China’s Place-Based E-Commerce Development Policies Generated Beneficial Spatial Spillover Effects on the Environment

Since 2009, China has implemented two important place-based policies to promote e-commerce development in selected cities: “Building National E-commerce Demonstration Cities” and “Comprehensive Pilot Zones for Cross-Border E-commerce”. Previous studies reported that these two e-commerce development policies generated local environmental benefits by reducing air pollution and carbon emissions in the policy implementation areas. However, whether these policies have spatial spillover effects on environmental quality in other regions and the extent of such effects have not been sufficiently analyzed. This study aims to empirically assess the environmental spatial spillover effects of these two policies. Based on panel data from 221 prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2021, this study utilizes a spatial econometric regression method to evaluate the policy effects. The study yields three main findings. (1) The policies significantly reduced air pollution concentrations and carbon emissions while increasing vegetation greenness in non-policy implementation areas. Specifically, the policies led to reductions in carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), as well as increases in the fractional vegetation cover (FVC), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and net primary productivity (NPP). Our findings indicate that the environmental effects of e-commerce development policies extend beyond the policy-implementing areas. (2) Further heterogeneity tests reveal that the beneficial spatial spillover impacts of e-commerce development policies were observed in cities with different geographical locations, servicification levels, economic scale, and population densities. (3) Mechanism analysis shows that although the policies did not alter the environmental regulation stringency in non-policy regions, they promoted industrial structure upgrading, technological advancement, and green innovation in these areas, thereby explaining the detected spatial spillover effects.