What determines urban resilience against COVID-19: City size or governance capacity?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103304Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Our findings indicate that the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic are not directly related to city size, but city governance capacity.

  • We identify three main mechanisms by which urban governance affects the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • This paper makes marginal contributions to existing studies related to the importance of urban governance for timely crisis responses.

Abstract

This study analyzed the effects of urban governance and city size on COVID-19 prevention and control measures. Based on real-time data in 276 prefecture-level Chinese cities, we used the ordinary least squares plus robust standard error strategy. It was found that: (1) despite the non-significant effect of city size, urban governance capacity was an important factor affecting the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic; urban governance capacity was particularly significant in the late control of the pandemic, but not significant in the early prevention; for every unit increase of urban governance capacity, the number of recovered COVID-19 cases per capita increased by 2.4%. Moreover, (2) the influence mechanism of anti-pandemic measures in cities could be divided into the workforce, financial, and material effects, and their contribution rates were 26.15%, 32.55%, and 37.20%, respectively; namely, the effective/timely assistance from Chinese central government regarding the workforce, financial, and material resources in key pandemic areas and nationwide played a major role in pandemic control. Additionally, (3) cities with a high level of smart city construction were more capable of enhancing the pandemic prevention and control effect, indicating that smart city construction is conducive to enhanced coping with public crises.

Keywords

city size
urban governance capacity
COVID-19
smart city

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