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Top1. Introduction
Balancing economic development and environmental protection is an important issue for sustainable economic growth (Nasir et al., 2019; Nguyen et al., 2020; Dong et al., 2020). Under the pressure of maintaining high economic growth in developing countries, economic policies are more likely to deviate from sustainable development, making environmental issues particularly prominent (Khan et al., 2020). The Chinese government has long attached great importance to environmental protection and green development. In September 2020, President Xi Jinping solemnly announced at the 75th United Nations General Assembly that China’s carbon dioxide emissions will peak by 2030 and it will strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Carbon peaking and carbon neutrality are not only the focus of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, but also a major long-term strategy for the next few decades. The connotation of high-quality economic development is essentially different from traditional development methods, and it essentially requires more comprehensive and innovative development. One of them is to achieve industrial-structure optimization, involving a new industrial revolution and carbon neutralization. In March 2022, Premier Li Keqiang clearly stated in the government work report that China will seek to continuously improve the ecological environment, promote green and low-carbon development, initiate an orderly process of carbon peaking and carbon neutralization, and implement a carbon peaking action plan. Implementing carbon neutralization and achieving green development have become a major strategic goals of China’s high-quality economic development.
Finance is an important core competitiveness of a country, and it should and must play an important role in the development process of achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality (Fan et al., 2021). Particularly in recent years, the vigorous development of digital finance has identified the optimal way of promoting the green transformation of firms. Starting with the launch of Alipay in 2004, digital finance, as a symbolic product of the combination of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, was the prelude to profound changes and innovative adjustments in the financial industry. Since 2014, digital finance has ushered in explosive growth, and its scale is rapidly doubling every year. Futhermore, many traditional institutions in China, including the five state-owned commercial banks, have fully embraced digital finance, marking the official entry of China’s financial industry into the era of digital finance. Through the combination of digital technology and financial products, digital finance overcomes the shortcomings of traditional financial services, lowers the threshold of financial services, promotes the transformation of traditional financial institutions, and improves the efficiency of financial markets, which is of great significance in promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. Existing research has found that for each unit increase in the digital financial inclusion index, the number of newly registered firms in the corresponding region increases by an average of 0.246% (Guo et al., 2016). Compared with traditional finance, digital finance has the characteristics of personalization, facilitation, and scenario-based, winning the favor of many consumers. Rapidly developing digital finance has become an important competitive force in financial markets, especially in the payments field, posing challenges to traditional finance. The emerging model of digital finance has also sparked academic discussions internationally. The Review of Financial Studies, an internationally renowned journal, launched a special issue on digital finance in 2019 (Fuster et al., 2019; Tang, 2019; Chen et al., 2019).