Digital economy and carbon dioxide emissions: Examining the role of threshold variables

Abstract

Considering that previous literature has mainly focused on the impact of the digital economy (DE) on environmental degradation, ignoring the role of natural resources, this study uses two key factors (natural resource rent and anticorruption regulation) as threshold variables to reveal the effect of natural resources on the association between DE and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. In doing so, the study covers 97 countries, uses annual data between 2003 and 2019, and applies a panel threshold model. The outcomes present that the influence of the DE on CO₂ emissions has a single-threshold effect (i.e., there is an inverted U-shaped link between the DE and CO₂ emissions) when natural resource rent is the threshold variable. Specifically, the DE significantly increases CO₂ emissions when the natural resource rent is at a low-to-medium level, but the DE suppresses CO₂ emissions growth when natural resource rent exceeds the threshold. Moreover, the DE drives overall CO₂ emissions growth when anticorruption regulation is the threshold variable and there are double thresholds for its impact on CO₂ emissions. Specifically, a rise in anticorruption regulation initially exacerbates the contribution of DE impact on CO₂ emissions and then weakens it over time. Based on the results, the study proposes various implications, such as formulating a DE development strategy, considering natural resources in the development of the DE, and strengthening anti-corruption efforts in the field of environmental protection.

Keywords

Digital economy / Natural resource rent / Anticorruption regulation / CO₂ emissions / Threshold regression

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Qiang Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Jiayi Sun: Methodology, Data curation, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Ugur Korkut Pata: Methodology, Software, Data curation, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Rongrong Li: Methodology, Data curation, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Mustafa Tevfik Kartal: Data curation, Investigation, Writing – original draft.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72104246).

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