A Study of the Impact of the Digital Economy on the Efficiency of Urban Green Economy—Based on the Yangtze River Delta City Cluster

This paper adopts the non-expected output-super-efficiency SBM (Slacks-Based Model) model and principal component analysis to calculate the green economy efficiency and the digital economy level of 27 prefecture-level cities in China’s Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration between 2011 and 2019, respectively, and examines the impact of the digital economy on the green economy efficiency by using benchmark regression and mechanism analysis. The findings show that, first, the digital economy has a significant contribution to the green economic efficiency of cities, and this conclusion still holds after robustness tests such as replacing explanatory and interpreted variables and introducing province-fixed effects. Second, through the mechanism test, it is found that the digital economy can indirectly promote urban green economic efficiency through the positive mechanism effect of promoting industrial structure upgrading.