This paper measures China's digital economy from 2011 to 2020 based on the two dimensions of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, and empirically analyzes the impact of digital economy development on China's ecological efficiency by using two-way fixed effects, adjustment effects, and threshold effects. The research finds: (1) The development of the digital economy significantly promotes the improvement of ecological efficiency, and this conclusion still holds after robustness tests such as staged samples, instrumental variables, and variable substitution. (2) While the impact of environmental regulation on eco-efficiency is positive, it also has a significant positive regulatory effect on the digital economy boosting the development of eco-efficiency. The results show that the positive impact of the digital economy has a nonlinear increasing characteristic of "marginal effect", and there is also a threshold effect on the interaction term with environmental regulation. Therefore, the research in this paper provides data support and a perspective for evaluating China's digital economy's impact on ecological efficiency and provides a policy reference for exploring ways to improve ecological efficiency.

Chen Naihui. The Impact of China's Digital Economy Development on Ecological Efficiency: A Perspective Based on Environmental Regulation. Academic Journal of Business & Management (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 22: 77-88. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJBM.2023.052212.

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