Digital Governance and the Regional Pooling Efficiency of Pension Insurance: A Four-Dimensional Collaborative Analysis Based on Yingkou City

Abstract

Using Liaoning’s 13 prefecture-level cities during 2015–2024 as the comparative background and Yingkou City as the focal case, this paper examines how digital governance and collaborative institutional arrangements shape the regional pooling efficiency of China’s basic pension insurance. Building on the dynamic-balance view of efficiency, the paper combines efficiency decomposition, benchmark Tobit evidence, and mechanism analysis to distinguish scale-matching problems from process-efficiency bottlenecks. The results indicate that Yingkou’s mean technical efficiency (TE) is 0.66, with pure technical efficiency (PTE) at 0.60 and scale efficiency (SE) at 0.89, showing that the core weakness lies primarily in process inefficiency rather than in scale mismatch. In the benchmark regression, institutional closure (0.142), economic fundamentals (0.098), digital governance (0.067), and the post-2022 reform window (0.041) are positively associated with pooling efficiency, whereas demographic pressure (-0.121) and fiscal stress (-0.054) are negatively associated with it. More importantly, the interaction term between institutions and technology (0.073) is significantly positive, implying that digital tools improve efficiency most effectively when rules, standards, and accountability are embedded into operational processes. On this basis, the paper proposes a four-dimensional collaborative path of policy adaptation, resource integration, technology enablement, and regulatory assurance, together with a staged roadmap oriented toward PTE improvement. The study provides an analytically grounded article-style condensation of the dissertation evidence and offers a practical reference for transformation-oriented cities facing ageing pressure, fiscal constraints, and digital-transition tasks.