Smart City Pilot Policy and the Socioeconomic Dimensions of Sustainable Urban Development: Evidence from China

Does China’s smart city pilot policy (SCPP) do more than raise economic output? This paper asks whether it also spreads development gains across regions and between urban and rural areas, treating the policy as a lens on selected socioeconomic dimensions of sustainable urban development. We study the 2012 SCPP on a panel of 167 prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2022. A common prosperity index, constructed with entropy-weighted TOPSIS, measures overall prosperity, urban–rural integration, and regional coordination; the policy effect is estimated with PSM-DID. The SCPP raises the index by 0.0328 points in the fixed-effects model and 0.0304 points in the PSM-DID model with controls. The gains are uneven across dimensions: they concentrate in overall prosperity, appear weakly in urban–rural integration, and are not statistically detectable in regional coordination. Digital economy development and new-type urbanization both moderate the policy effect upward. Location matters as well: the effects concentrate in eastern cities and in cities with higher human capital and better informatization infrastructure. Local development conditions, in short, shape where the benefits of smart-city investment land.