Articles article
Local Government AI Policy Attention and Urban Economic Resilience:Evidence from Chinese Prefecture-Level and Above Cities
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between local government AI policy attention and urban economic resilience, and further identifies the roles of urban absorptive conditions and fiscal channels. Using an unbalanced panel of Chinese prefecture-level and above cities from 2011 to 2024, we construct a local government AI policy attention indicator from government work reports and measure urban economic resilience as the deviation of city GDP growth from national GDP growth. A two-way fixed effects model is employed. Baseline estimates show that, after controlling for population size, population density, economic development level, openness, industrial structure, and human capital, local government AI policy attention is significantly and positively associated with urban economic resilience. The result is robust to alternative measures of the key explanatory variable, two-sided winsorization, and the inclusion of province-by-year fixed effects. Subgroup analysis indicates that the positive association is more pronounced in eastern cities and in cities with higher economic development. Moderation tests show that industrial structure advancement and digital financial inclusion each strengthen the positive relationship, while mechanism tests indicate that local government AI policy attention is significantly associated with lower fiscal revenue-expenditure pressure, which in turn is significantly negatively associated with urban economic resilience. The findings suggest that the resilience effect of policy attention depends on urban absorptive conditions, and that fiscal space may be an important channel through which policy attention translates into economic resilience.
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References
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