ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1626326
This article is part of the Research TopicCreating an Economy that is not Reliant on Coal, Oil, and GasView all articles
Research on the impact of the digital economy on carbon-neutral technology innovation
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China
- 2Weifang University of Science and Technology, Weifang, China
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At the historical intersection of the “dual carbon” strategy and the digital economy, leveraging digital power to promote environmental governance and technology innovation has emerged a key area of researches. Consequently, investigating how the digital economy influences carbon-neutral technology innovation has become prominent. Utilizing panel data from Chinese 264 cities spanning 2011 to 2022, explores the influence of digital economy and its internal structure and carbon-neutral technology innovation. The results show: (1) The digital economy possesses a potent promotional role in driving carbon-neutral technology innovation, and there is regional heterogeneity. (2) Digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, two major systems within the digital economy, have significant promoting impacts on carbon-neutral technology innovation, and compared with industrial digitalization, and the promoting effect of digital industrialization is stronger. (3) The digital economy can enhance carbon-neutral technology innovation by improving resource misallocation. (4) When using the digital economy, digital industrialization and industrial digitalization as threshold variables, the digital economy produces a non-linear influence on carbon-neutral technology innovation. (5) The digital economy exerts a spatial spillover influence on carbon-neutral technology innovation. The research’s conclusions have certain referential value for promoting China’s digital economy and carbon-neutral technology innovation.
Keywords: digital economy, Carbon-neutral technology innovation, Dynamic threshold model, Spatial spillover effect, Regional heterogeneity
Received: 10 May 2025; Accepted: 03 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Geng, Li and Chen. 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: Chaoyang Li, Weifang University of Science and Technology, Weifang, China
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