Whether the construction of digital government alleviate resource curse? Empirical evidence from Chinese cities

Breaking the resource curse is an inevitable requirement to achieve sustainable development, while the effect of digital government on it still remain as a black box, which forms the initial motivation of this study. Based on the panel data of 282 cities in China from 2015 to 2021, this study applies a dual machine learning model to identify the impact and internal mechanism of digital government construction on resource curse. The result reveals that the construction of digital government has a significant impact on mitigating the degradation of resource curse, and the effect is more significant in the sample of cities in the central and eastern regions, small and medium-sized cities, non-resource cities, and cities with low market segmentation levels. The mechanism analysis shows that digital government can alleviate resource curse by promoting manufacturing and service transformation of industrial structure. The above findings not only provide empirical evidence for the sustainable promotion of digital government and the breaking of resource curse, but also provide a practical basis for optimizing and improving the construction of digital government.