The impact of tourism digital transformation on carbon emission efficiency: Quasi-experimental evidence from national smart tourism pilot.

The continuous advancement of digital technology offers sophisticated tools and platforms for digital tourism, while the promotion of digital tourism simultaneously provides new opportunities for the low-carbon economy. This paper takes the smart tourism city policy as a quasi-natural experiment in China. Utilizing the panel dataset of cities spanning from 2006 to 2022, a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach is employed to explore the impact of tourism digital transformation on carbon emission efficiency from the perspective of low-carbon development. Results indicate that the tourism digital transformation substantially augments carbon emission efficiency of cities when contrasted with their counterparts in non-pilot cities. In addition, the impact of the digital tourism manifests significant heterogeneity, especially in cities distinguished by larger scales and lower levels of tourism resource endowment. Moreover, the adoption of digital tourism initiatives enhances carbon emission efficiency via green technological innovation, the advancement of informatization level, and the proliferation of green transportation systems. The findings enhance our comprehension of the influence of digitalization policies on China's trajectory towards low-carbon development.