Can the Low-Altitude Economy Enhance Urban Ecological Resilience?

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_49How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Low-altitude Economy; Urban Ecological Resilience; Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

The low-altitude economy has emerged as an important manifestation of new quality productive forces. This paper exploits the designation of 26 National Comprehensive Demonstration Zones for the General Aviation Industry in 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment. Annual observations for 289 Chinese cities between 2005 and 2023 are used to estimate the policy effect through a difference-in-differences framework. The preferred specification yields a positive coefficient of 0.0281, significant at the 1% level, indicating that the pilot program increases urban ecological resilience. Further analysis identifies digital infrastructure as an important transmission channel. The regional estimates reveal a pronounced spatial imbalance: the effect is strongest in northeastern and eastern China, modest in central China, and statistically indistinguishable from zero in western China. This pattern suggests that local digital capacity, industrial foundations, and governance conditions may influence the extent to which cities benefit from the policy. By linking low-altitude economic development to ecological resilience, this study extends the literature on the environmental implications of emerging industries and offers evidence for coordinating low-altitude initiatives with digital infrastructure investment and ecological governance.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Haoze Hu
AU  - Ming Lin
AU  - Wenxia Liu
AU  - Xuanru Yu
AU  - Qixian Lan
AU  - Jiaye Xu
AU  - Hangyu Shen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - Can the Low-Altitude Economy Enhance Urban Ecological Resilience?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 500
EP  - 508
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_49
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_49
ID  - Hu2026
ER  -