Open Public Data and the Path to Urban Sustainable Development: A Resilience Perspective

Abstract

Within the framework of sustainable development in the digital era, the vast yet inactive reservoir of public data represents a hidden pathway toward building resilient cities. This point has often been overlooked in existing research. Our core objective is to investigate the impact of China's public data openness (PDO) on urban resilience. This action aims to establish public data platforms and provide more publicly accessible, machine readable, and freely usable public data in order to fully unlock the value of public data. We find that PDO significantly enhances urban resilience, with an average treatment effect of 0.003. This conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Specifically, PDO improves economic resilience, infrastructure resilience, and institutional resilience, but has no significant effect on social resilience and even exerts a negative impact on ecological resilience. Meanwhile, the impact of PDO on urban resilience is not uniform and varies across different types of cities. We also find that PDO improves urban resilience by promoting technological innovation, fostering emerging industries, and advancing digital finance. Moreover, PDO generates a significant positive spatial spillover effect on the urban resilience of neighboring areas, and the spatial spillover boundary is well defined. Our study extends the traditional framework of urban digital governance and provides practical policy insights for emerging countries experiencing rapid urbanization on how to fully unlock the potential of public data and enhance urban resilience.