Can Smart City Construction Promote the Level of Public Services? Quantitative Evidence From China

Effectively improving the level of public services (PSL) has long been a key topic of concern in theoretical and practical circles. A smart city is a real product of the high integration of digital technology and urban governance, which has a close theoretical correlation with PSL, but there is no academic research to quantitatively verify the relationship between the two. To bridge this research gap, this study empirically analyzes the relationship between smart city construction and PSL by constructing panel data of 212 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2018 using the difference-in-difference (DID) model. The baseline regression finds that smart city construction significantly improves PSL during the sample period. Among them, smart city construction improved the quality of education and medical services (EAM) by approximately 5.18% and the level of social life security (SLS) by approximately 4.04%. This result holds after performing the robustness test. The mechanism analysis revealed that smart city construction has a significant positive impact on PSL through informational, technological, and economic effects. The above study examines the policy effects of smart city construction and provides a course of action to optimize PSL. The study suggests that the public service effects of smart city construction can be further improved by transforming the urban governance model and establishing a systematic technological innovation mechanism.