TITLE:
Supply Chain Resilience Effects of Province-Wide Industrial Integration—A Policy Evaluation Based on Double Machine Learning
AUTHORS:
Zhenyu Cai, Jing Ni
KEYWORDS:
Province-Wide Industrial Integration, Supply Chain Resilience, Double Machine Learning, Resource Dependence Theory, Industrial Cluster Theory, Dynamic Capability Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.16 No.7,
July
17,
2026
ABSTRACT: Against the backdrop of rising global supply chain disruption risks, improving the resilience and security of industrial and supply chains has become a major strategic issue. Taking province-wide industrial integration as a quasi-natural experiment, this study uses a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2011 to 2023 and applies a double machine learning (DML) model to identify the causal effect, potential transmission channels, and heterogeneous features of province-wide industrial integration on firm-level supply chain resilience. The results show that, first, province-wide industrial integration significantly improves firms’ supply chain resilience, and this conclusion remains robust after changing the number of cross-fitting folds, applying winsorization, and replacing the machine-learning learner. Second, the mechanism analysis indicates that province-wide industrial integration significantly improves emergency production-capacity buffer reserves, industrial collaborative agglomeration, and supply chain operational efficiency. These findings are consistent with the transmission logic proposed under the integrated framework of resource dependence, industrial cluster, and dynamic capability theories (RIDCT). Third, heterogeneity analysis and formal between-group coefficient difference tests show that the resilience-enhancing effect of province-wide industrial integration is more pronounced among firms with lower supply chain dependence and in regions with lower natural-disaster risk, suggesting certain patterns of gap-filling and diminishing marginal returns. This study provides causal evidence for understanding the resilience-enabling effect of province-wide industrial integration and offers policy implications for differentiated policy deployment and the precise improvement of industrial and supply chain security.