Digital Finance, Household Green Consumption, and Crossing the Environmental Kuznets Curve Turning Point
WU Dingwen, LI Jianqiang, ZHANG Zhenkun, WANG Hongjian
Institute for Financial & Accounting Studies, Xiamen University; School of Accountancy, Zhejiang Gongshang University; School of Management, Jinan University; Intelligent Finance Innovation Lab/School of Finance, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics
Summary:
The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China explicitly emphasized the promotion of green consumption and the formation of green and low-carbon production and lifestyles. As an essential component of sustainable living, green consumption not only serves as a critical instrument for advancing ecological civilization and achieving China's carbon peaking and neutrality goals, but also represents an intrinsic requirement for optimizing demand-side structures and promoting high-quality economic development. In the new stage of development, stimulating household demand for green consumption and fostering sustainable consumption patterns have become important practical issues for balancing economic growth, environmental protection and facilitating the green transformation of development modes. Despite growing attention to and advocacy for green consumption, actual consumer participation remains relatively limited. Consequently, reducing the frictions associated with green consumption and unlocking its potential within China’s domestic economic circulation have become pressing policy challenges. Against this backdrop, the rapid development of digital finance provides a new opportunity to address the obstacles hindering green consumption. Through the deep integration of modern information technologies, digital finance has fundamentally reshaped the geographical boundaries of financial services. By leveraging big data analytics and intelligent risk management, it substantially lowers barriers to financial access and reduces information asymmetry, thereby enhancing households’ financial accessibility. The inclusive nature of digital finance effectively alleviates liquidity constraints faced by households in green consumption decisions, enabling consumers to optimize intertemporal resource allocation through convenient consumer credit instruments and transform latent green preferences into actual purchasing behavior. From a broader macroeconomic perspective, the expansion of green consumption driven by digital finance may also exert profound influences on the dynamic relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution. According to the traditional Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, economic growth and environmental pollution exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship. During the early stages of economic development, economic growth is often accompanied by environmental degradation. After a certain income threshold is reached, however, pollution levels begin to decline as income continues to rise. By lowering the entry barriers to green consumption and releasing latent green demand at earlier stages of development, digital finance may facilitate structural shifts in consumption patterns, reduce the dependence of economic growth on pollution-intensive activities, and bring forward the EKC turning point. This study first constructs a theoretical framework to illustrate how financial accessibility affects green consumption and subsequently influences the timing of the EKC turning point. Empirically, we employ regional new energy vehicle (NEV) consumption, measured using compulsory automobile insurance registration data, as a proxy for green consumption. The results indicate that digital finance significantly promotes regional green consumption and brings forward the EKC turning point. Further analyses reveal that this effect is more pronounced in regions with younger demographic structures. Moreover, the breadth of coverage, depth of usage, and degree of digital support services in digital finance all contribute positively to green consumption. Mechanism analyses suggest that digital finance stimulates green consumption by alleviating household liquidity constraints and releasing suppressed green demand. Through demand-pull effects, it further encourages firms to undertake green innovation, thereby bringing forward the EKC turning point. Economic consequence tests further demonstrate that digital finance, through promoting green consumption, significantly reduces regional SO2 and NOx emissions while simultaneously fostering economic growth, achieving a synergistic outcome between environmental protection and economic development. The policy implications of this study are threefold. First, policymakers should recognize the role of digital finance in promoting green consumption from the perspective of consumption upgrading and sustainable economic development. Efforts should be devoted to improving digital financial infrastructure and enhancing the efficiency of financial resource allocation toward green consumption sectors, thereby promoting a transition toward greener and lower-carbon consumption patterns. Second, governments should firmly embrace the principle that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” and fully leverage digital financial tools, including mobile payments, digital credit, and intelligent risk management, to expand green consumption scenarios such as new energy vehicles, green household appliances, and low-carbon transportation. Such measures can lower participation barriers and accelerate the release of green demand. Third, policymakers should account for regional heterogeneity and demographic differences when formulating digital finance development strategies, tailoring policies according to population age structures, digital infrastructure conditions, and stages of economic development. Compared with the existing literature, this study makes three primary contributions. First, from a macro-level perspective based on regional NEV sales, this study systematically investigates the mechanisms through which digital finance promotes household green consumption. Second, this study offers a novel explanation for the timing of the EKC turning point from the perspective of green consumption. Third, this study examines the macroeconomic consequences of green consumption transformation induced by digital finance from the dual perspectives of economic growth and environmental protection.
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