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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsus.2025.1567413
The Effects of Digital Transformation on Corporate Energy Efficiency: A Supply Chain Spillover Perspective
Provisionally accepted- Changzhou Vocational Institute of Textile and Garment, Changzhou, China
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As a new enterprise development model, digitalization is an important driver for improving energy efficiency and can provide carbon reduction services across the entire chain. In this study, we utilize the panel data of relevant listed firms from 2009 to 2022 to investigate the causal impact of digital transformation on corporate energy efficiency at each node of the supply chain and discuss the moderating effects of digital finance and public environmental concern. The empirical results indicate that digital transformation can enhance corporate energy efficiency, and has a forward spillover efficiency-enhancing effect. Further, when a firm adopts digital transformation, it has stronger green innovation and better energy structure leading to higher energy efficiency, and improves the energy efficiency of downstream firms through enhanced green innovation. Moreover, both digital finance and public environmental concern show significant positive moderating effects, and digital finance can positively moderate the contribution of corporate digital transformation to the energy efficiency of downstream firms. Finally, we investigate the heterogeneous treatment impact across different firms, and find that the positive effect is more pronounced in a subsample of state-owned and eastern firms, short-distance downstream firms and downstream firms with low-resource endowments. Therefore, a platform should be provided for enterprises to promote digital transformation and unblock the conduction path of green innovation and energy structure in order to realize the green transformation of the entire supply chain.
Keywords: digital transformation, supply chain, corporate energy efficiency, digital finance, Public environmental concern
Received: 02 Feb 2025; Accepted: 16 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Song. 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: Fangfang Song, Changzhou Vocational Institute of Textile and Garment, Changzhou, China
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