The Impact of E-Commerce Transformation of Cities on Green Total Factor Productivity

Abstract

The e-commerce-oriented transformation of cities is an important measure to enhance the vitality of economic development, improve the efficiency of resource allocation, and provide a new boost to the green and high-quality development of regions. Taking the quasi-natural experiment of national e-commerce demonstration city construction as the starting point, using the panel data of 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2021, we measure the green total factor productivity of cities by using the super-efficient SBM model with non-expected outputs and the global reference GML index method, and use the multi-period propensity score matching double-difference method to examine the impact of urban e-commerce-oriented transformation on the green total factor productivity of the city and the intrinsic mechanism of the effect. The results show that the urban e-commerce transformation policy can significantly promote regional green total factor productivity, and this result still holds after a series of robustness tests, such as changing the time point of the policy, randomly selecting the placebo proposal for the treatment group, and changing the matching method; the effect is regionally heterogeneous, and is more pronounced in large cities, non-provincial capitals, eastern cities, central cities, and non-resource-based cities; the urban e-commerce transformation mainly promotes the improvement of urban green total factor productivity through three channels: the industrial structure upgrading effect, the economic agglomeration effect, and the green technology innovation effect.