How does big data development affect urban environmental welfare performance in China? Evidence from national big data comprehensive pilot zones

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Accurately assessing the impact of big data pilot zone policies on urban environmental welfare performance is essential for addressing the challenge of coordinated economic, environmental, and social development.Treating national-level comprehensive big data pilot zones as a quasi-natural experiment, this study measures urban environmental welfare performance using an EBM-Network-DEA approach based on a panel of 282 Chinese prefecture-level and higher cities from 2003 to 2023, and estimates a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) model that accommodates heterogeneous dynamic effects to identify the causal impact of the pilot zones. The empirical results show that the big data pilot zone policy significantly improves urban environmental welfare performance, and this finding is robust to a range of checks including endogeneity tests, placebo simulations, and machine-learning based estimations. Mechanism analysis indicates that the policy promotes overall improvements in environmental welfare performance through multiple channels summarized as “technical efficiency gains — pollution reduction — social welfare enhancement.” Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy effect is stronger in central and western cities, cities with lower administrative ranks, non-old industrial base cities, and non-resource-dependent cities. Moreover, the policy generates significant spatial spillover effects: within a 100-kilometer radius around pilot cities, neighboring non-pilot cities experience measurable gains. These conclusions contribute China-based theoretical insights and policy implications to the achievement of the Global Sustainable Development Goals and the advancement of global green governance in the digital economy era. • Applies heterogeneity-robust staggered DID to China's big data pilot zones as a quasi-natural experiment. • Integrates macro-micro perspectives via EBM-Network-DEA to measure environmental welfare performance holistically. • Identifies three transmission channels: industrial upgrading, pollution reduction, and welfare equity gains. • Finds policy effects vary by region and decay beyond 100 km, with spatial spillover boundaries. • Provides novel evidence linking digital economy policies to inclusive green growth in developing contexts.

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