Haze Pollution Levels, Spatial Spillover Influence, and Impacts of the Digital Economy: Empirical Evidence from China

Jie Zhou,Jianping Zhou,Cheng Zhao,Hanlin Lan

doi:10.3390/su13169076

Jie Zhou, Jianping Zhou + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169076

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Abstract

With the development of digital technologies such as the Internet and digital industries such as e-commerce, the digital economy has become a new form of economic and social development, which has brought forth a new perspective for environmental governance, energy conservation, and emission reduction. Based on data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2018, this study applies the space and threshold models to empirically examine the digital economy’s influence on haze pollution and its spatial spillover. Furthermore, it investigates the spatial diffusion effect of regional digital economic development and haze pollution by constructing a spatial weight matrix. Subsequently, an instrumental variable robustness test is performed. Results indicate the following: (1) Haze pollution has spatial spillover effects and high emission aggregation characteristics, with haze pollution in neighbouring provinces significantly aggravating pollution levels in the focal province. (2) China’s digital economy has positively impacted haze pollution, with digital economic development having a significant effect (i.e., most prominent in eastern China) on reducing haze pollution. (3) Changing the energy structure and supporting innovation can restrain haze pollution, and the digital economy can reduce the path mechanism of haze pollution through the mediating effect of an advanced industrial structure. It shows a non-linear characteristic that the influence of haze reduction continues to weaken. Thus, policymakers should include the digital economy as a mechanism for ecologically sustainable development in haze pollution control.

Highlights

Since China’s reform and opening up, factor cost advantages have enabled the nation to achieve rapid economic development
DIGEi,t is an indicator of the development level of the digital economy in province i in period t; Xcontrol i,t is a series of control variables: population structure (PS), fixed assets (FA), energy situation (ES), and degree of innovation (IN) in Equation (6); μi, refers to the individual fixed effect of province i that is time-invariant; δt controls the time fixed effect; and εi,t is a random perturbation term
In the spatial autoregressive model (SAR) estimation with a time fixed effect, the estimated value of ρ was 0.2, significant at the 5% level. This value indicates that neighbouring regions have a significant positive spatial spillover effect on PM2.5; an increase of 1% in PM2.5 concentration in neighbouring provinces leads to an increase of approximately 0.2% in PM2.5 concentration in the focal province

Summary

Introduction

Since China’s reform and opening up, factor cost advantages have enabled the nation to achieve rapid economic development. This long-term and extensive economic development model has caused severe environmental pollution. As haze effects are wideranging, long-lasting, and difficult to treat, this form of air pollution has attracted extensive attention from many researchers. Many studies show that severe haze pollution greatly harms people’s physical and mental health and reduces life expectancy, and the resulting welfare cost hinders sustainable economic development [1,2,3,4]. Haze pollution detracts from improvements to health, living standards, and quality of economic development, making its effective control a priority. Cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, big data, and other digital technologies attempt to break the information asymmetry, and they are expected to play an important role in global environmental governance [18,19,20]

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