School of Statistics & Applied Mathematics, Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu, 233030, China.
IESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9221, LEM, Lille Economie Management, F-59000, Lille, France.
J Environ Manage. 2023 Oct 15;344:118408. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118408. Epub 2023 Jun 17.
Improving energy efficiency can go a long way in helping China address environmental problems it currently faces and help deliver on its pledge of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. At the same time, innovative production technologies based on digital solutions continue to attract significant attention, owing to their potential to provide environmentally sustainable development opportunities. This study explores whether the digital economy can improve energy efficiency by facilitating input reallocation and promoting better information flows. We rely on a panel of 285 Chinese cities for the period 2010-2019 and a so-called slacks-based efficiency measure incorporating socially undesirable outputs to obtain energy efficiency from the decomposition of a productivity index. Our estimation results demonstrate that the digital economy can promote better energy use efficiency. More specifically, a 1-percentage point increase in the size of the digital economy leads to an average increase of around 14.65 percentage points in energy efficiency. This conclusion still holds under a two-stage least-squares procedure used to mitigate endogeneity. The efficiency-enhancing impact of digitalization is heterogeneous and depends on factors such as resource endowment, city size, and geographical location. Additionally, our results suggest that digital transformation within a particular region has an adverse effect on energy efficiency in that region's neighboring areas due to negative spatial spillover effects. These negative spillovers outweigh the positive direct effect on energy efficiency that can be attributed to a growing digital economy.
提高能源效率可以在很大程度上帮助中国解决当前面临的环境问题，并有助于实现 2060 年碳中和的承诺。与此同时，基于数字解决方案的创新生产技术因其提供环境可持续发展机会的潜力而继续受到极大关注。本研究探讨了数字经济是否可以通过促进投入再配置和促进更好的信息流来提高能源效率。我们利用 2010-2019 年期间的 285 个中国城市面板和一个包含社会不可接受产出的基于松弛的效率衡量标准，从生产率指数的分解中获得能源效率。我们的估计结果表明，数字经济可以促进更好的能源利用效率。更具体地说，数字经济规模每增加 1 个百分点，能源效率平均提高约 14.65 个百分点。在使用两阶段最小二乘法程序来缓解内生性问题后，这一结论仍然成立。数字化的效率提升影响具有异质性，取决于资源禀赋、城市规模和地理位置等因素。此外，我们的结果表明，由于负面的空间溢出效应，特定地区的数字化转型会对该地区周边地区的能源效率产生不利影响，这些负面溢出效应超过了可以归因于不断增长的数字经济的对能源效率的积极直接影响。
