Impact of the digital economy on green total factor productivity - mediating effects on industrial upgrading technical progress

During the major transition period of China's economy from high-speed development to high quality development, the growth speed of digital economy has continuously exceeded that of GDP, which already becomes the core driving force for economic transformation and upgrading (Yi et al., 2003). However, as environmental pollution and resource depletion problems become progressively severe, application of the traditional total factor productivity to measure the quality of economic development is inappropriate to reflect the dual effects of economic development and environmental protection. Therefore, this dissertation aims to examine whether the digital economy can break through the constraints of traditional production factors and become a new driving force for China's green economic transformation and explores the mechanism of digital economy in improving the GTFP through constructing panel regression, testing the fixed effect, mediating effect, threshold effect and conducting heterogeneity analysis.