The policy effect of digital empowerment on food security: evidence from the national big data comprehensive pilot zones

This study employs the entropy-weighted TOPSIS method to assess food security and uses a multi-period DID model on panel data from 284 Chinese cities over the period 2011 to 2022. It provides both theoretical analysis and empirical testing of how the National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zones (NBDCPZ) policy influences food security through its impact mechanisms and functional pathways. The results show that (1) Overall, the policy effectively boosts food security, with its positive effect remaining significant under multiple robustness tests; (2) Heterogeneously, the policy’s impact is more significant in the central and western regions than in the eastern regions, with a stronger protective effect on food security in major grain-producing areas and production-consumption balance areas compared to major grain-marketing areas; (3) Mechanistically, the innovation-driven effect, resource allocation effect, and risk protection effect are key channels through which the policy safeguards food security. This study seeks to provide a theoretical foundation and decision-making reference for digitally empowering food security, offering potential insights for policy formulation.