While digital finance and renewable energy consumption (REC) are two timely issues, it remains unclear whether the former affects the latter, especially in developing economies. This paper examines the impact of digital finance on China’s REC between 2011 and 2018 and explores the underlying mechanisms. Results show that digital finance, along with its coverage breadth and usage depth, significantly improved REC in China and that digital finance in the area of credit has had the most significant impact. Additionally, the results show that loan scale and income level are the main mediation variables, through which digital finance affects REC. The findings also suggest that economic growth and technological progress have increased REC in China, while carbon dioxide emissions have had no meaningful effect on this consumption. The results further indicate that policymakers must pay close attention to the role of digital finance when formulating policies on REC. To promote REC and environmental sustainability, developing economies like China should strengthen the breadth and depth of digital finance development, focus on the influence channels of digital finance, and promote economic growth and technological progress.

In response to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this paper proposes a new National Sustainable Development Index (NSDI), based on the modification of the Human Development Index (HDI). The purpose of our research was to improve the widely adopted HDI index by incorporating more comprehensive sustainability perspectives, so as to help policy makers to better analyze the sustainability-related issues facing their countries. After clarifying the concept of sustainable development, our research suggests that this term represents a coordination and configuration of economic, social, and environmental aspects of development, with its major focuses on balancing intra-generational welfare and maximizing the total welfare across generations. We then put forward a novel NSDI framework including 12 indicators from dimensions of economy, resource environment, and society, and calculated the weights of 12 indicators using the entropy method. To further validate our proposed index, this paper also measured the NSDIs of 163 countries in the world, and compared this index with the HDI and other well-known modification indices of HDI. The results showed that the NSDI is a reliable and relative complete index for sustainable development assessment, which makes up for the shortcomings of existing indices.

This study examines the relationships between ICT (information and communication technology), financial development, and renewable energy consumption using data from a panel of 35 countries during the 1996–2018 period. The results from the moderating effect and panel threshold models suggest the following outcomes. (i) Both ICT and financial development promote renewable energy consumption. (ii) ICT moderates the relationship between financial development and renewable energy consumption. (iii) The relationship between financial development and renewable energy consumption has a significant threshold effect when ICT is used as the threshold variable, such that increasing ICT enhances the promoting effect of financial development on renewable energy consumption. (iv) Economic development, trade openness, and urbanization positively affect renewable energy demand during the sample period, whereas environmental deterioration and technological progress do not promote renewable energy consumption. Therefore, when formulating policies for renewable energy development, governments should strengthen the integration of ICT with financial development.

Sustainable development has become a new goal of world development, and the measurement of sustainable development level is an important issue. This article introduces indicators of land ecology and allocation to establish a sustainable development index (SDI) including two levels of indicators. Based on the data research of SDI 2019 of 188 countries (regions), we conclude as follows: 1) the ranking of oil-producing countries fell sharply because of land ecological deterioration and single industrial structure; 2) the ranking of Southeast Asian and East African countries (regions) progressed because of ecological protection; 3) most developing countries (regions) have excellent performance on ecological protection, and the main reason for changing their ranking is the inequality of land allocation. Emerging countries, such as China and Russia, also have these problems in their rapid development. We suggest that countries (regions), especially countries (regions) that rely heavily on resource extraction, should pay attention to land ecological protection, and developed and emerging countries (regions) should optimize land allocation. The main contribution of this article is to provide a new solution and ideas for the measurement of sustainable development by improving the indicator system.