Can the Digitalization Reduce Carbon Emission Intensity?—The Moderating Effects of the Fiscal Decentralization
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This research presents selected panel data for 30 Chinese provinces from 2011-2019 to explore the effects of fiscal decentralization and digitalization on carbon emission intensity. The results show that both increasing the degree of fiscal decentralization and increasing the level of digitalization significantly reduce carbon emission intensity; the mechanism analysis shows that fiscal decentralization has a positive moderating effect on digitalization in reducing carbon emission intensity, and the negative effect of digitalization on carbon emission intensity is particularly significant when fiscal decentralization crosses the threshold value. Author established his hypothesizes and proved that.
The importance of this article is indicated by the fact that it examines this relationship in a new approach, in a quantitative way, thus it is a valuable contribution to the field.
In general, the contents of this manuscript after minor revisions meet the requirements of scientific papers.
Drafting of this paper in many cases are not clear, rather contradictory. For example:
"As the world's top carbon-emitting country in 2021, China, which is with total primary energy consumption reaching 5.24 billion tons of standard coal and CO2 emissions as high as 1.147 Gt, much higher than the CO2 emissions of the world's second-largest emitter, the United States (5.01 Gt)1, is under tremendous pressure to reduce emissions."
The marking of references should also be merged.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we are grateful for the suggestion comments, which greatly helped us to improve the manuscript. To provide more detail about the revisions we have made, we have uploaded documents named Manuscript_A_Revision, which is with revision detail. And in the Manuscript_A_Revision document, the blue marks are our own revisions, and the red marks are revisions made with the help of the English Editing Agency, from who we sought help to reduce errors. Next, we will respond point by point to the revisions we have made.
Point 1: Drafting of this paper in many cases are not clear, rather contradictory.
Response 1: We are sorry for the mistake.We have made adjustments to the introduction section to make the drafting clear.
Point 2: The marking of references should also be merged.
Response 2:We have addressed the marking of references throughout the text.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Author/s,
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your paper. The paper “The Impact of Digitalization on Carbon emission intensity— Fiscal Decentralization as Moderating Effect” is interesting for journal readers. But following changes should be done before the consideration to improve the quality of the paper:
Abstract: I suggest authors to rewrite the abstract to make it more constructive. Abstract should have at least one sentence per each: context and background, motivation, hypothesis, methods, results, conclusions. Add some numbers from your findings
Title: make the title more sharp
· 1. The introduction part of the study needs improvement and story flow and the authors need to give proper contributions to their study. I noticed that the novelty of this paper is not described in detail. This should be put in the introduction section properly. There is a need to do a more rigorous and systematic literature review. See following one for the CO2 theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-04514-6 The authors should clearly mention the literature gap.
2) Need more disscussion for the findings. Discussion of the findings, which is conspicuously absent here, is meant to spark debate on policy. If the results don't offer anything new in terms of theory or policy, then a simple comparison with the literature won't prove their originality. It would be appropriate to indicate a powerful future research directions and limitations of this at the end of the conclusion section just before references.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you very much to point out the deficiencies in our manuscript. To provide more detail about the revisions we have made, we have uploaded documents named Manuscript_A_Revision, which is with revision detail. And in the Manuscript_A_Revision document, the blue marks are our own revisions, and the red marks are revisions made with the help of the English Editing Agency, from who we sought help to reduce errors. Next, we will respond point by point to the revisions we have made.
Point 1: Title: make the title more sharp
Response 1: We have changed the title to “Can the Digitalization Reduce Carbon emission intensity? — The Moderating Effects of the fiscal decentralization”in the line 2 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 2: The introduction part of the study needs improvement and story flow and the authors need to give proper contributions to their study. I noticed that the novelty of this paper is not described in detail. This should be put in the introduction section properly. There is a need to do a more rigorous and systematic literature review. See following one for the CO2 theory https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-04514-6 The authors should clearly mention the literature gap.
Response 2:Thank you for your instructive suggestions.We summarize the novelty of our study by rethinking the contributions of the existing literature in depth, as detailed in lines 50 to 110 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 3:Need more disscussion for the findings. Discussion of the findings, which is conspicuously absent here, is meant to spark debate on policy.
Response 3:Thank you for your valuable advice.To be more clear and in accordance with the reviewer's concerns,we added about disscussion in lines 451 to 481 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 4:If the results don't offer anything new in terms of theory or policy, then a simple comparison with the literature won't prove their originality.
Response 4:We thank the reviewer for raising this comment.We have distilled the theoretical and practical implications of our study and listed them in lines 483 to 496 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 5:It would be appropriate to indicate a powerful future research directions and limitations of this at the end of the conclusion section just before references.
Response 5:According to the reviewer's comment,we present the Theoretical Contributions and Practical Insights in lines 483 to 496 of the document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Reviewer 3 Report
This study uses data from 30 Chinese provinces between 2011-2019 to investigate the effects of fiscal decentralization and digitalization on carbon emission intensity. According to the findings of the econometric analysis, both increasing the degree of fiscal decentralization and increasing the level of digitalization significantly reduce carbon emission intensity. Mechanism analysis shows that fiscal decentralization has a positive moderating effect on digitalization in reducing carbon emission intensity and the negative effect of digitalization on carbon emission intensity is particularly significant when fiscal decentralization exceeds the threshold value. According to the heterogeneity analysis, the carbon reduction effect of digitalization and the positive moderating effect of fiscal decentralization are stronger in the central and western regions of China, while the positive moderating effect of fiscal decentralization is not significant in the eastern region. Therefore, it is recommended to accelerate China's digital transformation and deepen the reform of the system of "devolving authority, improving regulation and optimizing service", which will effectively promote low-carbon development.
Compared with existing studies, the possible contributions of the study are as follows: First, to study the mechanism of the impact of digitalization on carbon emission intensity at the macro level and use Chinese provincial panel data to empirically test the impact of digitalization on carbon emission intensity, which helps to enrich and expand the research literature on the environmental protection impact of digitalization; Secondly, introducing fiscal decentralization as a moderating variable to further explore the synergistic effect of fiscal decentralization and digitalization, which provides new ideas for carbon emission reduction; thirdly, using a threshold regression model to test the conditions of the impact of digitalization on carbon emission intensity and reveal the threshold effect of fiscal decentralization on this effect.
The hypotheses tested in the study are as follows:
Hypothesis 1(H1): Digitalization is beneficial to reduce carbon emission intensity.
Hypothesis 2(H2): Fiscal decentralization has a positive moderating effect in digitally reducing carbon emissions intensity.
Hypothesis 3(H3): The degree of impact of digitalization on carbon intensity varies when fiscal decentralization is at different thresholds.
The study is generally well written and I found it successful, but the language of the study needs to be checked by a native speaker. There are also too many spelling mistakes. These need to be corrected. The choice of methods and variables used in the study is appropriate. The explanation of the models used in the study is sufficient. The results of the econometric analysis are discussed in detail and policy recommendations are presented to the reader. It is very useful to present robustness tests to the reader. I do not have any correction requests regarding the econometric analysis. However, the period interval chosen in the study should be specified. In the conclusion, it would be appropriate to mention the limitations of the study and recommendations for future research.
The language of the study needs to be checked by a native speaker.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you for reviewing our manuscript and for the constructive comments, which greatly helped us to improve the manuscript.To provide more detail about the revisions we have made, we have uploaded documents named Manuscript_A_Revision, which is with revision detail. And in the Manuscript_A_Revision document, the blue marks are our own revisions, and the red marks are revisions made with the help of the English Editing Agency, from who we sought help to reduce errors. Next, we will respond point by point to the revisions we have made.
Point 1:However, the period interval chosen in the study should be specified.
Response 1:We describe the basis for determining the data periods in lines 283 to 287 of the document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 2:In the conclusion, it would be appropriate to mention the limitations of the study and recommendations for future research.
Response 2:Thank you so much and I think these comments are very helpful in improving the quality and significance of the manuscript.We list the limitations and future research directions in lines 518 to 529 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper is well written with a clear contribution. There are important information missing in the paper about the statistical methods used. In fact, when performing panel data regressions, a number of diagnostic tests are typically required to ensure the robustness and validity of the regression model such as Hausmann specification, heteroskedasticity, cross sectional dependence...Absent the results of these tests, it is difficult to assess the validity of the results.
Moreover, the results of these tests may affect the calculation of the standard errors (e.g. Driscoll-Kraay standard errors).
Besides, in section 5.4, the methods used to determine the threshold value should be further explained.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you for reviewing our manuscript and for the constructive comments, which greatly helped us to improve the manuscript. To provide more detail on the revisions we have made, we have also uploaded document named Manuscript_A_Revision, which is with revision detail. And in the Manuscript_A_Revision document, the blue marks are our own revisions, and the red marks are revisions made with the help of the English Editing Agency, from who we sought help to reduce errors. Next, we will respond point by point to the revisions we have made.
Point 1:a number of diagnostic tests are typically required to ensure the robustness and validity of the regression model such as Hausmann specification, heteroskedasticity, cross sectional dependence...Absent the results of these tests, it is difficult to assess the validity of the results.
Response 1:We agree with the reviewer that further elaborating on this point and we list the these tests in table 3,which is next to the line 363 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Point 2:Besides, in section 5.4, the methods used to determine the threshold value should be further explained.
Response 2:We appreciate the reviewer’s insightful suggestion and we have introduced the methods in table 7,which is next to the line 439 of document Manuscript_A_Revision.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
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Reviewer 4 Report
The authors responded satisfactorily to the comments.
