ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Cities
Sec. Urban Economics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1629300
This article is part of the Research TopicUrban Economic Aspects of Energy, Exergy, and Environmental SustainabilityView all 4 articles
Heterogeneous Effects of the Digital Economy on High-Quality Green Development of Urban Economy and Its Spatial Spillovers: Evidence from the Upper Yangtze River Economic Belt
Provisionally accepted
- 1The Engineering & Technical College of Chengdu University of Technology, Leshan, China
- 2Sichuan Institute of Industrial Technology, Deyang, China
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Based on the panel data of urban agglomerations in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2011 to 2023, this study constructs a comprehensive measurement framework to evaluate the level of digital economy and high-quality green development of urban economy, and conducts analysis using benchmark regression, quantile regression and spatial Durbin model.The results show that: the digital economy has a significant promoting effect on the high-quality green development of urban economy, and this conclusion is reliable through robustness tests; innovation capability is an important intermediary, and the digital economy drives high-quality economic development by stimulating urban innovation vitality and improving innovation capability; its impact has obvious heterogeneity, with the driving effect on large cities being significantly stronger than that on small and medium-sized cities, and the enabling effect on non-resourcebased cities being greater than that on resource-based cities; the spatial spillover effect is significant, as the digital economy not only promotes local economic growth, but also drives the coordinated development of surrounding cities. Moreover, there are differences in the promotion intensity of the digital economy on the five sub-dimensions of high-quality green development of urban economy (innovative development,coordinated development, green development, open development and shared development), among which the effect on coordinated development is the most prominent.
Keywords: digital economy, high-quality green development of urban economy, Innovation capability, Mediation mechanisms, Spatial spillovers
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Fan, Yang and Song. 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: Qin Fan, The Engineering & Technical College of Chengdu University of Technology, Leshan, China
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