Digital Soil Breeding Clean Air: How Does Urban Digital Infrastructure Construction Improve Air Pollution?

With the rapid development of global industrialization and urbanization, air pollution has become a major challenge threatening human health and the ecological environment, and there is an urgent need for innovative governance solutions relying on technological progress. To explore the role of digital infrastructure in environmental governance, this study employs panel data from 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2023 and applies a fixed-effects model to systematically examine the impact of digital infrastructure development on urban air pollution and its underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that digital infrastructure development significantly reduces urban air pollution, a conclusion that remains robust after controlling for fixed effects and employing instrumental variable approaches. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that digital infrastructure improves air quality through two distinct pathways: (1) enhancing regulatory capacity by improving monitoring accuracy and enforcement efficiency and (2) fostering green innovation by lowering barriers to technological development and application. The study extends the research domain of environmental economics and digital technology, providing novel theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence for understanding the role of digital technology in environmental governance.