The empowering effect of digital technology on port resilience

Against the backdrop of increasing global supply chain uncertainties, how to enhance the ability of ports to cope with external shocks has become a hot topic in both academia and industry. To this end, this study is based on panel data of 16 listed Chinese port companies from 2004 to 2023. A web crawling technique was used to obtain the text of corporate annual reports. The term frequency-inverse document frequency method was applied to extract the frequency of digitalization-related keywords, so as to quantify the degree of digital technology application. Meanwhile, the sensitivity index method was used to measure the level of port resilience. On this basis, a fixed-effects model was further constructed to empirically examine the empowering effect of digital technology on port resilience and its underlying mechanism. The results show that the application of digital technology significantly improves the resilience of major Chinese ports. For each standard deviation increase in the digital technology level, port resilience increases by about 0.2 standard deviations. This finding remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Digital technology exerts its effect by strengthening absorptive capacity and adaptive capacity, among which the enhancing effect on adaptive capacity is particularly prominent. However, the path of improving resilience through innovation capacity has not yet emerged. Under the impact of the 2020 global public health event, the empowering effect of digital technology on port resilience was significantly enhanced. In contrast, under the impact of climate change and the 2008 financial crisis, the empowering effect of digital technology on port resilience did not change significantly. These conclusions provide a new perspective for seeking to improve port resilience in the current context of sharply increasing global uncertainties.