The Construction of a Unified National Market, Digital Economy Development, and Intercity Collaborative Innovation

Specifically, the data on intercity collaborative innovation are obtained from the Chinese Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS). Data related to market integration are mainly drawn from the China Statistical Yearbook and the China City Statistical Yearbook published by the National Bureau of Statistics, as well as from disaggregated consumer price index (CPI) data at the prefecture-level city level, covering six categories of residential CPI: food, clothing, transportation and communication, housing, healthcare, and education, culture, and recreation.

City-level economic and social variables, including gross regional product, population size, science and technology expenditure, and financial loans, are mainly obtained from successive issues of the China City Statistical Yearbook and the EPS Data Platform. Intercity geographical distances are calculated based on the Chinese city map with approval number GS (2024) 0650; using the longitude and latitude coordinates of each city, the matrix of straight-line distances between cities is computed under the Albers projected coordinate system.