The Impact of Digital Economy Development on Carbon Emissions——A Quasi-natural Experiment from the National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Area
The digital economy is a new economic form with strong growth momentum,and clarifying its impact mechanism on carbon emissions is the key to achieving China's green transformation and high-quality economic development.Based on the data of 286 prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2019,this paper builds a staggered difference-in-difference model and a modified two-stage difference-in-difference model considering spatial spillover effect to explore the direct effects of digital economy development on ur-ban carbon emissions and its spillover effects on carbon emissions of other cities.The results show that the development of a digital economy can reduce the total carbon emission of cities and the carbon emission generated by electricity consumption,but has no significant impact on the carbon emission generated by other ways,and the reduction of industrial electricity carbon emission is the direct reason for the reduction of carbon emission level.The development of the digital economy will have a spillover effect of carbon emission reduction on surrounding cities,which will decrease with the increase of geographical distance.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the carbon reduction effect of digital economy development is different un-der different types of Pilot areas,different innovation environments,and economic levels.Mechanism a-nalysis shows that the development of a digital economy reduces the level of urban carbon emissions by pro-moting the innovation of consumption formats and models and promoting the digital transformation of indus-tries.
Carbon emissionsDigital economyThe national big data comprehensive pilot areaIndustrial digitization
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