ABSTRACT
Digital technology enables the service industry to develop rapidly, which also brings about the increase of carbon emissions in the service industry (CESI). How to better integrate the service industry into China's carbon emission reduction model has become an important content that the Chinese government needs to pay attention to. This paper uses the industry-level panel data of the service in 30 provinces of China from 2008 to 2019 to examine the relationship between the degree of digital technology and CESI through theoretical and empirical methods. The results reveal that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between digital technology and CESI, and the effect of digital technology on curbing CESI is limited. Furthermore, the pilot policy of carbon market reduces CESI by 173.17 Mt and CESI per 10,000 people by 0.0065 Mt. Resource differences, regional differences and industrial structure differences bring about heterogeneous impacts. The Chinese government in particular, and the government established by the carbon emission reduction model should pay attention to promoting the digital transformation of the service industry to achieve the carbon emission reduction target, but the digital transformation of the service industry should be carried out in a hierarchical and orderly manner under the coordination of the government.
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates whether emerging digital finance can reduce environmental pollution in China based on data from 273 of China's prefecture-level cities spanning the period from 2010 to 2017. The dynamic spatial econometric models (DSDM) find a significant negative association between digital finance and pollutants emissions, and the impacts vary among regions and urban development stages. The impact mechanism test proves that digital finance reduces pollutants emissions through technological innovation, structural adjustment, and capital allocation effects. In addition, we explore the different dimensions of digital finance and find that the depth of use has a more practical effect on reducing emissions. Further analyses based on the threshold model show an inverted N-shaped nexus between digital finance and emissions. The threshold effect also exists in terms of the traditional financial level. Our study proves that emerging digital finance crucially affects its potential benefits to environment and provides an empirical basis for policy-makers to accelerate the digitalization of financial markets, particularly paying attention to its emission-reduction effects.
Subject(s)
Environmental Pollutants , Cities , Environmental Pollution , China , Models, Econometric , Economic DevelopmentABSTRACT
This paper presents a new index called sustainable total-factor ecology efficiency (STFEcE), which integrates the ecological footprint and human development index into the framework of total-factor energy efficiency. Compared with the total-factor ecology efficiency index, the new index can better reflect the sustainable development efficiency of a region. This study uses data from 30 provinces of China over the period 2005-2016 to measure the STFEcE. Considering the heterogeneity of regional development in China, the meta-frontier slack-based data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is implemented. The results are as follows. First, the STFEcE for China is low, indicating the great potential for improvement in the sustainable development efficiency of China. Second, the heterogeneity of the STFEcE across the three regions of China (eastern, central, and western) is evident, given the "concave" trend from the eastern region to the western region. Third, decomposing the STFEcE into the technology inefficiency and management inefficiency indexes shows that the management efficiency of the eastern region needs to be improved, whereas the technology efficiency of the central region needs enhancement. For the western region, both the technology efficiency and management efficiency need improvement.
