Does Digital Finance Build a Sustainable Buffer? Exploring Its Impacts on Manufacturing Supply Chain Resilience

Enhancing supply chain resilience has become crucial for sustainable manufacturing development as firms face repeated disruptions from pandemics, geopolitical shocks, logistics bottlenecks, and climate-related uncertainty. As digital finance alleviates corporate financing constraints and improves information transmission across supply chains, it may strengthen supply chain resilience, thereby supporting the sustainable development of manufacturing firms. Accordingly, this paper examines this effect using panel data consisting of 21,060 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms spanning the period 2011–2023. It combines the proxy of digital finance, which is the city-level Baidu search index for digital finance, with the entropy-weighted and firm-level supply chain resilience index to assess its sustainability. Based on the fixed-effects model, digital finance positively affects the resilience of manufacturing companies’ supply chains and, by extension, promotes the sustainable development of manufacturing supply chains. We also find that digital finance improves manufacturing supply chain resilience by enhancing information transparency, resolving maturity mismatches between investment and financing, and mitigating financial risks. This impact is larger in poorly developed traditional financial regions, firms with poor governance, and in growing companies. Policy recommendations center on advancing digital supply chain finance, strengthening data governance, and improving risk management systems to reinforce supply chain resilience and promote the long-term sustainable development of manufacturing firms.