Beyond Digital Infrastructure: Telecommunications Service-Market Development and Energy Carbon Intensity in Chinese Cities

As digitalisation reshapes economic coordination and governance, the role of telecommunications services extends beyond network construction and ICT access. However, the environmental relevance of the activity of the telecommunications service market is not understood sufficiently. Drawing on panel data for 269 cities at the Chinese prefecture level from 2006 to 2022, this study estimates fixed-effect models and conducts a series of robustness tests to alleviate potential endogeneity and specification concerns. The results show that telecommunications service-market development (TMD) is significantly negatively associated with urban energy carbon intensity. Specifically, the baseline estimate indicates that a one-unit increase in logged TMD is associated with approximately a 0.835-unit reduction in carbon intensity. However, it is positively associated with per-capita CO2 emissions, while its association with total CO2 emissions is statistically insignificant. This relationship is robust to alternative measurements, model specifications, and endogeneity treatment. Moreover, both carbon intensity and TMD exhibit significant spatial dependence, and the main Spatial Durbin Model yields direct and indirect effects of −0.483 and −8.842, respectively, indicating negative spatial spillovers across cities. The moderation results further show that higher levels of digital economy development and fiscal decentralization significantly attenuate the negative association between TMD and energy carbon intensity in the interaction models. These results extend research on ICT development, digital infrastructure, digital economy, and low-carbon development by shifting attention from telecommunications infrastructure to TMD as a market-based information-service condition.