Dynamic Pollution and Carbon Reduction Effects of Digital Financial Development—A New Perspective Based on Dualistic Environmental Constraints
The cutting-edge literature recognizes the importance of digital finance in reducing pollution and carbon emissions,but fails to clarify its synergistic impact on pollution and carbon reduction,and fails to iden-tify the role of local environmental constraints triggered by the national environmental governance's"strong accountability and bottom line".This paper systematically explains the internal mechanism of digital finance to reduce pollution and carbon under the binary environmental constraints,and empirically tests it based on the panel data of 275 prefectural-level cities in China from 2011 to 2021 using the mediation effect model and the panel threshold technique.The results found that:digital finance can effectively reduce PM2.5 concentra-tion while practically reduce urban carbon emissions,i.e.,the development of digital finance has a significant synergistic emission reduction effect,and the above conclusions are still valid after a series of robustness tests.The pollution reduction effect of digital finance is stronger than the carbon reduction effect,and the positive effect of digital finance coverage only appears in the process of urban pollution reduction,while the depth of digital finance use only has a positive impact on urban carbon reduction.Digital finance can not only directly empower urban environmental governance,but also indirectly help reduce pollution and reduce car-bon by improving energy efficiency,driving industrial upgrading and stimulating green innovation.Further analysis based on the new perspective of binary environmental constraints shows that,under the regulation of pollution reduction constraint and carbon reduction constraint,the pollution reduction and carbon reduction effect of digital financial development presents the nonlinear evolution of increasing marginal efficiency.There are spatial differences in the regulation mechanism of binary environmental constraints,and it is appro-priate to choose a more severe carbon reduction constraint strategy for the eastern and central regions,while the eastern and western regions should adopt a more intense pollution reduction constraint strategy.At the present stage,although the binary environmental constraints is generally conducive to the coordinated devel-opment of digital finance and urban pollution and carbon reduction,the positive regulating effect of pollution reduction constraint presents a stepwise heterogeneous characteristic of"central>western>eastern",and the positive effect of carbon reduction constraint is only reflected in the eastern region.The above findings pro-vide important policy insights for local governments to make scientific use of digital financial tools under the binary environmental constraints to promote the"dual-carbon"strategy and win the battle against air pollution.
digital financedualistic environmental constraintspollution and carbon reductiondynamic regulation
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