Digital Inclusive Finance, Green Finance, and Urban Economic Resilience: Functional Complementarity in Chinese Cities

This study examines urban economic resilience (UER) within a framework that incorporates financial, technological, and industrial conditions. Panel data for 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2014 to 2023 are used. The analysis examines whether digital inclusive finance (DIF) and green finance (GF) are associated with UER both separately and jointly, and whether green technological innovation (GTI) and digital infrastructure (RDI) moderate these associations. Both DIF and GF are positively associated with UER, and their interaction term is positive, supporting functional complementarity—although common drivers, scale effects, and resource abundance cannot be fully ruled out. The baseline findings remain robust to alternative measures and sample specifications, while the instrumental-variable estimates for the joint DIF–GF specification are subject to weak-identification concerns. RDI plays a more consistent moderating role; DIF is more closely associated with resistance and recovery, GF with adaptation, adjustment, and transformation, and the interaction is positive across all resilience dimensions. Heterogeneity analysis reveals significant differences in the DIF–GF interaction across urban contexts. Despite positive interaction coefficients within central and western regions and along the Hu Line, formal between-group tests confirm that complementarity is significantly stronger in eastern regions, cities south of the Hu Line, and non-old-industrial-base cities. These findings suggest that the association between financial functions and UER depends on urban system conditions rather than arising automatically from combining DIF and GF.