Can smart city construction enhance urban disaster resilience? A staggered difference-in-differences test based on China's national smart city pilots

Abstract

Whether digital governance can be converted into measurable disaster-mitigation performance is an important criterion for evaluating smart-city development. Taking China's national smart-city pilot program as a quasi-natural experiment, this study uses a balanced panel of 300 prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2023 and applies a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate its effect on urban disaster resilience. The results show that the pilot significantly reduces direct disaster losses as a share of GDP and also lowers disaster fatalities, the share of the population affected, and a composite disaster-damage index. The findings remain robust after accounting for meteorological conditions, region-specific annual shocks, and differential trends associated with pre-policy disaster risk. Event-study estimates, placebo tests, and alternative estimators for staggered treatment timing provide further support for the baseline conclusion. Channel analysis indicates that improved emergency-resource allocation and technological innovation are the clearest pathways, whereas monitoring, early warning, and interdepartmental data sharing are reflected mainly in broader improvements in governance capacity. The evidence suggests that smart-city infrastructure contributes to disaster resilience when digital systems are integrated into emergency procedures, resource coordination, and cross-departmental collaboration.