Can Smart City Policy Facilitate the Low-Carbon Economy in China? A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on Pilot City

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of the implementation of smart city policy (SCP) on the development of low-carbon economy (LCE) in China. For this purpose, we developed a nonconvex meta-frontier data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to measure LCE and used the differences-in-difference (DID) analysis method in the econometric model to empirically analyze the impact of SCP on LCE, using the dataset of 230 cities from 2005 to 2018. The results show that the implementation of SCP can significantly improve the LCE of cities, and the dynamic effect test presents that the promotion of smart cities to low-carbon economy increases with time. In addition, SCP promotes the development of LCE by optimizing government functions and improving the efficiency of governance and the degree of implementation openness. But there is heterogeneity between different cities as follows: the implementation of SCP has a more significant effect on the promotion of LCE in central and western regions in China and large-scale cities and cities without strict environmental protection planning. Finally, the robustness test verifies the reliability of the experimental data again and puts forward conclusions and policy recommendations.

Control of Material Procurement Cost of Enterprises under the Background of the Low-Carbon Economy

“…In a broad sense, the carbon financial market refers to various investment and financing activities to achieve carbon emission reduction, so it covers a wide range. Investment, consultation, guarantee, financing, and credit related to low-carbon economic projects all belonging to the broad scope of carbon finance [17][18][19]. A low-carbon economy means not only that the manufacturing industry should accelerate the elimination of energy-intensive, high-polluting backward production capacity and promote energysaving and emission-reducing scientific and technological innovation but also that the public should be guided to reflect on which habitual consumption patterns and lifestyles are bad hobbies that waste energy and increase pollution, so as to fully explore the huge potential of energy-saving and emission-reducing in the service industry and consumer life.…”

The impact of digital transformation on corporate sustainability- new evidence from Chinese listed companies

“…It can show that the digital conversion is gradually deepening, and it is worth noting that the frequency of each keyword has increased substantially since 2012. One possible explanation is that since 2012 the Chinese government has issued a smart city pilot policy, referring to the use of various information technologies to improve resource use efficiency (Fan et al, 2021).…”

Dynamic Nonlinear Connectedness between the Financial Inclusion, Economic Growth, and China’s Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from a Panel VAR Analysis

“…However, considering the small sample size of the Northeast Economic Zone, many scholars still tend to use the traditional three major economic zones for empirical analysis. For recent related literature, please refer to Shi and Xu [93], Fan et al [94], Ke et al [95], Liu et al [96], Ren et al [97], and Luo et al [98].…”