ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1643646
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Pathways to Sustainability: A Focus on Emerging Technology, SDGs, and Circular EconomyView all articles
Catalyzing Green Total Factor Productivity through Digital Innovation: Mechanisms, Evidence, and Policy Implications from Urban China
Provisionally accepted
Lu Yao1*
Cheng Lu2- 1Taiyuan Normal University, Taiyuan, China
- 2China Jiliang University, Hangzhou, China
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As a key emerging driver of synergistic development between economic growth and environmental quality, digital technological innovation plays an increasingly vital role. Achieving coordinated development between the digital economy and the green economy has become a pressing issue in the context of high-quality and sustainable economic growth. This study empirically investigates the impact and mechanisms of digital technological innovation on green total factor productivity (GTFP) using panel data from 278 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2022. A series of fixed effects and mediation models are employed to identify both direct and indirect effects. The results show that digital technological innovation significantly promotes GTFP, with a one-unit increase in digital innovation associated with an estimated 0.8% improvement in carbon emission efficiency. These findings are robust to various tests, including alternative model specifications, exclusion of municipalities and outliers, lag-ging of the core explanatory variable, alternative measurement approaches, and instrumental variable estimation using exoge-nous policy shocks. Further mediation analysis reveals that digital innovation enhances GTFP primarily through improvements in green technological innovation and industrial structure upgrading. Moreover, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect of digital innovation on GTFP varies across cities with differing resource endowments, levels of intellectual property protection, and participation in policy pilot programs. To maximize the potential of digital innovation in fostering green productivity, this study recommends strengthening the green orientation of digital innovation, establishing an integrated “digital-green” collaborative in-novation system, optimizing the institutional environment for green technology transformation, and aligning industrial policies to promote both digitalization and greening simultaneously. Tailored strategies should be adopted by cities based on their unique advantages to facilitate the development of new industries that combine digital and green attributes.
Keywords: Digital Technological Innovation, Green total factor productivity, Green technological innovation, Industrial structure upgrading, Digtial economy
Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yao and Lu. 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: Lu Yao, Taiyuan Normal University, Taiyuan, China
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