Towards inclusive green growth: does digital economy matter?

Abstract

In this decade, China has been pursuing an inclusive green growth strategy. Concurrently, the digital economy, which relies on the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, has experienced explosive growth in China. The digital economy’s capacity to optimize resource allocation and reduce energy consumption potentially makes it a conducive channel towards sustainability. Using the panel data of 281 cities in China from 2011 to 2020, we theoretically and empirically explore the impact of the digital economy on inclusive green growth. Firstly, we theoretically analyze the potential impact of the digital economy on inclusive green growth using two hypotheses: accelerating green innovation and promoting the industrial upgrading effect. Subsequently, we measure the digital economy and inclusive green growth of Chinese cities using Entropy-TOPSIS and DEA approaches, respectively. Then, we apply traditional econometric estimation models and machine learning algorithms to our empirical analysis. The results show that China’s high-powered digital economy significantly promotes inclusive green growth. Moreover, we analyze the internal mechanisms behind this impact. We find that innovation and industrial upgrading are two plausible channels that explain this effect. Additionally, we document a nonlinear feature of diminishing marginal effects between the digital economy and inclusive green growth. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the contribution weight of the digital economy to inclusive green growth is more remarkable in eastern region cities, large and medium-sized cities, and cities with high marketization. Overall, these findings shed more light on the digital economy-inclusive green growth nexus and provide new insights into understanding the real effects of the digital economy on sustainable development.

Nonlinear spatial impacts of the digital economy on urban ecological welfare performance: evidence from China

“…On the one hand, DE is favorable to the improvement of ecological efficiency (Shen et al, 2022). The DE can not only break through the geographical restrictions, better play the function of the market to effectively allocate resources, and improve the resource utilization efficiency of the whole economic system (Xin et al, 2023), but also reduce the resource consumption of the production side by strengthening the cooperation of upstream and downstream enterprises and the integration of front-and back-end industries . In addition to this, the DE can also lead the green consumption and reduce the pollution emission at the consumption side by constructing a digitalized innovation system of information sharing and an interconnection of networks and platforms, and by leading the green consumption and demand (Yang and Liang, 2023).…”

“…To deal with these problems, this paper firstly selects appropriate instrumental variables and processes them using the two-stage least squares method. In this paper, the number of fixed-line telephones owned by the city in 1984 is used as an instrumental variable for the development of DE (Xin et al, 2023). On the one hand, the construction and improvement of urban telecommunication and network infrastructure is an important foundation for the development of DE, and China's Internet was initially accessed by telephone dial-up; thus, cities with higher fixed-line telephone ownership historically should have higher levels of DE development, which is in line with the condition of instrumental variable correlation (Zhou et al, 2019).…”

The impact of the digital economy on low-carbon innovation in the Yangtze River Delta region

“…(1) Some studies treat innovation or low-carbon innovation as a vital intermediary and then explore the influence of the digital economy on various aspects. For example, some scholars have found that the digital economy can impact various aspects of the economy, including high-quality economic development or green economy [8][9][10][11], energy supply chain efficiency [12], carbon intensity [13], and optimization of industrial structure [14,15], through facilitating innovation or low-carbon innovation. Although the aforementioned studies consider innovation as an intermediary variable, these studies confirm that the digital economy has a positive influence on low-carbon innovation.…”

The determinants of financial inclusion from the households’ perspectives in Vietnam

“…Inclusive growth refers to comprehensive growth in which all individuals receive fairer benefits and opportunities. Many reports have examined the inclusive growth of developed nations [12][13][14]. While inclusive growth or inclusive green growth is a broad concept of inclusiveness in economics, inclusive finance or financial inclusion particularly focuses on the growth effects of finance [15].…”