ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate and Economics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fclim.2025.1644628
How does digital financial inclusion improve Chinese county-level carbon productivity?
Provisionally accepted
- 1Yan'an University, Yan'an, China
- 2Shaanxi Binchang Mining Group Co., Ltd, Yan'an City, China
- 3Yan’an Energy and Chemical Group Co., Ltd, Yan'an City, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
China has put forward the “carbon peak and carbon neutral” climate commitment, but as the basic unit of the national economy, China’s county economy is facing the double pressure of economic growth and emission reduction. Studying the impact of digital financial inclusion on carbon productivity can provide a strong basis for the expansion of “carbon emission reduction support tools” to counties and the cooperation between local governments and Internet platforms. Based on panel data spanning 1677 Chinese counties from 2014 to 2022, this study employs fixed-effects, mediation, moderation, and quantile models to analyze and derive the following conclusions. (1) digital financial inclusion has a significant impact on the improvement of county carbon productivity, with an influence coefficient as high as 19.44%. (2) Digital financial inclusion enhances county-level carbon productivity by promoting technological innovation and industrial structure upgrading. The positive moderating effects of traditional finance and urbanization further amplify this impact. Digital financial inclusion exerts a strong positive effect on carbon productivity at lower quantiles, but its influence diminishes at median quantiles and turns negative at higher quantiles. This pattern reflects diminishing marginal returns and tightening resource constraints as development approaches the technological frontier. (3) Only digitalization level and coverage breadth of digital financial inclusion have a significant positive impact on county carbon productivity, and the effect of digitalization level is almost twice that of coverage breadth. The influence coefficients of digital inclusive finance on carbon productivity in the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the Yellow River Basin are 21.72% and 27.82%, respectively, which are more significant than those in other places. This paper recommends prioritizing low-carbon industrial development, shifting focus to less-developed regions to leverage latecomer advantages, and embedding carbon productivity targets into regional strategies with incentive mechanisms to drive sustainable growth.
Keywords: Digital financial inclusion, Carbon productivity, mediation effect, Moderator effect, quantile regression
Received: 10 Jun 2025; Accepted: 07 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lei, Zhang, Li, Cai and Zhou. 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: Zhaoyuan Lei, Yan'an University, Yan'an, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.