Can the Development of the Digital Economy Reduce Urban Carbon Emissions? Case Study of Guangdong Province

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The purpose of the authors is to take the panel data of 21 cities in Guangdong Province from 2011 to 2019 to explore the impact of the development of the digital economy on urban carbon emissions and Its Spatial Heterogeneity. Research questions are clearly formulated, so it is easy to understand the aim of this research. The manuscript is full of valuable Figures and Tables which clearly demonstrate the strength of the paper. In general, the topic of this manuscript is creative, the paper has clear arranged structure and the English is easy to be understood. The paper can be accepted after some modifications.

1. I suggest that some references should be added to the paper, the current literature review is not enough. For example, “Du et al. (2022). Blue sky defense in low-carbon pilot cities: A spatial spillover perspective of carbon emission efficiency”; “Jing et al. (2023). Does the digital economy promote the reduction of urban carbon emission intensity?”.

2. The authors should summarize the main contributions of this paper. The significance of this paper is not expounded sufficiently. The authors need to highlight this paper’s innovative contributions. The objective of the paper presented need more clarifications to suit reader to understand the main idea of the paper.

3. The authors should include details about future work in the conclusion, which would be valuable. The limitations of the study should also be specified in detail.

4. The discussion of results is too brief (Figure 6). In particular, the meaning of policies should be analyzed in depth.

5. There are still some basic grammatical errors in the article that need to be corrected.

Author Response

We are very grateful for having a chance to improve our manuscript “Can the development of the digital economy reduce urban carbon emissions? Evidence from 21 cities in Guangdong Province” (Land-2288423). We also appreciate the editors and reviewers who reviewed our research and paid so much patience to our manuscript; the detailed comments and suggestions are very significant and helpful for the authors to improve the research.

 

Based on the comments and suggestions, we have made careful modifications to the manuscript. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewers’ comments are appended below. The detailed information can also be seen in our revised manuscript. Revised portions are marked in red color in the revised paper.

 

Although the authors have carefully improved the paper in accordance with the comments and suggestions, there may still exist some problems and errors in our revised manuscript. We invite the editors and referees to propose more criticisms and suggestions. We also hope the new manuscript will meet Land’s standard with approval.

 

Best regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is very easy to read. I have only a few comments. Maybe authors can think to change in title "Evidence from 21 cities in Guangdong Province" to "case study of Guangdong Province"  - something to think about. I think the Evidence is a "strong" word

Line 209 maybe to add in figure 2 title "cities" also in figure 5 it's much easier to understand (Line 301)

Line 307 change "graph" to "map" 

Author Response

We are very grateful for having a chance to improve our manuscript “Can the development of the digital economy reduce urban carbon emissions? Evidence from 21 cities in Guangdong Province” (Land-2288423). We also appreciate the editors and reviewers who reviewed our research and paid so much patience to our manuscript; the detailed comments and suggestions are very significant and helpful for the authors to improve the research.

 

Based on the comments and suggestions, we have made careful modifications to the manuscript. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewers’ comments are appended below. The detailed information can also be seen in our revised manuscript. Revised portions are marked in red color in the revised paper.

 

Although the authors have carefully improved the paper in accordance with the comments and suggestions, there may still exist some problems and errors in our revised manuscript. We invite the editors and referees to propose more criticisms and suggestions. We also hope the new manuscript will meet Land’s standard with approval.

 

Best regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx