When Policies Complement: Low-Carbon and Digital Infrastructure Pilots in China

Environmental policies are typically evaluated in isolation, yet they may interact in ways that single-program assessments cannot detect. We examine whether two Chinese pilot programs, a low-carbon city initiative and a green data center initiative, generate synergistic effects on urban ecological resilience. Using panel data from 292 cities over 2002–2022 and staggered difference-in-differences estimation, we find that neither pilot alone improves resilience, but our preferred specification indicates that their joint implementation raises it by 29.2%, with stronger synergies associated with cities that adopted carbon regulation before digital infrastructure deployment. The main channels operate through investment mobilization, consumption transformation, and innovation output rather than simple innovation input expansion. These findings provide evidence that cross-domain policy complementarities can produce super-additive effects that are difficult to detect in conventional single-program evaluation, while also speaking to countries that are attempting to coordinate digital transformation with decarbonization under uneven institutional capacity.
© 2026 Published by Elsevier Inc.