The Impact of the Digital Economy on Low‐Carbon, Inclusive Growth: Promoting or Restraining

Abstract

Based on panel data from 30 provinces in China, this paper uses a two‐way fixed effect model to empirically test the influence of regional digital economy development on the level of low-carbon, inclusive growth. The empirical study shows that: (1) The digital economy has a significant inverted U‐shaped impact on China’s regional low‐carbon, inclusive growth. It shows that regional digital economic development has a significant inverted U‐shaped impact on low‐carbon, inclusive growth (the inflection point is 0.3081), and it was found that most of the observations fall on the left side of the inverted U shape. (2) The inverted U‐shaped influence has significant heterogeneity in the regional location, information degree, and factor productivity level. (3) The digital economy promotes low‐carbon, inclusive growth mainly by improving the overall efficiency of source alloca-tion, but low‐carbon, inclusive growth may be curbed by distorting the allocation of capital ele-ments. (4) Via dimensionality reduction analysis, we found that the inverted U‐shaped impact of digital applications and digital finance on regional low‐carbon, inclusive growth is more obvious. In addition, we also found that the inverted U‐shaped impact of regional digital economic development on low‐carbon ecology and social inclusiveness is more obvious. This study provides an important reference value for relevant departments to formulate low‐carbon, inclusive development policies from the perspective of regional digital economic development.