Does improved digital governance in government promote natural resource management? Quasi-natural experiments based on smart city pilots

Ke Chen, Qiyuan Li, Muhammad Shoaib, Waqar Ameer and Tao Jiang

Resources Policy, 2024, vol. 90, issue C

Abstract: Based on panel data for 281 cities in China from 2007 to 2021, this paper uses the global Malmquist‒Luenberger index to measure natural resource management. Using the smart city pilot as a quasi-natural experiment in government digital governance, the progressive difference-in-differences method was used to investigate whether the government's digital governance capacity promotes green and sustainable development. The main findings are as follows: the improvement of the government's digital governance capacity significantly contributes to green and sustainable development. After a series of placebo tests and robustness tests, the results of this paper still hold. Government digital governance promotes natural resource management mainly through two mechanisms: green technology innovation and intellectual property protection, and the quality of green technology innovation plays a more critical role than quantity. The impact of improved government digital governance on natural resource management varies significantly across different types of cities, cities with different political levels, and cities with different urban locations and human capital levels.

Keywords: Digital government; Natural resource management; Green technology innovation; Smart city pilots (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301420724000886
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jrpoli:v:90:y:2024:i:c:s0301420724000886

DOI: 10.1016/j.resourpol.2024.104721

Access Statistics for this article

Resources Policy is currently edited by R. G. Eggert

More articles in Resources Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().