Abstract: Government competition modes could effect regional development quality in differentiated forms. It is crucial for current economic transformation to analyze that differentiated impact and establish a competition system conducive to high-quality development. Existing research only focuses on the direct impact of specific government competition models on economic growth, lacking comparative research on the mechanisms and quality effects of different competition models and various competition strategies. Also, it is assumed that governments only adopts one single competitive model, ignoring the combination effects of multiple competitive strategies.Based on the essence of government competition behavior, the competitive modes are divided into three categories: input competition, protection competition and institutional competition. Through the inter-provincial panel data of mainland China from 1997 to 2020, the impact of government competitive modes and specific strategy combination on regional development quality is empirically studied. The results show that input competition has both positive and negative effects on high-quality development, protection competition is not conducive to improving development quality, while institutional competition has the strongest improving effect on development quality. The results are robust after replacing the proxy variables. The research using interaction effect and strategy combination dummy variables shows that there is substitution effect between different competitive strategies, which belongs to the same mode. The strategy combination from different modes will weaken the quality effect of the single policy, but the combination of public services and simplification of administration and decentralization is conducive to high-quality development.

Key words: government competition, development quality, total factor productivity, strategy combination, competition mode