South Asian Journal of Social Studies and Economics

As a new form of economy that has emerged with the development of new-generation digital technologies, the smart economy creates important opportunities for high-quality economic development. Using urban-level data from 2006 to 2023, this paper identifies the development of the smart economy using big data comprehensive pilot zones and adopts a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effect of the smart economy on high-quality economic development and its underlying mechanisms. The study shows that the smart economy promotes high-quality economic development, with particularly notable effects on the stability and structure of economic growth, while its effects on the distribution structure of economic growth and on the mitigation of resource and environmental depletion are not statistically significant. The mechanism analysis indicates that the smart economy promotes high-quality economic development mainly through cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and quality optimization. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive effect of the smart economy is more pronounced in non-border cities and in cities of lower administrative rank, which may help narrow developmental disparities among cities. These findings are subject to limitations concerning the proxy measure of smart-economy development and the generalisability of the results beyond China’s institutional context, which future research should address. This study provides a theoretical basis and empirical reference for the smart economy to foster reasonable quantitative growth and effective qualitative improvement in China’s economy.