Climate-Smart City: Can China’S Smart City Policy Lead To Low-Carbon Development Of Cities?

As an intensive mode of urbanization, a smart city may be conducive to achieving a win–win situation of regulating the urban economy and the environment. Based on a quasi-natural experiment in three batches of smart pilot cities, we use the difference-in-differences (DID) method to examine the impact of the smart city policy on CO2 emissions by adopting city panel data in China during the period 2003–2017. This study also explores the influence mechanism and heterogeneous effects of smart city policy. The empirical results indicate that China’s smart city policy effectively lowered CO2 emissions by approximately 1.83%. This primary finding remains reliable using the propensity score matching (PSM)-DID method for robustness check. Moreover, the smart city policy not only directly inhibits CO2 emissions, but also indirectly influences CO2 emissions through scale, structure, and technology effects. Regarding city heterogeneity, the first-tier cities in the eastern area, which have larger population scale and more resource endowments, tend to have stronger negative impacts on CO2 emissions. Based on these conclusions, we highlight several specific policy measures for reducing CO2 emissions and achieving dual carbon targets in China.