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Digital infrastructure, as the foundation for urban innovation, has reshaped China’s regional innovation landscape. This study examines whether digital infrastructures’ rapid growth has bridged or widened the regional innovation gap, using a core-periphery perspective. Based on a sample of 270 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2020, empirical results show that digital infrastructure significantly widens the innovation gap between centre and periphery cities. The widening of the gap is mainly attributed to the limitations of the peripheral cities in terms of innovation adaptation capacity and knowledge absorption capacity, resulting in the failure of the innovation-enabling effect of digital infrastructure to be optimally used. The effect of digital infrastructure on the urban innovation gap presents a ‘U-shaped’ curve with geographic distance, with the inflection point at about 300 km from the central city. In addition, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the gap-widening effect of digital infrastructure is more pronounced in the following contexts: the pre-2016 period, the central region, peripheral cities with lower innovation levels, and those with higher market integration. This study offers both theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence to support the collaborative innovation and development of cities as they modernize their digital infrastructure systems.
Sun et al. (Mon,) studied this question.