy on the port city coordination by constructing the dynamic Spatial Durbin Model (SDM). To further clarify local patterns of the spatial effect, this paper subsequently analyses the spatial effects within and between three sub regions in Guangdong. The results show that first, the port city coordination has a habit persistence; second, the digital economy development may be mainly due to the local policy; third, the digital economy has a positive spatial spillover effect on the port city coordination, and the effect will increase over time; forth, the spatial effects in the Pearl River Delta and in the western and eastern areas present different patterns. The quantitative research enriches the port city theory under the new circumstances of digital economy, and brings new insights into regional integration and sustainable development.