Exploring the Impact of Digital Infrastructure on Environmental Regulatory Efficiency: A Process Decomposition Perspective

Low efficiency of environmental regulation (ERE) has become a major obstacle to effective environmental governance in developing countries. There is an urgent need to identify the key weak links of low ERE and explore external driving factors to improve ERE. Based on the operational mechanism of government environmental regulation, the regulatory process is divided into a supervision stage and a governance stage, and the intrinsic mechanism through which digital infrastructure affects ERE is theoretically explored. Subsequently, this paper uses a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the ERE in China from 2007 to 2022. On this basis, this study uses econometric models to test the theoretical mechanism. The findings are as follows: Firstly, although ERE has shown an upward trend over time, there is significant heterogeneity across regions. The increasing trend in ERE is largely attributed to improvements in governance efficiency (GE). Secondly, digital infrastructure is significantly and positively related to ERE. The relationship is mainly reflected in the governance efficiency stage. Thirdly, heterogeneity analysis shows that the positive correlation between digital infrastructure and ERE and GE is more prominent in the central–western regions and resource-based regions. The positive correlation between digital infrastructure and supervision efficiency (SE) is stronger in regions with stronger promotion incentives. In regions with close external environmental attention, the positive correlation between digital infrastructure and GE is more pronounced. However, we found no evidence that environmental assessment pressure significantly affected this relationship.