Assessing the link between digital government development and urban industrial chain resilience: Evidence from public data openness

Nowadays, the trend of anti-globalization is becoming increasingly obvious, which poses a huge challenge to China industrial chain. At the same time, the Chinese government launched a lot of policies related to the digital economy and data elements to promote the industry chain development. Based on the data of 278 cities in China from 2012 to 2021, we use the public data openness platform as a quasi-natural experiment and use a difference-in-differences model to examine the impact of public data openness on the urban industrial chain resilience. The findings of this paper are as follows. First, public data openness significantly improves the urban industrial chain resilience. After a series of robustness tests, the conclusion remains valid. Second, the mechanism test shows that the public data openness mainly improves the urban industrial chain resilience by improving the efficiency of government governance and enhancing the vitality of innovation and entrepreneurship. And after the level of innovation and entrepreneurship vitality breaks through the critical value, the role of promotion will become more significant. Third, the promotion of public data openness is more obvious in cities with higher human and material capital. This paper has important policy implications for further promoting public data openness and improving the urban industrial chain resilience. • Explore the impact of open public data on the urban industrial chain for the first time. • Improve governance efficiency and increase innovation and entrepreneurship are the ways. • The effect is more obvious in cities with higher human and material capital.