Abstract
Digitalization has emerged as a new hope for low-carbon sustainable economic growth after its successful trial during the COVID-19 measures. Therefore, both developed and developing economies focus on digitalization to cope with carbon neutrality targets. Thus, this study attempted to generate a meaningful relationship between the digital economy and green energy, innovation, and environmental tax policy to capture the role of factors in acquiring carbon neutrality. For the abovementioned objectives, modern econometric methods, such as the Kilian bias-adjusted bootstrap, were adopted to evaluate the Chinese dataset between 1990 and 2021. The results indicate that the study factors play a significant role in acquiring carbon neutrality in the long-term Chinese economy. Furthermore, quantile autoregressive distributed lag model (QARDL) indicates that all the factors influence carbon neutrality in various quantiles. Consequently, the digital economy, green energy and innovation, and environmental taxes significantly assist in attaining carbon neutrality in the long term, and the ecological Kuznets curve prevails in the economy. Therefore, radical and wide-ranging policy implications are required in many areas including environmental restrictions, digital economy promotion, green and sustainable technologies, and clean energy sources.
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Funding
This work is supported by the General Project of Philosophy and Social Science Planning of Shenzhen (Fund No. SZ2022B013), the Key Project of Shenzhen Polytechnic (Fund No. 6022310001S), and Teaching Research Project of Hubei Colleges and Universities (2021464).
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Shengyang Zhong, Jie Chen, and Faiz Nayab: conceptualization, data curation, methodology, writing—original draft, and software. Zia ur Rehman and Jie Chen: data curation, visualization. Shengyang Zhong and Zia ur Rehman: visualization, supervision, editing. Faiz Nayab and Jie Chen: review and editing. Shengyang Zhong: writing—review, supervision and editing.
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Zhong, ., Chen, J., Rahman, Z.U. et al. Quantifying digital economy and green initiatives for carbon neutrality targets: a Kilian bias-adjusted bootstrap model evaluation of China economy. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 9550–9564 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-31445-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-31445-0