数字经济赋能绿色发展:内在机制与经验证据

The Digital Economy Enables Green Development: The Internal Mechanism and Empirical Evidence

蓬勃发展的数字经济所释放的大规模红利与中国迫切需要由粗放发展向绿色发展的重大战略转变形成历史交汇,“十四五”时期中国的绿色发展亟须全面构筑数字经济发展新优势。文章首先从动力转换和演化机理两个层面探讨数字经济赋能绿色发展的内在机制,然后立足于2011~2019年中国221个地级及以上城市的面板数据,运用固定效应模型、工具变量法、双重差分模型、中介效应模型对二者关系进行了实证检验。研究表明:数字经济能够赋能绿色发展,该结论在以历史上固定电话普及率作为数字经济的工具变量进行回归和以“宽带中国”试点城市作为准自然实验等稳健性检验后均得以证实成立。进一步的中介机制检验表明,数字经济可以通过加强技术创新、助力企业成长、推动产业优化三条中介渠道赋能绿色发展。基于上述研究,文章从推进数字中国建设,提升技术创新能力,推动企业化数字转型及加快传统产业数字渗透提出了数字经济赋能绿色发展的对策建议。

The large-scale dividend released by the digital economy coexists with major strategic shift from extensive development to green development, forming an important trend in contemporary China. During the 14 th Five-Year Plan period, China’s green development needs to build new advantages in the development of the digital economy. First, this paper constructs the theoretical framework of the digital economy enabling green development from the two levels of the dynamic transformation and the evolution mechanism. Second, it tests the relationship between the digital economy and green development through the fixed effects model, instrument variables model, DID and intermediary effect model based on the panel data of 221 cities at prefectural level or above in China from 2011 to 2019. This paper finds that: the digital economy has significantly promoted China’s green development, and this conclusion is still valid after taking the historical fixed telephone penetration rate as the instrumental variable and the “broadband China” pilot city as the robustness test of quasi-natural experiment. In addition, further intermediary mechanism test shows that the digital economy can enable green development through three intermediary channels: strengthening technological innovation, helping enterprise growth and promoting industrial improvement. Based on the above research, this paper puts forward suggestions for four areas: promoting the development of a Digital China, improving the ability of technological innovation, promoting the digital transformation of enterprises and accelerating the digital penetration of traditional industries.