Research on the Impact of the Digital Economy and Technological Innovation on Agricultural Carbon Emissions

Abstract

The digital economy, closely linked to agricultural progress, plays a key role in reducing agricultural carbon emissions. By utilizing panel data between 2011 and 2021 from 30 Chinese provincial-level regions, the present work empirically assesses the direct impact and nonlinear spatial spillover effects of the digital economy on agricultural carbon emissions, where methodologies including fixed effects, threshold models, and spatial econometrics are employed. The results were as follows: (1) The digital economy led to remarkable inhibition of agricultural carbon emissions, which was consistent across various robustness checks. (2) The carbon reduction efficiency of the digital economy presented obvious spatial variation, which had a greater negative effect in eastern regions and major grain-producing regions. (3) The digital economy had a nonlinear impact on agricultural carbon emissions, and technological innovation played a threshold effect, showing an “inverted U-shaped” characteristic of increasing first and then decreasing overall. (4) This emission abatement effect also showed a significant spatial spillover aspect, meaning that the digital economy development in one area prominently abates agricultural carbon emissions in adjacent provinces. Our findings might provide a theoretical and empirical foundation for comprehending and addressing agricultural carbon emissions abatement in China from the digital economy perspective.