Digital economy, new‐type urbanization, and carbon emissions: Evidence from China

Abstract China has been a major carbon dioxide emitter. According to the World Energy Statistics Yearbook 2021 published by British Petroleum (BP), China's total carbon emissions in 2020 were 9.899 billion tons, accounting for 30.7% of the world's total emissions and ranking first in the world. Promoting digital economy construction, new‐type urbanization construction and carbon emissions reduction is the focus of the Chinese government. Based on the decoupling model and threshold regression model, this article empirically tests the impact of digital economy and new‐type urbanization on carbon emissions by panel data from 2013–2019 in 30 provinces of China. The results show that there are 23 provinces of China having a better decoupling relationship between digital economy and carbon emissions reduction, and 20 provinces of China having a better decoupling relationship between new‐type urbanization and carbon emissions reduction. In the threshold regression models with energy intensity as the threshold variable, the digital economy has a significant threshold characteristic with a negative non‐linear effect on per capita carbon emissions. The new‐type urbanization also had a significant threshold characteristic with a two‐way non‐linear effect on per capita carbon emissions, but the negative effect is not significant. This means that, during the sample period, the improvement of China's digital economy level can effectively promote carbon emissions reduction. However, the improvement of the new‐type urbanization level curbs carbon emissions reduction.