How digital economy lead to low-carbon development in China? The case of e-commerce city pilot reform

E-commerce has emerged through digital platforms and Internet construction as an important way to achieve low-carbon development in China. To evaluate the mitigation effect of e-commerce, this paper conducts a quasi-natural experiment in terms of the pilot policy of national e-commerce demonstration cities (NEDC) to explore the changes in CO2 emissions of 270 cities from 2004 to 2017 in China. We also check the asymmetry, mechanism effects and heterogeneity. The results show that the treated cities reduce CO2 emissions by 4.1% due to the NEDC pilot policy compared to the untreated cities. The estimated results pass the parallel trend test, robustness tests, and the Goodman-Bacon decomposition. Moreover, the NEDC pilot policy increases the CO2 emissions of treated cities by promoting economic growth (scale effect), and decreases the carbon emissions of treated cities by upgrading the industrial structure (structural effect) and increasing the technological innovation level (technical effect). Furthermore, the CO2 mitigation effects of the NEDC pilot policy are significantly concentrated in the higher quantiles. Finally, the NEDC pilot policy has significantly negative effects on CO2 emissions in “postage-free regions,” southern China, and cities with large e-commerce sales. The results of this paper provide theoretical and practical references for China to achieve low-carbon development.