Discovery of innovation effect and spillover effect : evidence from intelligent manufacturing promoting low-carbon development

As global warming increases, the need for the coordinated development of the economy and the environment is becoming increasingly apparent, urgently requiring a low-carbon transition. A conceptual framework was constructed originally from the perspective of innovation and the spillover effect, exploring the influencing pathways of intelligent manufacturing on the low-carbon transition. The dynamic linkages among intelligent manufacturing, carbon efficiency, and industrial structure upgrading were demonstrated by the PVAR model, based on a panel data set of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2020. The empirical result shows that intelligent manufacturing promotes low-carbon transition mainly through industrial structure upgrading, and the spillover effect plays a more significant and widespread role in the low-carbon transition. Furthermore, the level of industrial structure upgrading was determined as the variable that explains the change in carbon efficiency the most according to the variance decomposition. Additionally, it is inefficient for intelligent manufacturing to popularize in traditional industries, which implies that it should be taken as a step-by-step approach to achieve a low-carbon transition for traditional industries. Moreover, upgrading the industry structure is an important step with far more priority in a low-carbon transition.