Abstract: Lanzhou New Area has been given the strategic mission of "an important economic growth pole in the Northwest", but can this old policy "innovation" still exert policy effects and realize the "curve overtaking" in the development of underdeveloped areas? In order to clarify this issue, this paper collected panel data of 15 provincial capital cities from 2005 to 2019 through the synthetic control method, and used the establishment of the Lanzhou New Area in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment to test the economic growth policy effect of the establishment of the Lanzhou New Area. The empirical results show that the establishment of the Lanzhou New Area has indeed promoted the growth of the regional economy, and this conclusion is robust, indicating that the old policy "innovation" of setting up a national-level new district can still be used as a tool for "overtaking on corners" in underdeveloped regions. Economic growth, but there is still a certain gap between the development of Lanzhou New Area and other state-level new areas, indicating that policy innovation requires matching policy infrastructure, and they need to be built and improved in the future.