Development Of Digital Economy Research Articles

Does digital economy keep enterprises out of green innovation trouble? evidence from "double carbon" goal.

The proposal of the "dual carbon" targets has provided direction for promoting China's economic green transformation and green innovation. As enterprises are important entities driving technological innovation in China, enhancing their green innovation capabilities holds significant practical significance for reducing carbon emissions. While the flourishing development of the digital economy currently provides new avenues and impetus for enterprise green innovation, research on the micro-level effects of green innovation driven by digital economy is still lacking. Therefore, based on data from Chinese cities spanning 2010 to 2021 and micro-level data of listed enterprises, this paper employs fixed effect model and intermediary effect model to empirically test the effect and mechanism of urban digital economy development on the quality and quantity of enterprise green innovation. Additionally, it investigates the carbon emission reduction effect resulting from digital economy development. The findings are as follows: (1) The development of digital economy exhibits a significant green innovation effect, effectively enhancing both the "quality and quantity" of enterprise green innovation. Particularly noteworthy is its impact on the quality of green innovation in enterprises, a result corroborated by several robustness tests. (2) Promoting regional knowledge spillover and alleviating enterprise financing constraints emerge as mechanisms through which the digital economy enhances the "quality and quantity" of enterprise green innovation. (3) Heterogeneity testing reveals that the digital economy exerts a greater green innovation effect on enterprises located in regions characterized by higher environmental regulations, high-tech industries, and state-owned enterprises. (4) Further analysis demonstrates that the digital economy effectively reduces enterprises carbon emissions and enhances their carbon performance by driving green innovation, thus providing endogenous impetus for achieving the "dual carbon" goals. By examining the effects and mechanisms of green innovation driven by digital economy from the perspectives of promoting knowledge spillover and alleviating financing constraints, this study enriches theoretical research on the relationship between the digital economy and green innovation at the enterprise micro-level. It offers new insights for governments in formulating green innovation policies and serves as a reference for green innovation decision-making in other developing countries.

The impact of MD&A digital transformation information disclosure on stock price synchronicity in China

With the continuous development of the global digital economy, digital transformation has become an important path for enterprises. The management discussion and analysis (MD&A) section of listed companies’ annual reports has progressively incorporated detailed information on their ongoing digital transformation efforts, reflecting the growing significance of this trend in corporate reporting. This paper uses data from 2011 to 2022 of A-share listed companies in China to investigate whether and how the MD&A digital transformation information affects the stock price synchronicity. The frequency of keywords related to digital transformation within the MD&A section of the annual report is analyzed and measured to quantify digital transformation information. The results show that digital transformation information in MD&A can significantly reduce stock price synchronicity. Further mechanism tests show that analyst and media act as information intermediaries to disseminate more firm-specific information to the market. In addition, heterogeneity tests show that this effect is mainly reflected in state-owned companies and larger companies. These findings provide valuable insights for policymakers, investors, and regulators in planning regulations.

Talent agglomeration research within digital economy development: Trend analysis and research prospects

Talent is important for development and innovation across fields. Further, in this era of digital economy, primarily driven by modern information networks, how to attract talent and effectively leverage talent’s agglomeration effect is a crucial research topic. Thus, this paper reviewed studies from the China Knowledge Network in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index and from the Web of Science Core Collection. By combining cluster analysis based on keyword co-occurrence with a review of highly relevant literature, this paper determines and compares mainstream directions in both domestic Chinese and international studies on talent agglomeration effects and digital economy talent research, thereby constructing a two-dimensional analytical framework. This paper recommends four research paths for the effects of talent agglomeration, namely, talent management, enterprise–industry development, industry–regional development, and industry–regional level of talent agglomeration. Meanwhile, considering the digital economy’s key role in future national economic strategies, its human resources studies should be included in these same paths for studying talent aggregation effects. Introducing public sector strategic manement theories into research on digital-economic talent aggregation could prove an extremely valuable subject matter in the future.

Can the digital economy development limit the size of the informal economy? A nonlinear analysis based on China's provincial panel data

This paper investigates whether and how digital economy (especially digital platforms and digital finance) restrains the informal economic activities in China measured by the MIMIC (multiple indicators multiple causes) model. Using Chinese provincial panel data from 1995 to 2020, we find that the average size of China's provincial informal economy displays a five-stage fluctuation, ranging from 13.63 % to 17.53 %. More importantly, we uncover a robust “inverted U-shaped” nonlinear relationship between the digital platform development and the informal economy, with a turning point of 0.4189. Initially, the development of digital platforms increases informal economic activities by disrupting traditional sectors, causing new types of tax evasion, challenging regulators and raising digital crime. However, beyond a certain threshold, digital platforms can overcome these problems through more job creations and improved regulation. Meanwhile, the digital financial development is proved to have a negative impact on the informal economy because it can offer much more advantages in addressing informality such as making payments transparent, easing credit constraints, raising total income, helping governments reach people and businesses. Our study provides convincing evidence and valuable advice for policymakers when developing digital economy to curb the informal economy.

The Impact of Digital Economy Development on Carbon Emission Efficiency in the Logistics Industry

The Impact of Digital Economy Development on Carbon Emission Efficiency in the Logistics Industry

Does digital economy promote regional green innovation? An empirical study based on the transmission effect and threshold effect of marketization

Exploring the green innovation effect of the digital economy under the condition of socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics is of great contemporary value. In this paper, we incorporate digital economy development, marketization and green innovation into a unified analytical framework. Based on the theoretical analysis of the intrinsic logical relationship among the three, a panel data of 31 provinces in mainland China from 2011 to 2021 is employed to empirically test the effect and mechanism of digital economy development on green innovation under the condition of marketization. The results show that digital economy development is effective in improving the level of regional green innovation; Marketization is an important transmission mechanism for digital economy to release the effectiveness of green innovation. Besides, marketization has a significant double threshold effect on green innovation driven by digital economy. To promote the synergistic development of China's digital economy, market-oriented reform and green innovation in the future, we should focus on promoting the construction of an “enterprise-public-government” community for digital economy and improving the mechanism of market-oriented green innovation.

To leave or to stay: Digital economy development and migrant workers’ location

The vigorous development of the digital economy will reshape labour demand, which in turn will affect the workplace choice of migrant workers and then their location. Taking the large-scale and highly-mobile immigrant workers in urban China as the research population, this paper conducted an empirical research on the impact of the digital economy on labour location using the data from the China Labour-force Dynamic Survey (2012–2016). Results show that the more developed a city’s digital economy is, the more immigrants the city can attract and absorb. Analysis of the impact channels shows that the attraction of the digital economy to immigrants stems mainly from entrepreneurial opportunity provision and skill utilization enhancement effects. There is individual heterogeneity in the impact of the digital economy, with low-skilled, rural, or high communication ability migrant workers likely to be positively impacted by the development of the urban digital economy. While local governments are committed to digital technology-driven economic transformation, they should nonetheless promote the training of workers in the new era to achieve a better match between digital development and labour market.

Effective approach toward low-carbon development: Digital economy development enhances carbon efficiency in cities

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) proposes to accelerate the development of the digital economy and promote “carbon neutrality”. In 2020, China announced a “double carbon” target. In 2022, the size of China's digital economy has reached 7.5 trillion dollars, ranking second in the world. Against this background, this paper takes 211 cities in China from 2011 to 2019 as the research object and tries to sort out the impact of the development of the digital economy on the carbon efficiency of cities in order to find an effective path for cities to realize low-carbon development. The results of the study show that the development of the digital economy significantly improves the carbon efficiency level of Chinese cities. After a series of endogeneity and robustness tests, the conclusion still holds. Public environmental concern and technological innovation are the key mediating paths. In addition, the digital economy has a significant non-linear effect on the carbon efficiency of Chinese cities. On the one hand, the low-carbon effect of the digital economy is only realized when the level of digital economy development is lower than the critical value of 0.040 and higher than the critical value of 0.085; on the other hand, the lower the level of urban carbon efficiency is, the greater the effect of the digital economy on urban carbon efficiency. Further research shows that the digital economy has a significant spatial spillover effect on the improvement of urban carbon efficiency, and the development of the digital economy not only helps to improve the carbon efficiency level of the local city but also positively influences the improvement of the carbon efficiency of neighboring cities through the spatial spillover effect. The heterogeneity study found that in eastern cities and megacities, the digital economy has a more obvious effect on the improvement of carbon efficiency. In the context of the booming digital economy, this paper tries to find an effective new path for urban low-carbon development by means of developing the digital economy.

Executive Social Connection, Regional Digital Economy Development, and Enterprise Digital Transformation

Aiming at the research limitation concerning the insufficient exploration of executive social connections in enterprise digital transformation, our research objective is to investigate the influence of executive social connections, namely political and business connections, on enterprise digital transformation. Furthermore, it assesses the moderating effects of regional digital economy development on these relationships. An empirical analysis, encompassing 5407 observations from 868 listed firms between 2012 and 2021 in China, demonstrates that executive political and business connections significantly contribute to enterprise digital transformation both individually and synergistically. Specifically, political connections are found to be more relevant to enhancing enterprise digital transformation in regions with higher levels of digital economy development, while business connections exhibit a stronger correlation in regions with lower levels of digital economy development. Additionally, it is revealed that the synergistic effect of political and business connections is more relevant to enterprise digital transformation in regions with lower levels of digital economy development.

Can digital economy development improve the coordination of IFDI and OFDI? evidence from 246 cities in China

ABSTRACT This study examines the impact of digital economy development on the coordination of inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) and outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in 246 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2020. Panel data analysis is used to measure the comprehensive development index of the digital economy and the coupling and coordination of IFDI and OFDI. The results show that digital economy development significantly promotes the coordination of IFDI and OFDI, even after conducting various robustness tests. The study also finds that technological innovation plays a mediating role in the relationship between digital economy development and the coordination of IFDI and OFDI. Additionally, the research reveals that the enhancing effect of digital economy development on the coordination of IFDI and OFDI is stronger in the eastern regions and the five major urban agglomerations. This study contributes to the understanding of the role of the digital economy in promoting the coordination of IFDI and OFDI and provides practical implications for policymakers to enhance such coordination in cities.

Breaking the resource curse: The impact of digital economy on the sustainable transformation of resource-based cities

Resource-based cities (RBCs) depend heavily on the extraction and processing of natural resources, resulting in relatively simple economic structures. However, the rise of the digital economy (DIGITAL) presents numerous opportunities for economic diversification and sustainable development. Further investigation is necessary to explore DIGITAL's potential to overcome the resource curse. This study examined the influence of digital economic development on the sustainable transformation of 115 RBCs in China from 2011 to 2019. Robustness and heterogeneity tests were conducted to ensure reliability of the findings. This study concluded that DIGITAL plays a pivotal role in driving the sustainable transformation of resource-based cities (STRBC). This conclusion was supported by various robustness tests. Urban economic efficiency and the vitality of innovation and entrepreneurship were identified as key channels through which DIGITAL contributes to STRBC. Moreover, governmental environmental concern can enhance DIGITAL's role in promoting STRBC. Furthermore, DIGITAL is particularly crucial for mature, declining, and regenerating cities, and has a stronger impact on cities with larger spatial scales. This may be attributed to factors such as the levels of economic development, infrastructure construction, and policy support in these regions.

Impact and transmission mechanism of digital economy on agricultural energy carbon emission reduction

The digital economy is a powerful driver for accelerating economic growth and an innovative approach to promoting high-quality agricultural development. Utilizing panel data encompassing 30 provincial-level administrative regions in China from 2011 to 2021, this paper quantifies the development level of digital economy and agricultural energy carbon emission intensity, and examines the impact and mechanism of digital economy on agricultural energy carbon emission intensity. The results reveal that: (1) Distinct regional disparities exist in both the development level of the digital economy and the carbon emission intensity of agricultural energy across China from 2011 to 2021, although an overall decreasing trend is observed; (2) The development of digital economy has a significant inhibitory effect on agricultural energy carbon emission intensity, and this conclusion remains robust after a series of tests; (3) Digital economy development can mitigate agricultural energy carbon emission intensity by alleviating misallocation of agricultural capital and promoting green technology innovation. In addition, there are significant regional differences in the impact of the digital economy on the carbon intensity of agricultural energy. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the environmental governance implications of the digital economy in agriculture and offer valuable guidance for the effective application of digital technologies towards achieving agricultural emission reduction goals.

Digital economy, technological innovation, and sustainable development.

This paper examines the impact of the digital economy on sustainable development, using panel data from cities at the prefecture level and above in China from 2011 to 2019. The results indicate: (1) The digital economy is conducive to boosting growth, increasing employment, reducing energy consumption, and cutting emissions, thereby promoting sustainable development. These findings prove robust. (2) Mechanism test outcomes reveal that, from the perspective of technological innovation, the digital economy can promote sustainable development through increasing R&D input and enhancing innovation output. (3) An extended analysis of the risk of a digital "divide" demonstrates that "dividend" of the digital economy is primarily manifests in spurring economic growth, enhancing energy efficiency, and strengthening environmental protection in lagging regions, while the digital "divide" effect is manifested in the stronger employment stimulating effect of developed regions versus backward areas. The results of this study not only enrich the relevant research system, but also provide empirical evidence to support accelerating digital transformation, strengthening technological innovation governance, and advancing sustainable development.

Coupling and Coordinated Development of Carbon Emission Efficiency in Industrial Enterprises and the Digital Economy: Empirical Evidence from Anhui, China

To delve into the interrelationship between the green transformation of industry and the economy’s high-quality development, to promote the coordinated development of industrial carbon emission efficiency and digital economy, to expand the scope and research ideas related to economic and social sustainable development, and to provide scientific reference for the low-carbon sustainable development of regional economy, this article introduced a data-centric methodology for evaluating the collaborative advancement of both industrial enterprises’ carbon emission efficiency and the digital economy. To accurately gauge the carbon footprint of industrial enterprises, models focusing on carbon emissions as well as carbon emission intensity were employed. To enhance the precision of evaluation outcomes and mitigate biases stemming from subjective weighting factors, we employed the entropy weight method to objectively assign weights to each indicator. Furthermore, the super-efficient slack-based model (SBM) can solve the problem that the conclusions are biased, due to the different radial. Subsequently, a carbon-emission efficiency slack-based measure model, and models for coupling degree and coupling-coordination degree were formulated. Anhui, as a central province in China, is also an important province in the Yangtze River Delta integration development. Coordinated development of its carbon emission efficiency and digital economy has important implications for the sustainable economy advancements of other regions in China, and even other countries or regions in the world. Therefore, Anhui was selected to be the empirical research sample. The results showed that the comprehensive levels of these two systems followed an increasing trend, while the digital economy lagged. Their coupling degree fluctuated and reached its highest point in 2021, whereas their coupling-coordination degree increased, showing high coupling and low coordination overall. This study proposes specific countermeasures and suggestions for the relevant decision-makers.

Retraction Note: Simulation of agricultural digital economy development and policy support system based on resource sensitivity index

Retraction Note: Simulation of agricultural digital economy development and policy support system based on resource sensitivity index

Digital economy development and regional innovation resilience: mechanism and empirical analysis

ABSTRACT Improving the resilience of innovation systems is a prerequisite for achieving high-level self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology. This study defines a conceptual framework of innovation resilience. It delves into its theoretical and empirical aspects to thoroughly examine the impact and transmission mechanisms of digital economic development on the resilience of regional innovation systems. The research findings reveal that the digital economy positively impacts regional innovation resilience (RIR), a result that persists even after a series of robustness tests. Second, the digital economy can effectively enhance RIR by expanding the scale of the digital industry, strengthening intellectual property protection, and increasing innovation. Third, there is a threshold effect on the influence of the digital economy on RIR, which becomes more pronounced with the developing digital economy and increasing levels of innovation personnel, funding, and output. The conclusions of this study provide new policy tools to strengthen innovation resilience and promote the optimization of regional innovation policies.

Digital economy evaluation, regional differences and spatio-temporal evolution: Case study of Yangtze River economic belt in China

Digital economy is a crucial indicator of national or regional competitiveness and modernization. Evaluation of the digital economy development is an important approach for comprehensively understanding China's digital economy landscape. Based on the panel data of 110 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2011 to 2020, this paper evaluated the development of the digital economy in YREB. The evaluation process focused on digital infrastructure, digital industrialization, digital innovation environment, and digital financial inclusion, employing a new mutual-information-based weighting method to quantify indicators’ centrality. We further adopted the Dagum's Gini coefficient decomposition method, kernel density estimation and Moran's I to reveal the regional differences and spatio-temporal evolution of the digital economy development. The results showed that a westward decreasing trend in the YREB's digital economy, with optimal development observed in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Regional differences exhibited a significant downward trend. It is noteworthy that the Gini coefficient showed a slight upward trend after 2017. The digital economy development dispersion across the YREB was apparent. The digital economy development showed a notable positive spatial correlation. Moreover, the distribution of digital economy development among the cities was mainly characterized by a low-low agglomeration pattern.

EcoDetect-YOLO: A Lightweight, High-Generalization Methodology for Real-Time Detection of Domestic Waste Exposure in Intricate Environmental Landscapes.

In response to the challenges of accurate identification and localization of garbage in intricate urban street environments, this paper proposes EcoDetect-YOLO, a garbage exposure detection algorithm based on the YOLOv5s framework, utilizing an intricate environment waste exposure detection dataset constructed in this study. Initially, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is integrated between the second level of the feature pyramid etwork (P2) and the third level of the feature pyramid network (P3) layers to optimize the extraction of relevant garbage features while mitigating background noise. Subsequently, a P2 small-target detection head enhances the model's efficacy in identifying small garbage targets. Lastly, a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) is introduced to strengthen the model's capability for deep feature fusion. Experimental results demonstrate EcoDetect-YOLO's adaptability to urban environments and its superior small-target detection capabilities, effectively recognizing nine types of garbage, such as paper and plastic trash. Compared to the baseline YOLOv5s model, EcoDetect-YOLO achieved a 4.7% increase in mAP0.5, reaching 58.1%, with a compact model size of 15.7 MB and an FPS of 39.36. Notably, even in the presence of strong noise, the model maintained a mAP0.5 exceeding 50%, underscoring its robustness. In summary, EcoDetect-YOLO, as proposed in this paper, boasts high precision, efficiency, and compactness, rendering it suitable for deployment on mobile devices for real-time detection and management of urban garbage exposure, thereby advancing urban automation governance and digital economic development.

Regional digital economy development and enterprise ESG performance —— comes from the empirical analysis of the panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies

Regional digital economy development and enterprise ESG performance —— comes from the empirical analysis of the panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies

Digital Transformation and Firm Total Factor Productivity: Tests on the moderating effect of ESG

With the rapid development of digital economy, digital transformation has become the choice of enterprises in the rapid development of the economy, can it have a real impact on the productivity of enterprises? In this paper, based on the A-share data of listed companies in China from 2009 to 2022, we use "crawler" tools to extract the frequency of words related to digital transformation in the annual reports of the companies, and use them as indicators of digital transformation. We use the economic data of enterprises and calculate the TFP of enterprises based on the OP method. Two-way fixed effects are used to analyze the results. The results show that: first, digital transformation can effectively increase enterprise total factor productivity, and for every 1% increase in digital transformation indicators, TFP increases by 0.1096%, which still holds after considering endogeneity and passing the robustness test. Second, among the ESG indicators, environmental and corporate governance indicators inhibit the increase in firm total factor rate by digital transformation, possibly due to the lower returns to production as a result of higher costs. Third, the heterogeneity analysis finds that digital transformation brings differential improvements in TFP according to the geographic location of the firm and the firm's revenue, with the East being better than the Center, and high-revenue firms being better than low-revenue firms. The conclusion can provide empirical evidence for the economic benefits brought by digital transformation, and explores the direction of the influence of ESG performance in this process, providing a new perspective for enterprises to better carry out digital transformation.