The establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas under the new development pattern of “dual circulation” is a key institutional innovation of high-level opening-up and an essential starting point for fostering high-quality regional coordinated development in China. Examining the impact of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas on regional coordinated development has important theoretical and practical implications not only for deepening digital trade system reform, perfecting the digital trade supervision system, and improving the digital trade market system, but also for building a new development pattern, narrowing the regional development gap, and achieving regional coordinated development. This paper takes the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas set up in four batches since 2015 as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the DID model to identify the net effect of its policies on the coordinated development of regions.

The study finds that the establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas significantly enhances the business cycle synchronization between established and non-established cities. The impact of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas on regional coordinated development is significantly heterogeneous due to differences in city pairs’ regional distribution, human capital, financial development, and information infrastructure level. The mechanism test shows that cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas primarily foster regional coordinated development through the leading demonstration impact of institutional innovation and resource reallocation. Following the quantification of the policy text of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive areas, the empirical test concludes that supply-oriented policy tools, environment-oriented policy tools, and demand-oriented policy tools are all effective policy tools to promote regional coordinated development.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, from the perspective of urban bilateral economic relations, it identifies the impact of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas on regional coordinated development and reveals the transmission channels of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot areas on regional coordinated development. Second, the strength of economic ties is used as a criterion for matching cities where the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot area is located with other cities, and the net effect of the policy impact of cross-border e-commerce pilot areas is more accurately identified by excluding city pairs with weak economic ties. Third, it employs the text analysis approach to quantify the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot area policy, and independently assesses the efficacy of different policy tools affecting regional coordinated development.