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

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 allocation, but low-carbon, inclusive growth may be curbed by distorting the allocation of capital elements. (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.