How does digital economy affect green total factor productivity at the industry level in China: from a perspective of global value chain

The digital economy is an important way to relieve current pressure on resources and the environment. Based on ecological modernization theory and global value chain theory, this paper adopts panel data of 17 manufacturing industries from 2000 to 2014, uses the non-radial directional distance function and the meta-frontier method to measure China’s green total factor productivity (GTFP) and its sub-indices, and takes the embedding degree and embedding position as moderating variables and threshold variables to construct an econometric model to explore the relationship among the digital economy, global value chain, and GTFP. The results show that (1) the digital economy has a positive effect on GTFP in both time and space. And in terms of time, the digital economy mainly enhances GTFP by improving technical efficiency and narrowing the technology gap. (2) Global value chain embedding position positively moderates the relationship between the digital economy and GTFP; In terms of sub-samples, labor-intensive and capital-intensive industries show the same impact characteristics as the total sample. (3) Further, it is found that the digital economy and GTFP have nonlinear characteristics. There is a single threshold effect on the embedding position. When the embedding position is low, the digital economy is positively correlated with GTFP but not significant; when the threshold value is crossed, the digital economy can significantly promote GTFP. The conclusions of this paper are helpful to realize the digital economy to promote the green development of the manufacturing industry, and provide an effective reference for the realization mechanism of China’s green economy transformation and ecological civilization construction in the post-pandemic era.