Catalyzing digital and environmental transformations by institutions in a diverse socio-economic world

Ramona Ţigănaşu, Alexandru Bănică and Pui Hang Wong

World Development, 2025, vol. 193, issue C

Abstract: In a world that urgently needs to tackle the environmental crisis, many policymakers claimed that digitalization and smart technologies have the potential to catalyze green evolution. Given that there is little discussion on the readiness of a country to unlock the opportunity of green transformation via digitalization, we propose to put into question how this aspect is reflected within a sample of heterogeneous nations. The study seeks to spot the preconditions of this widespread concern related to digital and environmental advancements and to explore how institutional and economic features moderate them. To test if, on a broad scale, the dynamics of digital and environmental facets are robustly anchored in the institutional architecture of different categories of states and if, at the global level, their effects and divides evolve under the direct influence of socio-economic circumstances, we constructed a large macro panel data (1996–2021) on over 160 countries, integrating various statistics. Results from our econometric models suggest that the investigated countries are in diverse stages of digital and environmental transitions, with strong asymmetries as regards the Internet access, greenhouse gas emissions per capita, black carbon emissions, recycling, and state capacity. The findings also illustrate that the development is rather tied to digitalization and the human capital is a prerequisite of digitalization. However, a strong state capacity is required to implement relevant policies to expedite digitalization and green transformations.

Keywords: Digital transformation; Environmental dynamics; State capacity; Development gaps; Policy relevance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X25001378
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:wdevel:v:193:y:2025:i:c:s0305750x25001378

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2025.107052

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().