Public Data Opening and Sustainable Urban Governance: Evidence from Urban Land Resource Misallocation in China

Digital transformation has become an important pathway for promoting sustainable urban governance. As cities increasingly adopt data-driven governance approaches, public data opening, defined in this study as the launch of local public data opening platforms and the platform-based release and reuse of digital public data by local governments, provides new opportunities to improve resource allocation efficiency and support more sustainable urban development. This study examines whether and how public data opening contributes to sustainable urban governance by reducing urban land resource misallocation in China. Based on the phased establishment of local public data opening platforms across Chinese cities, this study constructs a panel dataset of 285 prefecture-level cities for the period 2007–2022. It then examines the policy effect using a multi-period difference-in-differences model, a threshold regression model, and a Spatial Durbin Model. The results show that public data opening significantly reduces urban land resource misallocation, with the baseline estimate suggesting an economically meaningful reduction in land allocation distortion. The main conclusion remains stable after a range of validity tests and robustness checks. Mechanism analysis indicates that platform-based public data opening improves land allocation by enhancing local governance capacity, strengthening government transparency, and promoting market integration. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the governance effect is stronger in cities with higher land finance dependence, more industry-oriented economic structures, and higher levels of land marketization. Further analysis suggests that digital infrastructure may serve as an enabling condition for the effectiveness of platform-based public data opening. The spatial analysis shows that the effect of public data opening exhibits certain inter-city associations, although the decomposed indirect effects do not provide consistent evidence of robust spatial spillovers. These findings highlight platform-based public data opening as an important digital governance instrument for strengthening sustainable urban governance and improving the efficiency of urban resource allocation.