Can telecommunications infrastructure enhance urban resilience? Empirical evidence from a differences-in-differences approach in China

The concept of urban resilience provides a viable solution for addressing urban challenges and managing urban security risks. The development of telecommunications infrastructure (TI) is considered a crucial force driving urban digital transformation and is expected to enhance urban resilience. However, limited research has examined TI’s impact on urban resilience. Considering the Broadband China policy implementation as a quasi-natural experiment, we adopt the time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to quantify TI’s impact on urban resilience in China, with its heterogeneity and mechanism further analyzed. The results reveal that TI can enhance urban resilience in China, as confirmed by various robustness tests. More specifically, TI can improve urban economic, social, and infrastructure resilience, while inhibiting ecological resilience and having no significant effect on institutional resilience. Besides, accelerating urban innovation, promoting urban industrial structure upgrading, and stimulating urban entrepreneurship are confirmed as three key pathways through which TI affects urban resilience. Finally, the heterogeneity analysis shows that TI’s impact on urban resilience is considerable in cities with high-level traditional infrastructure, non-resource-based cities, and cities with high education levels, but is not notable in cities with low-level traditional infrastructure, resource-based cities, and cities with low education level. These findings can provide important implications for policy-makers in promoting urban resilience through TI construction.