Digital economy's impact on green innovation efficiency: bottom-up or top-down?

The development of the digital economy provides crucial support and impetus for enhancing green innovation efficiency. This connection between the digital economy and green innovation manifests in many dimensions. While within the research on the pathways through which the digital economy influences green innovation, the sequential order of these transmission pathways is of paramount importance. This bears significant implications for optimizing resource allocation, enhancing the efficiency of green innovation, and providing guidance for government policy formulation. This study utilizes data from 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2021 and employs the SBM-DDF model considering undesired output to estimate green innovation efficiency. Furthermore, a multiple mediation model is constructed from three levels: macro-environment, industrial structure, and micro-enterprises, in order to investigate the transmission mechanism of the impact of the digital economy on green innovation efficiency. The research findings indicate that the rapid development of the digital economy significantly improves the regional green innovation efficiency, and this conclusion remains valid after conducting robustness tests. Additionally, there is a lagging effect in the enhancement of green innovation efficiency from the digital economy. The digital business environment, coordination of industrial structure, and level of enterprise digital transformation play significant mediating and moderating roles in the relationship between the digital economy and regional green innovation efficiency. In the chain mediation effect model, the impact of the digital economy on green innovation efficiency follows a "bottom-up" transmission process, while the 3-Layer chain mediation effect of the digital economy on green innovation efficiency is almost negligible.