Impact of Public Environmental Concerns on the Digital Transformation of Heavily Polluting Enterprises

Youmeng Wu, Hao Sun, Hongliang Sun and Chi Xie ()
Additional contact information
Youmeng Wu: School of Business, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan 243002, China
Hao Sun: School of Business, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan 243002, China
Hongliang Sun: School of Business, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan 243002, China
Chi Xie: School of Business, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: China is currently facing the arduous tasks of energy conservation, emission reduction and structural transformation, making it of great significance to study the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. As an important informal regulatory system, public environmental concerns affect corporate environmental behavior by increasing external environmental pressure. This study uses the data of listed companies in China’s heavily polluting industries from 2012 to 2020 and Baidu Index data to analyze how public environmental concerns affect the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. This study finds that public environmental concerns can significantly promote the digital transformation of heavily polluting enterprises. For non-state-owned, green image and high-tech enterprises, the impact is even more obvious. Furthermore, based on the structural and hierarchical perspective of enterprise digital transformation, we find that public environmental concerns significantly promote digital technology application. This study puts forward some suggestions for government departments to formulate environmental protection regulations, enterprises to fulfill their green responsibilities and the public to participate in environmental governance.

Keywords: public environmental concerns; heavily polluting enterprises; digital transformation; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/203/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1/203/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2022:i:1:p:203-:d:1012627

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().