Can Digital Governance Promote Urban Sustainable Development? Evidence from China’s Information Benefiting the People Pilot Program

This study examines whether government-led digital governance is associated with improvements in urban sustainable development performance in the context of China’s Information Benefiting the People pilot program. Using the pilot program as a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate a difference-in-differences model based on a panel of Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2024. Urban sustainable development performance is measured using an entropy-weight TOPSIS composite index that integrates economic development, resource-environmental quality, and social life. The results provide evidence that pilot city designation significantly improves the composite index within this specific policy setting, and the finding remains robust after PSM-DID estimation, excluding the pandemic year and municipality samples, adopting one-period lagged specifications, and controlling for concurrent digital policy programs. Channel analysis provides evidence consistent with three potential pathways: industrial structure upgrading, green innovation, and government fiscal transparency. Moreover, environmental regulation strengthens the positive effect of digital governance, suggesting institutional complementarity between regulatory pressure and digital capacity. Sub-dimension analysis shows that the overall improvement is mainly driven by social life and resource-environmental quality, whereas the economic development dimension does not show a significant response within the study period. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals stronger effects in non-resource-based cities and ordinary prefecture-level cities, indicating that the effects of digital governance reforms may depend on local structural conditions and governance capacity.