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With the deepening of China’s industrial green transformation, traditional environmental regulation policies, while effective in promoting enterprises’ passive emission reduction behaviours, struggle to stimulate sustained green technological innovation. As a key driving force for technological transformation, the digital economy offers a new pathway for enhancing green production efficiency. This study explores how the digital economy influences China’s green industrial productivity using provincial panel data from 2011 to 2023. A super-efficiency SBM model with undesirable outputs measures green production efficiency, and a digital economy index is constructed using the entropy method. A spatial econometric model analyzes this relationship, supplemented by mediation and threshold effect models to reveal underlying mechanisms. The findings highlight three key points: (1) The digital economy significantly improves green industrial efficiency. (2) Human capital accumulation and industrial structure upgrading serve as the primary mediating pathways through which the digital economy drives green industrial production efficiency. (3) A threshold effect in human capital indicates that once it surpasses a certain level, the impact of the digital economy on green efficiency increases significantly. These results suggest that accelerating digital transformation and integrating digital technologies with industrial production are essential for enhancing green industrial efficiency and promoting sustainable development.
Hui Wang (2025) studied this question.