From the Sharing Economy to the Low Carbon Economy:Evidence from the Entry of Bicycle Sharing Platforms
As an important form of the digital economy,the sharing economy has widely penetrated into transportation,catering services,daily life,and other fields and is a booster to promote China's realization of the"carbon peaking and carbon neutrality"goal and high-quality economic and social development.However,regarding the social chaos caused by the arrival of sharing bicycles in cities,there is a lack of detailed and in-depth empirical research on the social and environmental benefits of this new economic model,and its causal identification mechanism on urban carbon dioxide emissions is still unclear.Therefore,this study focuses on the arrival of sharing bicycle platforms in cities and evaluates its impact on urban monthly carbon dioxide emissions.Using panel data on urban characteristics and monthly carbon dioxide emissions from 2015 to 2017,the study conducts a quasi-natural experiment of the introduction of a bicycle sharing platform to urban areas and employs a staggered difference-in-difference model to evaluate the impact of the bicycle sharing platform on per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the city.It is found that the bicycle sharing platform significantly reduces urban per capita carbon dioxide emissions on the whole.The mechanism analysis reveals that the bicycle sharing platform has a carbon emission reduction effect mainly through the substitution effect of regional transportation and the preference of the public for shared bicycles.The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the carbon reduction effect of bicycle sharing is stronger in areas with lower environmental regulatory intensity,a higher degree of digital economic development,a greater level of technological innovation,and the co-location of two bicycle sharing companies.The contribution of this study is mainly reflected in the following two aspects.First,it supplements the environmental and economic benefits generated by the sharing economy.This study mainly takes the settlement of the bicycle sharing platform as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate its impact on the emission reduction of urban per capita carbon dioxide emissions.Moreover,unlike the estimation or measurement of some literature based on individual cities,it takes Chinese cities as the research object and uses the contingency of the time the bicycle sharing platform entered each city to identify using the staggered difference-in-difference model,making the research conclusions more representative.Second,it discusses the impact of the sharing economy on the development of low-carbon transformation of Chinese cities from the perspective of the sharing economy.As the settlement of the bicycle sharing platform is more driven by the supply of operators,this study uses the settlement of the bicycle sharing platform in cities as an example to identify the cause and effect,providing evidence for how the market mechanism helps with low-carbon transformation.The conclusions of this study broaden the effect evaluation of the settlement of bicycle sharing platforms in cities,explain how bicycle sharing reduces carbon emissions,and provide beneficial policy enlightenment for the development of the sharing economy to improve urban carbon emissions.It recommends that the government should actively supervise and manage such platforms.On the one hand,the government should carry out overall management of the development mode of sharing economy platforms to promote the orderly development of the sharing economy.On the other hand,the government should establish a unified personal credit evaluation system to guide and standardize consumer behavior.The government should also strengthen government-enterprise cooperation,encourage the integrated development of the sharing economy platforms and traditional industries,and actively carry out international exchanges and cooperation.Finally,the government should improve the policy system of environmental governance and play the important role of supervising the digital economy and the sharing economy to achieve the dual carbon goals in cities.
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万方数据
