Abstract: Resource-based cities have made historic contributions to China’s economic take-off, but the ensuing resource depletion, ecological destruction, and environmental pollution have also caused them to pay a heavy price.In recent years, high-quality development has gradually become a research hotspot for experts and scholars.How to achieve high-quality economic development in resource-based cities is an issue that needs to be studied urgently.Starting from the connotation of high-quality economic development, this paper uses resource-based cities in Shandong province as a sample, uses the indicator loop method to improve the high-quality economic development indicator system of resource-based cities, and improves the traditional coupling and coordination model to measure the level of high-quality economic development from 2010 to 2019.The study found that in the past ten years, the high-quality economic development level of resource-based cities in Shandong province has shown an overall upward trend, but it is still at a low level of coordination; all prefectures and cities have cross-level upgrades, but the overall gap is still large, and the development of different subsystems is different.Different and resistance factors are different.The five indicators have the greatest impact on innovation, coordination, greenness, openness, and sharing, which are the internal expenditures of industrial R& D funds above designated size, the added value of the tertiary industry/the added value of the secondary industry, the energy consumption of 10 000 yuan of GDP, the actual use of foreign capital, and the ratio of per capita disposable income to per capita GDP.