How Do Smart Policies Affect Urban Disaster Resilience? A Quasi-Experimental Study Using China’s Smart City Pilot Policy

Abstract

With China’s development plan of “digital—intelligent transformation,” the Smart City Pilot Policy (SCPP) initiative has played a unique role in disaster management since 2012. Based on three batches of China’s smart pilot cities, this research harnesses the multi-period difference-in-differences method to empirically examine the SCPP impact on urban disaster resilience by adopting panel data from 102 sample cities between 2013 and 2023. The findings reveal the following aspects. (1) the SCPP significantly enhances the level of Urban Disaster Resilience (UDR) as defined, albeit with a time lag. (2) the SCPP primarily improves UDR by promoting technological empowerment and innovation driver. (3) Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that SCPP’s impact varies by city scale and administrative level, and the positive effect is more pronounced for peripheral cities. This primary finding remains reliable after a series of robustness checks. This study provides insights for developing countries similar to China for promoting smart city construction and strengthening the capacity to lift urban disaster resilience.