Green technology innovation is crucial for achieving sustainable development. This paper establishes fixed effect and mediation effect models to study how digital finance influences corporate green technology innovation and the moderating role of financial constraints using the data of Chinese A-share public businesses from 2011 to 2020. The results show that, first, green technology innovation is facilitated by digital finance, and both the coverage breadth and use depth play important roles. Second, digital finance encourages business innovation in green technology by alleviating financial constraints. Third, in state-owned businesses and businesses located in the eastern regions, digital finance has a more visible driving impact on green technology innovation. The aforementioned findings offer insightful research to encourage the balanced growth of digital finance and better enable corporate green technology innovation.

The emitted levels of CO₂ continue to be a striking topic. These emissions have been growing over the years, thus, making them a predicament to be reckoned with. Eradicating such a predicament has not been easy because finding an optimal determinant has not been achieved by scholars; however, foreign direct investment inflows are known to play a role in such varying instances. Therefore, to analyze the impact that such inflows have on CO₂ emissions, this study employs data from 41 African countries from 2005 to 2019 and aims to assess how foreign direct investment and other variables influence CO₂ emitted levels. Moreover, this study tests the validity of the pollution haven and halo hypotheses on the employed African countries as its two main objectives. After applying the pooled least squares, fixed and random effects models, and the generalized method of moments, the findings revealed that per the adopted African countries, the pollution haven and halo hypotheses do not hold; however, foreign direct investment inflows contribute to the rising and falling levels of CO₂ emissions. In addition, the financial structure and per capita GDP increase the African countries’ CO₂ emitted levels, while trade openness causes a reduction. Based on the aforementioned findings, this study recommends that the government, policy-makers, industries, and interested personnel of this study’s employed countries should: apply and execute policies, laws, and regulations that will deter or punish polluting foreign investment and encourage clean ones; since green finance is making waves but is not well established in most African countries, green financing systems should be initiated and implemented; establish preferential trading policies that will highlight an addition of value via clean technology; and practice carbon capture, usage, and storage.

A large number of foreign direct investment inflows not only promote China’s economic development but also bring environmental pollution problems., Improving carbon emission efficiency and cutting carbon emissions while maintaining China’s attractiveness to foreign investment has become a topic of concern in China. Firstly, this paper measures the carbon emission efficiency of different provinces in China with the super efficiency DEA model and studies the temporal and spatial characteristics of carbon emission efficiency. Secondly, the impact of FDI on carbon emission efficiency is investigated. FDI negatively affects carbon emissions but positively affects carbon emission efficiency. In addition, the interaction term of FDI and each channel negatively affects carbon emission efficiency, indicating that each channel has a negative impact on the relationship between FDI and carbon emission efficiency. Thirdly, the results of the sub-sample analysis show that the impact of FDI on carbon emission efficiency has the feature of regional heterogeneity. Based on the results, policy implications regarding the improvement of carbon emission efficiency are proposed.

The development of China’s manufacturing industry is constrained by factors such as energy and resources, and low-carbon development is arduous. Digitalization is an important method to transform and upgrade traditional industries. Based on the panel data of 13 manufacturing industries in China from 2007 to 2019, a regression model and a threshold model were used to empirically test the impact of digitalization and electricity consumption on carbon emissions. The research results were as follows: (1) The digitalization level of China’s manufacturing industry was steadily increasing; (2) The proportion of electricity consumption in China’s manufacturing industries in the total electricity consumption hardly changed from 2007 to 2019, basically maintaining at about 6.8%. The total power consumption increased by about 2.1 times. (3) From 2007 to 2019, the total carbon emissions of China’s manufacturing industry increased, but the carbon emissions of some manufacturing industries decreased. (4) There was an inverted U-shaped relationship between digitalization and carbon emissions, the higher the level of digitalization input, the greater the carbon emissions of the manufacturing industry. However, when digitalization develops to a certain extent, it will also suppress carbon emissions to a certain extent. (5) There was a significant positive correlation between electricity consumption and carbon emissions in the manufacturing industry. (6) There were double energy thresholds for the impact of labor-intensive and technology-intensive manufacturing digitalization on carbon emissions, but only a single economic threshold and scale threshold. There was a single scale threshold for capital-intensive manufacturing, and the value was −0.5352. This research provides possible countermeasures and policy recommendations for digitalization to empower the low-carbon development of China’s manufacturing industry.

With the data of 41 cities, including urban and rural areas in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region from 2007 to 2019, this paper mainly uses the spatial econometric method to analyze the impact of forest resource abundance in the YRD region on economic development under the background of carbon neutrality. Direct effects, indirect effects, and total effects are further decomposed. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) The abundance of forest resources in the YRD has a U-shaped non-linear effect on economic development, and the curse of forest resources will gradually form forest resource welfare with economic improvement. (2) The phenomenon of economic convergence exists in the YRD region. (3) The spatial effect of forest resource abundance on economic development is non-linear, and the increase in greenery and carbon reduction should be moderately reasonable. (4) The abundance of forest resources can also promote the development of green total factor productivity. The research in this paper complements the existing literature and provides a reference for policymakers.