Has the national ocean economic pilot project promoted blue economy development in China?

This paper estimates the impact of the national ocean economic pilot project on the blue economy (BE) development using panel data for 11 coastal regions in mainland China from 2005 to 2017. The study shows that the BE is composed of three levels: traditional advantageous industrial construction, emerging industrial development, and ecological protection, where they can merge an index system using the analytic hierarchy processimproved entropy weight method. Besides, this paper adopts heterogeneous timing difference-in-differences to find that the policy increased the BE in the pilot areas by an average of 0.025. This effect passed various robustness checks including the parallel trend hypothesis and placebo test. In addition, the policy can also mediate the BE by skill and capacity aggregation, optimization of transportation networks, and incentives for innovation, and their contributions were 21.5%,10.6%, and 10.6%. Moreover, this paper finds that the current BE work shows a preference for the economy over the ecosystem. For economic growth, pilots prefer traditional rather than emerging industries. In summary, this study recommends that multi-level governments should use a project-based management model for the BE, increase international cooperation and knowledge transfer to promote the integration of the knowledge economy and the BE and facilitate administrative reform to clarify the ecological responsibilities of marine management agencies.