Digital Economy and Land-Use Carbon Emission Efficiency Under a Net Carbon-Balance Framework: Temporal Dynamics and Spatial Associations in the Yangtze River Delta, China

The digital economy has become an important force driving regional transformation and green development, yet existing evidence on its net carbon-balance effects on land-use carbon emission efficiency (LUCEE) remains limited. Using panel data for 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta from 2002 to 2022, this study first calculates city-level net carbon-emission pressure by jointly considering anthropogenic carbon emissions and land-based carbon sequestration, and then evaluates LUCEE using a super-efficiency SBM model with undesirable outputs, in which urban construction land is incorporated as an independent input rather than used as a common scaling denominator. A two-way fixed-effects model, mediation model, geographical detector, and spatial econometric model are further employed to examine the temporal dynamics, transmission mechanisms, spatial heterogeneity, and spatial associations of the digital economy. This study finds that, in the short term, digital-economy development is significantly negatively associated with LUCEE, while this negative association gradually weakens over time, with no clear evidence of a positive reversal within the observed lag structure. Industrial tertiarisation shows partial and limited evidence as a transmission channel, although it does not automatically translate into greener land-use performance. The digital economy also helps explain LUCEE heterogeneity and shows enhanced explanatory power when combined with government intervention, land-use intensity, industrial tertiarisation, and economic development. Moreover, the spatial analysis provides supplementary evidence of a negative association between digital-economy development in spatially connected cities and local LUCEE, although this finding should be interpreted cautiously given the limited evidence of endogenous spatial dependence. These findings deepen the understanding of the low-carbon consequences of digitalisation and provide policy implications for green digital development, industrial transformation, and regionally coordinated carbon mitigation.