Abstract
How to boost the economy and achieve more sustainable development with enhanced quality, efficiency, and fairness by leveraging digital technology in the post-COVID-19 era has been an important agenda faced by many countries. As China’s new infrastructure initiative has the potential to open a new pathway for economic resilience, its policy characteristics and orientation have attracted more and more attention by policy makers and researchers. Taking the new infrastructure policies issued by Chinese local governments since 2020 as a data source, this paper, on the one hand, uses text mining and social network analysis to reveal the scope and coverage of the construction of new infrastructure and its orientation. On the other hand, a quantitative evaluation of 12 provincial policies grounded on a revised framework and policy modeling consistency index approach was conducted. The results show that Chinese governments adopt a bottom-up incrementalism planning mode for the policy steering of the construction of new infrastructure. This policy arrangement is a kind of goal-oriented modulation that makes planning more adaptive and participatory to enhance the infrastructure sustainability.
Highlights
How to boost the economy and achieve more sustainable development with enhanced quality, efficiency, and fairness by leveraging digital technology in the post-COVID-19 era has been an important agenda faced by many countries
As proposed by Estrada [27], the PMC index calculation follows a structured procedure as follows: First, the PMC index model with 9 primary variables and 43 secondary variables designed for new infrastructure construction (NIC) policy evaluation is incorporated into the multi-input-output table, and the secondary variables are assigned according to Equation (1) and Equation (2), respectively
Collecting 12 provincial NIC policies as data sources and using text mining and social network analysis method, this paper firstly reveals that Chinese governments adopt bottom-up incrementalism planning for the construction of new infrastructure
Summary
The scale of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact and the uncertainty about its future course and consequences are forcing changes in organizational, industrial, and societal fields. With the new infrastructure initiative rising to the national strategic level, many local governments have issued NIC policies to respond to the central government guidelines and stimulate infrastructure-related investments. The significance of this paper lies in the following: (1) The current public policy and planning frameworks in many countries appear inadequately structured to tackle the multifaceted challenges facing infrastructure upgrade in general and sustainable digital infrastructure in particular over the decades. Unlike a traditional top-down approach to infrastructure planning and spending decision, NIC in China is viewed as a digital technology diffusion and vowed by the central government as an important initiative without detailed conception. This paper aims to identify the characteristics and orientation of NIC policies, and enhances our understanding of how Chinese local governments align their regional policies with central government initiatives to craft a sustainable next-generation infrastructure.
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