Does New-Type Consumption Enhance Urban Economic Resilience? Evidence from China’s Information Consumption Pilot Policy

Abstract

Against the backdrop of frequent internal and external shocks, as a core driver of the consumption segment in the digital economy, the impact mechanism and actual effectiveness of information consumption on urban economic resilience urgently require systematic exploration. Based on panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2022, this study treats the information consumption pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) method to empirically examine the policy’s impact on urban economic resilience and its internal mechanisms. The results show that the information consumption pilot policy significantly enhances urban economic resilience, with a policy effect coefficient of 0.084, and this conclusion remains robust after multiple robustness tests. Mechanistic analysis indicates that the policy indirectly strengthens urban economic resilience by promoting consumption growth, stimulating technological innovation, and improving human capital. Meanwhile, the level of digital infrastructure plays a positive moderating role in the policy effect. Heterogeneity analysis finds that the policy has a more pronounced effect of enhancing economic resilience on cities with larger population sizes, higher economic density, and non-resource-dependent characteristics. Further extended research confirms that the information consumption pilot policy exhibits a significant spatial spillover effect on urban economic resilience, and this spillover effect presents a phased characteristic of “resource homogeneous competition → positive synergistic driving → cross-regional resource siphoning → spatial attenuation of the effect” with changes in geographical distance.