Smart city pilot policies and their effects on urban ecological welfare: evidence from Chinese cities

Understanding how digital transformation policies influence urban ecological outcomes remains a pressing yet underexplored question in sustainability science. Using panel data from 213 Chinese cities between 2011 and 2023, this study estimates the causal effect of China’s Smart City Pilot Policy (SCPP) on urban ecological welfare (UEW). Leveraging quasi-natural experimental methods—including difference-in-differences, PSM-DID, and synthetic control—we find that the SCPP significantly improves UEW by enhancing digital infrastructure, fostering greener industrial structures, and boosting public investment in science and innovation. The policy’s benefits are more pronounced in cities with higher administrative ranks, stronger ecological resilience, and greater resource endowment. These results reveal that uniform digital urban strategies may be suboptimal. Instead, differentiated approaches tailored to local ecological and institutional capacities can amplify the green dividends of digital transformation, advancing more equitable and sustainable urban futures.