Can smart transportation enhance green development efficiency?

As a new transportation mode, smart transportation may be an effective means to improve green development efficiency. Therefore, to empirically verify whether smart transportation affects green development efficiency (GDE), this study explores the smart transportation-GDE nexus by adopting a balanced panel dataset of 30 Chinese provinces for the period 2002-2017. Furthermore, we analyze the influence mechanism of smart transportation on GDE and its regional heterogeneity. We also discuss the potential asymmetric effect and threshold effect between smart transportation and GDE. The empirical results indicate that smart transportation significantly contributes to the improvement of GDE. Specifically, smart transportation not only promotes GDE directly, but also indirectly enhances GDE by reducing carbon intensity. Notably, the impact of smart transportation on GDE is asymmetric across different quantiles. In addition, the impact of smart transportation on GDE varies according to the level of environmental regulation. To be more specific, when the stage of environmental regulation is above the threshold, smart transportation plays a more important role in promoting GDE. Finally, several specific policy measures are highlighted for improving China's GDE and its smart transportation.