Can digital finance reduce industrial pollution? New evidence from 260 cities in China

Hongmei Wen, Jingliang Yue, Jian Li, Xuedan Xiu and Shen Zhong

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 4, 1-22

Abstract: Industrial pollution reduction is a crucial issue in the pursuit of sustainable economic and environmental development. As a product of the deep integration of traditional finance and Internet information technology, digital finance has become an effective tool for regulating the use of funds and strengthening the effectiveness of policies in the context of the digital era, which has obvious effects on industrial pollution emissions. Using panel data of 260 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011–2019 and the digital inclusive finance index jointly compiled by Peking University and Ant Financial Services Group, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of digital finance on industrial pollution emissions through fixed effects model, mediating effects model and threshold effects model. The empirical results show that digital finance can effectively reduce industrial pollution and part of the impact is achieved through industrial structure. In the process of reducing industrial pollution by digital finance, there exists double threshold effects. When the development of digital finance breaks the threshold value, the industrial pollution emission reduction effect appears to accelerate. Finally, this paper puts forward targeted suggestions to promote industrial pollution reduction and environmental economic development.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0266564 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 66564&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0266564

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266564

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().