Does network infrastructure construction reduce energy intensity? Based on the “Broadband China” strategy

Junjie Hong, Fangyuan Shi and Yuhan Zheng

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2023, vol. 190, issue C

Abstract: As one of the new economic forms, the digital economy has penetrated into all sub-sectors of the economy becoming a new engine for economic growth. Network infrastructure is the pillar and core driver for the development of the digital economy, getting increasingly evident and important. Meanwhile, green development has become a time trend for the more and more serious global climate problems. Thereinto, reducing energy intensity is an important starting point for achieving green development. The impact of network infrastructure on energy intensity should not be ignored. This article uses the “Broadband China” demonstration cities as a quasi-natural experiment to reflect the improvement of network construction and build a time-varying difference-in-differences (time-varying DID) model to explore the impact of network construction on Chinese prefecture-level energy intensity. The results show that: (1) The construction of network infrastructure can significantly reduce prefecture-level energy intensity, and this conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. (2) Network infrastructure construction will reduce prefecture-level energy intensity through the mediating effect of energy efficiency, market environment, and innovation. (3) The effect will be more obvious in Northeast China, with huge scale, high levels of human capital, perfect broadband user access, complex industrial structures and better financial development levels. We hope this research provides empirical evidence for improving the construction of network facilities and realizing the “Two-Wheel Drive” of digitizing and greening.

Keywords: Network infrastructure construction; Energy intensity; The “Broadband China” policy; Time-varying DID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 L86 O13 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162523001221
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:190:y:2023:i:c:s0040162523001221

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122437

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().