数字经济能促进绿色发展吗?——基于节能、减排、增效机制的实证检验

Can Digital Economy Promote Green Development? Empirical Evidence from Energy Saving, Emission Reduction, and Efficiency Improvement

构建多维评价体系测度中国各省绿色发展和数字经济水平,并实证检验数字经济对绿色发展的影响作用及其内在机制。研究结果表明,数字经济的发展显著促进了绿色发展水平的提高,这一结论在采取工具变量等一系列稳健性检验后依然成立。分位数回归结果证明这种作用呈现出随数字经济水平提高而不断增强的非线性特征,验证了网络效应的存在。异质性检验结果表明,数字经济对绿色发展的影响作用表现出地区差异、产业结构差异和环境规制强度差异。数字经济能够降低能源消耗、减少污染排放、提高生产效率,其中提高生产效率是数字经济促进绿色发展的主要作用机制。

This paper constructs a multidimensional evaluation system to measure the level of green development and digital economy of each province of China,and analyzes the effect of digital economy on green development and its mechanism. The results show that the development of digital economy significantly contributes to the improvement of green development level,and this finding still holds after a series of robustness tests including the use of instrumental variables. The quantile regression result demonstrates that this effect shows a non-linear characteristic that consistently increases with the level of digital economy,which verifies the existence of network effects. The results of heterogeneity test show that the effect of the digital economy on green development varies across regions with different geographical location,different industrial structure and different environmental regulation intensity.The digital economy can reduce energy consumption,decrease pollution emissions and improve production efficiency,among which improving production efficiency is the main mechanism of the effect of digital economy on green development.