Evaluating the Impact of Resource‐Exhausted Cities' Supporting Policies: Insights From Population Settlement

ABSTRACT Resource‐exhausted cities grapple with an amalgam of challenges such as economic decline, substantial unemployment, and pressing environmental crises, posing a global conundrum. Population settlement is a cardinal driver of economic growth; hence, strategies to retain inhabitants are quintessential for the transformative growth of these cities. Leveraging a panel data set spanning 2003–2019 of Chinese county‐level jurisdictions, this study employs the staggered difference‐in‐differences (DID) model to discern the implications and underlying mechanisms of the resource‐exhausted cities' supporting policies (RECSP) on employment rates and population inflows. The findings indicate that the RECSP improves regional employment rates and population inflows, with enhanced environmental quality, refinement of public services, manufacturing shifts, and industrial upgrades being the primary mechanisms. Notably, the effects of RECSP on population settlement are more pronounced in regions with centralized heating and in the Northeast. Furthermore, mining cities witnessed a more substantial surge in employment rate, while forestry‐based cities registered a marked population inflow. The results underscore the imperativeness of amplifying support to resource‐exhausted cities, advocating for urban industrial metamorphosis, enticing population inflows, enhancing employment rates, and thereby catalyzing diversified and sustainable economic evolution.