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Studying the effects of expected economic growth targets and environmental constraint targets set by Chinese local governments at the beginning of the year on high-quality development can provide empirical evidence for optimizing expected target management, improving macro-control, and fulfilling governance efficiency in the new development stage to some extent. Therefore, based on the theory of economic growth accounting and the stochastic frontier model, this paper calculated the level of high-quality development at the urban level, extracted the economic growth targets and environmental constraint targets from the Report on the Work of the Government with text analysis, constructed instrumental variables based on the spatial weight matrix, and then discussed the effects of the expected development targets formulated by local governments on high-quality development, conditional heterogeneity, and mechanisms. The results showed that: ① Excessive economic growth targets were not conducive to high-quality development, while environmental constraints targets had a significant role in promoting it and could slow down the erosion effect of excessive economic growth targets on high-quality development. This conclusion still held after solving a series of robustness tests, such as the endogenous bias. ② Heterogeneity analysis found that, with the implementation of the ecological civilization concept, China' s economy could achieve a win-win situation of quantity increase and quality improvement. To better promote high-quality development, the target positioning of cities with good economic foundations should weaken economic increment and strengthen environmental constraints, and the growth targets and environmental constraints set by local governments should be endogenous to their own regional resource endowments and leave appropriate elastic spaces. ③ The mechanism test showed that improving the economic growth targets reduced the level of innovation and raised the amount of new investment in the region, which was not conducive to high-quality development. Environmental constraints could promote technological innovation and limit the blind expansion of new investment, thus promoting high-quality development. Based on the above research conclusions, this paper summarizes policy implications from the aspects of political performance evaluation, formulation of expected development targets, technological innovation, and green development to promote the synergy between economic growth and green development in China and the synchronization of expected target management and high-quality development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs the system of urban high-quality development index from the six dimensions of economy, innovation, coordination, green, open and sharing. It measures the high-quality development level of cities in 31 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) of China from 2004 to 2019 by entropy method, analyzes the spatial distribution and spatial correlation of high-quality development level of Chinese cities by using global spatial auto-correlation and hot-spot analysis and analyzes its driving factors by geographical detector model. The results show that: (1) the overall change of high quality development level of cities during the period of investigation is stable and slightly increased. The regional level is high in the eastern coastal areas and low in the western remote areas. Overall level of development: the eastern part>overall>middle part>the west area. (2) The high-quality development level of the city has significant spatial agglomeration characteristics, and the overall spatial distribution characteristics is "East hot west cold", hot spot range from "striped" gradually evolved into "clump", while the cold point range gradually transferred to the northwest region; hot spots have radiation-driven effect on the surrounding areas, and hot spot district have a "eviction weakening" effect on cold spot areas. (3) Innovation has the strongest effect on the high-quality development of cities, followed by open development, coordinated development and economic development, while the impact of green development and shared development is weaker; and the interaction between driving factors is greater than the independent effect of single factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]