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| Financing “New Infrastructure” and Digital Economy Development: Evidence from Special Purpose Bond Issuances |
| JI Yunyang, YANG Yuchen, WANG Xiulei
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School of Economics and Trade, Hunan University;
School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China;
Paula and Gregory Chow Institute for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University |
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Abstract Accelerating the development of the digital economy and promoting the deep integration of the digital economy with the real economy is an important path to drive the development of new quality productivity. Over the past decade, the scale of China's digital economy has continued to expand, with the added value of core digital industries accounting for about 10% of the country's GDP. New infrastructure construction (referred to as “new infrastructure”) is an indispensable public good for the high-quality development of the digital economy and is crucial for the intelligent and integrated development of industries. However, “new infrastructure” is characterized by high costs, long payback period, and significant externalities, which urgently requires long-term stable financial support and institutional guarantees. With the gradual expansion of the scale and investment fields of local government special purpose bonds, “new infrastructure” has also become a key support direction for special purpose bonds, mainly covering information infrastructure such as 5G base stations, big data centers, and industrial internet. Against this background, few articles have systematically studied whether the issuance and use of “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds can promote the development of the digital economy , and the underlying mechanisms.
Based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities from 2005 to 2021, this paper constructs a multi-period difference-in-differences model to empirically examine the impacts and mechanisms of the issuance and use of “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds on the development of the digital economy in cities. Compared with existing literature, the contributions of this paper are reflected in three aspects: First, it quantitatively identifies the impacts of “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds on the digital economy from the perspective of investment and financing, which is different from the traditional infrastructure financing assessment or the benefit analysis of “new infrastructure” itself. Second, it fills the gap in the research on the economic consequences of special purpose bonds in the field of new economic forms. Third, it focuses on the triple positive effects of financing, demand pull, and signal transmission, breaking through the research limitations of previous studies that focused on the implicit debt crowding-out effect, and simultaneously exploring heterogeneity from multiple dimensions such as regions, policies, and industrial agglomeration, deepening the understanding of the relationship between the two.
This paper finds that the issuance and use of “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds can significantly enhance the development of the digital economy in regions. Mechanism analysis shows that “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds fill the funding gap through the financing effect, accelerate the implementation of new infrastructure; expand the market for digital products through the demand-pull effect, promoting the accumulation of digital human capital and technological innovation; boost market confidence through the signal transmission effect, stimulating the vitality of digital entrepreneurship. The above effects are more significant in eastern regions, regions with high levels of new quality productivity, cities that are nodes of computing power networks, and regions with high levels of digital technology development. Moreover, strong government attention to the digital economy and digital industrial agglomeration can further enhance this effect.
The policy implications of this paper are as follows: First, moderately expand the issuance scale of “new infrastructure” special purpose bonds and optimize fund allocation; second, improve the institutional framework, establish an incentive mechanism for quota allocation and a full life cycle management system to ensure the precise and efficient use of funds; third, activate the synergy of multiple mechanisms, improve the mechanism for cultivating digital talents, encourage digital technological innovation, enrich application scenarios, and deepen the integration of the digital and real economies.
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Received: 01 June 2025
Published: 01 February 2026
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