Analysis Of The Impact Of Digital Economy Development On Carbon Emissions In The Yangtze River Delta Region

Global warming is a huge challenge for mankind.The massive increase in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has caused global warming to intensify and has brought about a series of negative impacts on human production and life and economic and social development.China currently has a high dependence on high-carbon fossil energy consumption,but the efficiency of resource and energy use is low.The demand for energy from urbanisation development and industrialisation is still increasing,putting China under enormous pressure to reduce carbon emissions.At the same time,the digital economy,as a new driving force for economic development,will become a new driving force in the process of achieving the goal of carbon compliance and carbon neutrality,and the role it plays cannot be underestimated.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the impact of the digital economy on regional carbon emissions.The Yangtze River Delta region is the most economically developed and modernised of China’s urban agglomerations,and its construction and development can serve as a model for other urban agglomerations in China.Therefore,this paper takes 41 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Delta region as the research object and selects panel data from2011-2019 for an empirical study to explore the impact of digital economy development on regional carbon emissions.First,the current situation of digital economy development in the Yangtze River Delta region from 2011-2019 is analyzed,and then the entropy value method is used to construct a digital economy development level index system,and the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of digital economy development level and carbon emissions in the Yangtze River Delta region are systematically explored.The results show that the overall digital economy in the Yangtze River Delta region is developing rapidly,but the level of digital economy development varies greatly among cities,showing the overall spatial characteristics of "high in the east and low in the west";the total carbon emissions are increasing year by year,and the spatial distribution characteristics are consistent with the characteristics of digital economy development level.Secondly,a fixed-effects model was constructed to investigate the direct effect of digital economy development on carbon emissions,and the results showed that digital economy development can significantly reduce carbon emissions,and this conclusion still holds after the robustness test.Again,a spatial Durbin model was constructed to investigate the spatial spillover effect of digital economic development on carbon emissions.The results show that the effect of digital economic development on carbon emissions is significantly negative under the three different weight matrices,indicating that digital economic development can effectively suppress carbon emissions;among the decomposition effects,both the direct and indirect effects are significantly negative,indicating that an increase in the level of digital economic development can not only reduce the city’s In the decomposition effect,both the direct effect and the indirect effect are significantly negative.The spillover effect is more significant than the direct effect,indicating that the higher the level of development of the digital economy,the stronger the spillover effect on the carbon emissions of neighbouring cities.The results show that the negative effect of digital economy development on carbon emissions is significant in Jiangsu Province and Zhejiang Province,but not in Anhui Province;there is heterogeneity in the degree of impact of digital economy development on carbon emissions,with cities with a high level of digital economy having a significant negative relationship and cities with a low level of digital economy development having a The effect is not significant.Finally,based on the above findings,corresponding policy implications are proposed:promoting the development of digital economy to reduce carbon emissions;paying attention to the spatial spillover effect of digital economy development on regional carbon emission reduction;and collaborative development in the Yangtze River Delta region to promote the development of digital economy together.