Does Digital Government Enhance the Uptake of Tax Incentives?Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the "Information for the Benefit of the People" Pilot

Against the backdrop of China's structural growth slowdown and an intensified tax-cut agenda, digital government has become a pivotal instrument for ensuring that preferential tax regimes reach their intended beneficiaries. Exploiting the "Information for the Benefit of the People" national pilot as a quasi-experiment, this paper combines 2009—2016 nationwide Tax Survey micro-data with a difference-in-differences design. The pilot is found to raise the effective take-up rate of the small-and-micro-enterprise income-tax concession by 12.8 per cent, corresponding to roughly 23 200 firms. Mechanism tests reveal that digital governance operates through mutually reinforcing channels: data aggregation dismantling information barriers, and process reengineering, trimming institutional transaction costs, information disclosure enhancing trust, and intelligent tax administration. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy effects are more prominent in regions with lower fiscal pressure and lower degrees of marketization, while the positive effects are more significant among private enterprises as well as labor- and capital-intensive industries. Policy recommendations include accelerating digital governance capacity and information infrastructure development, promoting intelligent digital service modes such as "apply-free" tax incentives, strengthening cross-departmental digital tax coordination, improving the tax-sharing system to alleviate grassroots fiscal capacity constraints, and promoting the equalization and precision of tax incentive implementation.