Environmental financing: does digital economy matter?

Abstract

Sustainable development and ecological restoration are a common goal pursued by countries around the world to mitigate the collision between economic growth and the environment. Digital economy has been rather instrumental in settling this type of conflict. The study is intended to identify the relationship between digital financing and environmental financing by assessing the specificities of their temporal and industry-specific dynamics, as well as to determine the side effects that the digital economy has in terms of current environmental investments and costs. The special attention is paid to the effect of the digital economy on both total environmental financing and its components, namely, environmental investment and current environmental protection costs. The authors come up with two indicators to evaluate the impact of the digital economy, these are digital financing (direct impact) and digital capital (indirect impact). To calculate these indicators, the authors’ own method is developed. The impact of the digital economy on environmental financing was tested using the least squares method with clustering of annual standard deviation and individual fixed effects. The research data were retrieved from the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) of the Russian Federation for 2012–2022. Our findings show that digital financing exerts a significant positive effect on environmental financing, which indicates that two dynamic processes in the economy—digital transformation and introduction of advanced environmental digital technologies—are synchronized. The authors prove that digital investments stimulate a comparable increase in environmental investment due to the effects created by digital technologies penetrating into environmental protection technologies. We demonstrate that the level of digitalization of the population, companies and the state assessed through the digital capital index has a positive effect on environmental financing. The results of the study are of use in the sphere of public policy.