The impact of the digital economy on occupational health: A quasi-experiment based on “Broadband China” pilot

Abstract

The recent years' booming digital economy can not only benefit businesses, but also be an important way to improve people's wellbeing. This paper aimed to identify the relationship between the digital economy based on the “Broadband China” pilot policy and occupational health by applying DID method. The empirical results highlight that occupational health in the pilot cities of “Broadband China” are significantly improved compared with those in non-pilot cities, indicating that the digital economy can significantly improve occupational health. However, this effect varies across regions with different levels of economic development. Compared with developed areas, the digital economy has a more obvious effect on the improvement of occupational health in less developed areas, which indicates that this effect conforms to the law of diminishing marginal effect. Therefore, the digital economy should be continuously promoted to improve occupational health. Governments at all levels should strengthen the network infrastructure to provide a good basic environment for the development of the digital economy. At the same time, governments should introduce more detailed digital economy goals and programs according to the actual situation of their jurisdictions to fully release the economic and social benefits of the digital economy.

New evidence on the real role of digital economy in influencing public health efficiency

“…As for the direct application of digital technology, Bao et al 31 believed that digital media played an important role in using visual data to disseminate information, using mobile health to coordinate medical resources, using social media to promote public health campaigns, and using digital tools to assist population management and disease tracking. In terms of the theory of digital economy and individual health, Wang and Wang 32 used DID method to identify the relationship between digital economy based on the pilot policy of “Broadband China” and occupational health, and found that although digital economy can significantly improve occupational health, compared with developed areas, The impact of digital economy on the improvement of occupational health in less developed areas is more obvious. Certainly, some scholars have found that digital media may affect certain public governance in aspects such as false information, lack of guidance and information leakage 31 .…”

A Win–Win Opportunity: The Industrial Pollution Reduction Effect of Digital Economy Development—A Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the “Broadband China” Strategy

“…This further excludes the problem of reverse causality of the regression and also provides a reliable empirical research setting for this paper. In view of this, we refer to Zhao et al (2020) and Fang and Tian (2021), to take the implementation of the "Broadband China" strategy as a quasi-natural experiment [34,35], and use a time-varying difference in difference model (Time-Varying DID) to identify the causal relationship between digital economy development and industrial pollution emissions. Our baseline regression model is designed as shown in Equation ( 1):…”