The Digital Impact on Environmental Performance: Evidence from Chinese Publishing

Digital technology has a significant impact on most industries in the 21st century. The publishing industry is also facing digital transformation, and the traditional paper business is considered polluted and wasteful as it generates carbon emissions. To compare the influence of digital paperless business with the traditional one on environmental performance in publishing, this paper adopts a refined weak disposability model initially introduced by Kuosmanen (2005). The main novelty of the paper is to include two types of desirable outputs in production technology: one is linked to generating undesirable outputs while another is not. Two additional economic assumptions can be imposed on environmental production technology, namely, weak disposability and null-jointness, respectively. We apply the refined model to assess the economic and environmental performance of the publishing industry in China. The paper business generates carbon emissions while the digital outputs (paperless business) may not produce pollution. The empirical results indicate that a vast potential improvement is detected for the digital outputs while limited progress is allowed for traditional outputs. Furthermore, we use the entropy method to obtain a comprehensive digital technology indicator and further explore its influence on performance in the publishing industry.