Digital Economy Development and Urban Green Innovation CA-Pability: Based on Panel Data of 274 Prefecture-Level Cities in China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript explores the connection between digital economy (DE) and green innovation (GI), which is quite meaningful, especially in many recently developed areas of China, which focus on developing its green financial sectors and adding in greenery elements into urban design etc. However, there are several weaknesses found in the current manuscript, which worth further work / citation of other relevant sources.
Further, the sentence structure may need to be improved, and English editing is strongly encouraged before the re-submission of current manuscript. The key problems are stated as follows too:
(1) Title: "panel data" is unclear - need to be more specific. This applies to Line 9 in Abstract as well.
(2) Lines 13-14: what do you mean "controlling for urban heterogeneity"?
(3) Abstract in overall - should also focus on discussing spatial heterogeneity of these quantities among different regions of China. The current abstract does not contain any discussion on this key items
(4) Lines 40-41: "Therefore, research related to GI has become the academic circle’s focus." - need to cite relevant references here.
(5) Line 52: "What kind of characteristics will appear in the space" - what do you mean by this statement, the motivation is unclear?
(6) Lines 103-105: "Green process innovation has a positive impact and is reinforced by horizontal information sharing and technology modularization, which is weakened by vertical bottom-up learning" - need to give some examples and explain in more details.
(7) Line 116: Regarding H1, given the complexity and interactivity of different intrinsic factors, how could this "hypothesis" or "assumption" be hold?
(8) Lines 124-125: need to be more specific how DE could affect haze pollution trends
(9) Lines 142-144: Here, the authors should also consider smart cities scorings from Eden Strategy Institute et al. (2018), and other socioeconomic attributes (i.e., social, political and humane) as stated in https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221067072100158X?via%3Dihub
(10) Line 150: Regarding H2, how do you define "intermediary role"? it would be better if you could list out the flow-chart of causes and results etc.
(11) Line 158: Equation (1) - how could you ensure these variables are sufficient for representing the complete profile and picture of GP?
(12) Lines 167-171: Again, the authors should explain the mediation effect model (by adding a table) in a clearer manner.
(13) Lines 200-203: Not quite understand and cannot follow why natural logarithm should be used? The number of green patent applications in each city should not be that large.
(14) Line 205: "Principal Component Analysis" - how? how is the analysis conducted?
(15) Lines 218-223: How can you make this a control variable? If FDI is a control variable, it means that you are considering a close spatial domain, but without any interaction with external parties, which is unreasonable.
(16) Table 2: The table is not that useful, the authors should describe the statistical distribution of datasets, rather than providing these statistical figures
(17) Lines 283-296: It would be better if there are some numerical figures provided here, so that the spatial variability can be reviewed more clearly.
(18) Tables 4 onwards: For regression, please supplement the statistical correlations, bias, RMSE etc. as well. Cannot conclude much from Table 4. Similar for Tables 5, 6 and 7. The authors should also briefly describe and analyze some of these numerical results within the main text as well.
(19) Line 368: "positive and significant" - How significant is it? Having some statistical figures will be better.
(20) Lines 481-491: The authors mentioned that data can hopefully be improved in future, and the number of samples can also be expanded. However, the willingness to share data among each other is also crucial. Here, the authors have missed a very important idea - data openness. Development of DE and GI is a kind of a smart city development, especially its innovative principles and cutting-edge scientific technology. Thus, it is suggested that the authors should discuss more on smart city development and data openness, for conducting spatial assessments (similar to this manuscript) for a longer time period. The authors should cite the important ideas implicated from the following three papers:
(i) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221067072100158X?via%3Dihub
(ii) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275120312087?via%3Dihub
(iii) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266618882100006X
(20) Lines 519-527: The authors should also associate this manuscript with the discrepancy of economic standard or income level among different prefectures. Higher economic standard must help with promoting DE and GI, and more human resources can also be inputted into relevant green development + research and development (R&D). However, the reviewer is not sure whether any previous research projects have investigated the issue. If so, it will be good for the authors to cite 1-2 papers as well.
Some obvious English errors are stated as follows. Apart from that, a proper round of English editing is needed.
(1) Line 35 - "technological" innovation
(2) Line 42 - "During" the past few years
(3) Line 58 and 59 - impact "of" respectively
(4) Lines 80-84: Please use "Section 2, Section 3, Section 4" and so on...
(5) Lines 98-103: Serious grammatical mistakes are found, please re-write these lines
(6) Line 111 - "considered",..."applied" (use past tense)
(7) Lines 145-148: Serious grammatical mistakes are found, please re-write these lines
(8) Lines 172-177: The choice of word "verified" may not be appropriate - verified means confirmed scientifically, it should be modelled ? or estimated?
(9) Line 205: "Economy" should be capitalized
(10) Line 231: "importance of the attachment of a region to GI"
(11) Line 232: "It is expressed by the proportion of local governmental expenditure on technology."
(12) Line 261: "Figures 1(a) and 1(b),"
(13) Line 265: "the increment is small"
(14) Line 269: "As shown in the figure, in the north"
In overall, the manuscript has some good implications, but the structure, together with the association with data openness, smart city development, economic perspectives / status of a prefecture / city should also be discussed in more details. Further, the presentation of statistical results should be in a more reader-friendly manner, i.e., more numerical or statistical parameters should be provided and discussed within different parts of the main text, especially when "regression" approaches are involved in the data analysis processes.
The manuscript will further be considered after the authors have properly addressed all aforementioned issues, and add in all relevant sources accordingly.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I congratulate the author(s) for the work done. It seems to me a relevant, current and necessary work. I believe, without a doubt, that it should be published and that it is relevant for the international scientific community. However, for its better visibility and readability, I make some minimal constructive recommendations, in the best academic spirit:
- It would be good to expand the keywords, if possible according to the journal's rules, in addition to the existing ones, so that the article is easily traceable in databases.
- The first time that necessary acronyms appear, it would be good for the words that make up these acronyms to be capitalised (in the abstract and in the article).
- A harmonious distribution of paragraphs should be sought, so that they all have a similar length, 6-7 lines, with neither very long paragraphs nor very short ones. This will make the text more readable and understandable, even if it is already well written, as there are very long paragraphs, unbalanced against others of 3 or 4 lines.
- Check typos, double blanks between words or brackets attached to words, without blank spaces.
- Check the font and the format of the tables because they are not very legible (for example, table 1).
- The methodology is perfectly explained - congratulations!
- In order to make the text more readable and present in other papers, it would be highly recommended to visually summarise the conclusions in one or two images, some kind of diagram.
- A section on limitations and prospects is missing, in line with what is missing in the Introduction: why there is a problem (new, current, original) to investigate, why this methodology has been chosen and why there are conclusions that generate an original advance in knowledge.
- Revise reference 4, which is not dated.
- Review reference 17, which is not dated.
- Revise reference 27, which is in capital letters.
- Revise reference 36, which is not dated.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The article is interesting and well written. It contains valuable conclusions for theory and practice. In my opinion it could be published in present form.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The revised version of the manuscript looks much better, just several minor problems to do further revision, as follows:
(1) Lines 193-199: if the coefficients are " not significant" - how do you judge whether the coefficients are significant? Any statistical ideas that have been adopted here, please include the method in main text in general.
(2) About Point 14: I think the authors can include some of these details (may not all), just ideas in the main text, like how PCA was adopted etc.
(3) About Point 15: I understand the authors' response, however it would be better if the limitations of this study could be explicitly spelled out in the manuscript, then readers know how FDI would affect / alter the entire results of this study.
(4) Line 564: What actually can be done to boost up the availability of data? Can connect with some social science discussion papers?
(5) Lines 569-571: "Third, when studying the impact mechanism of the DE on GI, only the industrial structure is pointed out, and the role of other factors on the relationship between the two can be studied in the future" - what kinds of factors? Could the authors list out 1-2 here?
(6) Lines 610-611: "Different cities have different levels of economic development, which will also have a certain impact on the development of DE and GI ability" - has this statement been justified or the trend is observed in previous studies? Please explain more.
The English this time looks much better than the previous version.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
There is huge improvement in the quality of this manuscript. The authors can have another round of English editing to ensure there is no grammatical mistake.
Also, the motivation and starting point of this study can be stated more clearly in Introduction.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
