The Impact of the Digital Economy on Provincial Carbon Productivity: Empirical Evidence from China

With the introduction of the dual carbon goals of "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality", low-carbon economic development has become the focus of attention for all sectors in China. Improving carbon productivity (CP) is the key to developing a low-carbon economy and is essential to achieving carbon emission reduction and economic growth. The rapid development of the digital economy (DE) provides a new breakthrough for improving carbon productivity, but there are few studies on the digital economy and carbon productivity in the existing literatures. We empirically investigate the impact mechanism of the digital economy on provincial carbon productivity using China's provincial panel data from 2010 to 2019. This study finds that the digital economy significantly raises provincial carbon productivity; this result remains valid after a series of robustness tests. The digital economy can impact provincial carbon productivity through both energy consumption structure (ECS) and green technology innovation (GTI) and can contribute to the improvement of provincial carbon productivity by optimizing energy consumption structure and improving green technology innovation. In addition, different environmental regulations have different impacts. Command-and-control environmental regulation (CER) weakens the positive impact of the digital economy on provincial carbon productivity, whereas market-based environmental regulation (MER) enhances the positive impact of the digital economy on provincial carbon productivity. This study extends the research on the digital economy in the field of low-carbon development, providing insights and policy suggestions for relevant departments to promote low-carbon development from the perspective of the digital economy. This study uses panel data of 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland (excluding Tibet) from 2010 to 2019 to conduct an empirical study combining the digital economy, carbon productivity, energy consumption structure, green technology innovation, and different environmental regulations into an integrated framework to explore the direct impact of the digital economy on carbon productivity, as well as the mediating roles of energy consumption structure and green technology innovation in this impact process, and the moderating roles of different types of environmental regulations. This study clarifies the impact mechanism of the digital economy on carbon productivity, and provides suggestions for relevant departments to promote the improvement of carbon productivity under the digital economy. In the future, we can explore the impact of the digital economy on carbon productivity in different industries, select micro-enterprise data and expand the sample size, so as to obtain more targeted suggestions.