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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1438927
This article is part of the Research Topic Sustainable Energy Governance in the Context of Global Climate Change: Technologies, Mechanisms and Strategies View all 7 articles

The Impact of China's Digital Economy Industry Development and Its Structural Indicators on Carbon Emission Intensity

Provisionally accepted
  • Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The development of the digital economy has reshaped the mechanisms of macroeconomic operations and had a profound impact on industrial economics. The article starts from the perspective of industrial organization theory. Based on the data of Input-output Tables with extended tables of 30 provinces, this paper analyzes the industrial development of digital economy and its three structural variables: digital manufacturing industry, digital service industry, and the development of industrial digitization on carbon emission intensity. The empirical results show that:(1) at the national level, the development of China's digital economy industries has a suppressive effect on carbon emission intensity; (2) in terms of spatial effects, the development of digital economy has significant carbon spillover effects, but digital industrialization and industrial digitization present different spatial effect results; (3) from the analysis of regional heterogeneity, in the northeast, central and western regions, the direction of influence of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization on carbon emission intensity is consistent; in the eastern region, the development of digital industrial service sector and industrial digitalization has a suppressive effect on carbon emission intensity, while digital industrial manufacturing sector presents a pro-increasing effect; (4) in terms of non-linear relationship, the impact of digital industry development on carbon intensity has a "promoting and then inhibiting" effect. The impact of digital industry development on carbon intensity shows the effect of "promoting increase, then suppressing, then promoting increase", and overall, China's digital economy industry has entered the low carbon development stage.

    Keywords: digital economy, digital economy industry, carbon intensity, Industrial organization theory, Low-carbon development, input-output

    Received: 27 May 2024; Accepted: 13 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wang, Yuan, Xiao and Chi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yongke Yuan, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

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