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Digital Finance, New Quality Productive Forces, and Government Environmental Governance: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Provincial Panel Data

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  • Yunsong Xu

    (School of Business, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083, China)

  • Shanfei Zhang

    (School of Business, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083, China)

Abstract

As the mainstream financial modality in the digital economy era, digital finance drives industrial digitization and green transformation through capital and technological support, enabling governments to advance environmental governance with greater precision, efficiency, and sustainability. Utilizing 2012–2023 panel data from 31 Chinese provinces, this study innovatively constructs a multidimensional panel data model for the quantitative analysis of the overall impact, heterogeneous effects, and spatial spillover effects of digital finance on government environmental governance. It further examines the mediating effect and the threshold effects of new quality productive forces, and the moderated mediation effects of green technological innovation and industrial collaborative agglomeration. In this study, (1) digital finance significantly drives government environmental governance, and this finding exhibits robustness; (2) digital finance exerts heterogeneous impact on government environmental governance, with more pronounced effects in eastern and sub-developed regions; (3) digital finance generates positive spatial spillover effects on government environmental governance; (4) new quality productive forces positively mediate the relationship between digital finance and government environmental governance; (5) green technological innovation exhibits dual moderation characteristics, moderating both “digital finance → new quality productive forces” and “new quality productive forces → government environmental governance,” while industrial collaborative agglomeration shows single moderation, specifically moderating “new quality productive forces → government environmental governance”; (6) the impact of digital finance on government environmental governance presents a nonlinear feature of “increasing marginal returns.” On these accounts, this study proposes targeted recommendations from six dimensions.

Suggested Citation

  • Yunsong Xu & Shanfei Zhang, 2025. "Digital Finance, New Quality Productive Forces, and Government Environmental Governance: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Provincial Panel Data," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-30, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijfss:v:13:y:2025:i:3:p:129-:d:1697245
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Dong, Kangyin & Liu, Yang & Wang, Jianda & Dong, Xiucheng, 2024. "Is the digital economy an effective tool for decreasing energy vulnerability? A global case," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 216(C).
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