Green Finance, Infrastructure Upgrading, and Urban Supply Chain Resilience: Evidence from China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones

The simultaneous pressures of low-carbon transition and repeated supply chain disruptions have made urban supply chain resilience an important concern for economic security and sustainable development. This study examines whether China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones (GFRIZ) policy, launched in 2017, improved the resilience of urban supply chains. Using panel data for 285 prefecture-level cities from 2012 to 2024, we combine a partially linear Double Machine Learning framework with spatial econometric analysis. To address concerns about construct validity, urban supply chain resilience is reconstructed as a composite index covering four dimensions: resistance, innovation, coordination, and recovery. These dimensions are measured by industrial diversification, invention patent authorization, industrial product sales rate, and supply chain fluidity, respectively. The results show that the GFRIZ policy significantly enhances urban supply chain resilience. This conclusion remains robust after alternative machine learning estimators, different cross-fitting folds, interactive fixed effects, winsorization, exclusion of the COVID-19 year, and placebo tests. Mechanism analysis suggests that infrastructure upgrading remains an important transmission channel, especially through digital, green, and transport infrastructure. The effect is stronger in eastern and central cities, large cities, transport hubs, and old industrial bases. Spatial analysis further shows that although urban supply chain resilience displays negative spatial autocorrelation, the GFRIZ policy generates positive spillover effects on neighboring cities through capital flows, industrial linkages, and knowledge diffusion. The findings provide evidence that green finance reform can strengthen urban economic resilience beyond its environmental objectives.