Has the Belt and Road Initiative Enhanced Economic Resilience in Cities Along Its Route?

Amid an increasingly complex and uncertain global landscape, geopolitical tensions and frequent trade frictions have emerged as critical external risks threatening the economic stability and sustainable development of Chinese cities. Enhancing cities’ economic resilience has become a key challenge in advancing China’s high-quality development agenda. As a major national strategic initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is expected to offer new development opportunities and pathways for risk mitigation, particularly for cities situated along its domestic routes. This paper examines whether and how the BRI affects the economic resilience of these cities and further explores the moderating role of local governance capacity in policy implementation. To this end, an empirical strategy combining the entropy weighting method and the difference-in-differences (DID) approach is employed to systematically assess the impact of the BRI on urban economic resilience at the city level. The key findings are as follows: (1) The findings show that the BRI has an enhancing effect on the economic resilience of cities along the routes, but governance is very weak, and urban resilience improves by 0.0045 units on average. Our findings imply that, while the BRI appears to be on the correct path, enhanced governance is necessary to implement city-specific planning approaches effectively. (2) The results of the moderating effect indicate that local governance capacity significantly amplifies the impact of the BRI on urban economic resilience, underscoring the critical role of institutional strength in the policy transmission process. (3) The heterogeneity analysis reveals significant regional disparities in policy effectiveness: while the BRI significantly improves economic resilience in eastern and central cities, it exerts a suppressive effect in western regions. This divergence is closely associated with variations in local governance capacity. In contrast, cities with stronger governance capabilities are more likely to experience positive outcomes, as confirmed by the significant moderating effect of local governance capacity. This study contributes to the growing literature on the spatial implications of national development strategies by empirically examining how the BRI reshapes urban economic resilience across regions. It offers important policy insights for enhancing the spatial governance of cities, particularly in aligning strategic infrastructure investment with differentiated local capacities. The findings also provide a valuable reference for land-use planning and regional development policies aimed at building resilient urban systems under conditions of global uncertainty.