The Impact of Supply Chain Innovation on Corporate Sustainable Development: Evidence from the Supply Chain Innovation and Application Pilot Policy

Amid profound transformations in the global political and economic landscape and increasingly stringent resource and environmental constraints, enhancing corporate competitiveness under high uncertainty and achieving sustainable development have become core challenges for firms. Based on data from Chinese A-share listed companies during 2013–2024, this study constructs a corporate sustainable development indicator system under the triple bottom line framework and measures it using the entropy method. Meanwhile, the Supply Chain Innovation and Application Pilot policy is treated as a quasi-natural experiment, and a Staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) model is employed to systematically examine the impact of supply chain innovation on corporate sustainable development. The results indicate that supply chain innovation significantly enhances firms’ sustainable development performance, and this finding remains robust across a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analysis shows that the policy effect primarily operates through two channels: relational effects and informational effects. On the one hand, supply chain innovation strengthens collaboration and trust between firms and their upstream and downstream partners, improving supply chain stability and overall operational efficiency. On the other hand, it promotes information sharing and digital coordination, alleviates information asymmetry, and optimizes resource allocation, thereby boosting corporate sustainability. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy effect is more pronounced in firms with higher levels of digitalization and weaker market pricing power, in upstream segments of the value chain, in industries with higher warehousing and transportation costs and lower market competition, and in regions with more advanced digital infrastructure and relatively richer resource endowments.