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Accurately portraying the spatially linked network characteristics of digital infrastructure and exploring its energy-saving effects are highly valuable for enhancing the synergy in digital infrastructure development and expanding its network spillover effects on energy conservation. This paper uses panel data at the city level in China and employs a modified gravity model to calculate the centrality of digital infrastructure spatial correlation network nodes. Based on this, an econometric model is constructed, incorporating variables such as digital infrastructure spatial correlation network node centrality and urban green total factor energy efficiency. The model is used to analyze the effects and transmission paths of digital infrastructure network node centrality on urban green total factor energy efficiency. The analysis yields the following conclusions: (1) Digital infrastructure spatial correlation network node centrality significantly improves urban green total factor energy efficiency, with considerable variability due to city geographic location, city scale, and city attributes. (2) Nonlinear testing results indicate that as digital infrastructure construction advances, its impact on urban green total factor energy efficiency shifts from inhibitory to promotional. (3) The impact mechanism shows that digital infrastructure node centrality enhances urban green total factor energy efficiency through green technology innovation. Additionally, it promotes advanced industrial structures and reduces capital mismatch, further influencing energy efficiency. (4) Digital infrastructure node centrality not only boosts urban green total factor energy efficiency but also facilitates regional convergence, increasing the convergence rate from 0.094 to 0.170%. The findings of the research offer policy guidance for the government on advancing digital transformation initiatives and enhancing energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of digital infrastructure on carbon emissions utilizing urban panel data spanning from 2007 to 2022 in China. The research findings reveal that digital infrastructure has mitigated carbon emissions in cities, with a more pronounced effect observed in eastern and northern regions. Notably, large cities and non-resource-based cities have reaped greater environmental benefits from digital infrastructure. Key mechanisms driving this reduction include lowering energy consumption, fostering green technological innovations, and enhancing factor allocation efficiency. Additionally, digital infrastructure construction exhibits a spatial spillover effect, where local digital infrastructure inhibits carbon emissions in neighboring cities. These discoveries offer insightful references for policymakers in planning the application of digital infrastructure to facilitate carbon reduction efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the cornerstone of the digital economy, the construction of digital infrastructure plays a crucial role in promoting China's high-quality economic growth.. Against the backdrop of the "dual-carbon" goals, the development of digital infrastructure will provide new momentum for carbon emissions reduction in urban areas. This study utilizes unbalanced panel data from 277 prefecture-level cities in China between 2008 and 2019, treating the smart city construction as a quasi-natural experiment, to systematically evaluate the impact of the pilot construction of smart city on urban carbon emissions intensity. The research findings reveal that the construction of the smart city has significantly contributed to the reduction of urban carbon emissions intensity, indicating that digital infrastructure contributes to urban carbon emission reduction. The reduction of carbon emissions resulting from smart city construction is particularly significant in the East and Central regions., as well as regions with high financial development levels, regions with high human capital levels and non resource-based cities. The construction of the smart city primarily achieves the reduction of urban carbon emissions intensity through two main pathways: improving the penetration rate of digital infrastructure and enhancing technological innovation capability. Therefore, this study recommends that local governments strengthen the integration and penetration of digital infrastructure with traditional industries, foster urban innovation vitality, and accelerate the transformation towards green and low-carbon cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge is regarded as a key driver of entrepreneurial activity and economic performance. Nevertheless, empirical evidence suggests that the extent to which knowledge spills over and translates into entrepreneurial activity differs tremendously across different regions. These inconsistent results expose the knowledge spillover mechanism as a concept that is not well understood. This paper is one of the few studies to propose an explanation for the seemingly inconclusive results that we find in the literature by considering the role of infrastructure in knowledge spillovers. Using a dataset of 67 countries, we examine the impact of different types of physical and digital infrastructure on the knowledge spillover mechanism. Our empirical results reveal that the extent to which knowledge translates into entrepreneurial activity largely depends upon the development of specific types of digital and physical infrastructure. This paper provides valuable insights into the knowledge spillover mechanism by identifying certain factors that influence the extent to which knowledge translates into entrepreneurial activity. Furthermore, it has important policy implications for countries to promote entrepreneurial activity and economic performance by developing certain types of physical and digital infrastructure. Plain English Summary: This study shows that the physical and the digital infrastructure of a country play an important role in knowledge spillover entrepreneurship. We identify certain types of infrastructure that have a pronounced impact on knowledge spillover entrepreneurship. Specifically, we identify the quality of the railroad infrastructure, the quality of electricity supply, and access to fixed broadband internet to be conducive to entrepreneurial activity. Understanding which factors encourage knowledge spillover entrepreneurship is important because knowledge spillover entrepreneurship contributes to the economic performance of a country. Our findings also provide policymakers with suggestions on how to increase the level of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship within their country by highlighting the importance of specific types of physical and digital infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving carbon productivity is of great significance to China's "30 · 60" carbon target, while the development of the digital economy is a driving force for green transformation. However, few studies discuss the relationship between the digital economy and carbon productivity. We investigate the influence of digital economic development on carbon productivity using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2020. Spatial econometric and moderating effects are considered. The results show that (i) digital economy has a positive direct and negative spatial spillover effect on carbon productivity, and this conclusion is still valid after the robustness test and endogeneity test; (ii) digital infrastructure has a greater impact on carbon productivity than digital industrialization and industrial digitalization; (iii) the mechanism analysis shows that environmental regulation negatively moderates the relationship between the digital economy and carbon productivity; (iv) heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect of the digital economy on carbon productivity is more obvious in the central region compared to the western region, while it is not significant in the eastern region. Overall, this paper not only provides a new analytical perspective for understanding the improvement of carbon productivity in the digital economy but also provides policy inspiration for promoting carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital development provides a new impetus for the improvement of economic efficiency. Project Broadband China was a program implemented by the Chinese government that provided additional funding for a set of cities to build digital infrastructure. Based on the panel data of 283 cities in China from 2010 to 2018, we take the project as a quasi-nature experiment to examine whether and how digital infrastructure influences regional economic efficiency. Our results of multi-period difference-in-difference analyses suggest that cities that obtained the program support have higher total factor productivity, an implicit proxy for economic efficiency. We further find that this effect can be achieved through the upgrading of regional industrial structure (the transformation from manufacturing industry to tertiary industry). Heterogeneity analyses further suggest that the efficiency effect of Project Broadband China varies across different cities in terms of location, scale, administrative and urbanization levels. Our findings contribute to digitalization research and the literature on economic efficiency, as well as highlight the importance of digital infrastructure construction for improving economic efficiency. Our study also provides valuable practical implications for policymakers (i.e., expanding the scope of Project Broadband China) seeking to improve high-quality economic development through digital infrastructure construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article holds that governmental investments in quantum technologies speak to the imaginable futures of digital sovereignty and digital infrastructures, two major areas of change driven by related technologies like AI and Big Data, among other things, in international law today. Under intense development today for future interpolation into digital systems that they may alter, quantum technologies occupy a sort of liminal position, rooted in existing assemblages of computational technologies while pointing to new horizons for them. The possibilities they raise are neither certain nor determinate, but active investments in them (legal, political and material investments) offer perspective on digital technology-driven influences on an international legal imagination. In contributing to visions of the future that are guiding ambitions for digital sovereignty and digital infrastructures, quantum technologies condition digital technology-driven changes to international law and legal imagination in the present. Privileging observation and description, I adapt and utilize a diffractive method with the aim to discern what emerges out of the interference among the several related things assembled for this article, including material technologies and legal institutions. In conclusion, I observe ambivalent changes to an international legal imagination, changes which promise transformation but appear nonetheless to reproduce current distributions of power and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the epoch of the digital economy, technological innovation and energy conservation are significantly facilitated by digital infrastructure, leading to substantial improvements in green innovation efficiency at the provincial level. This study employed the feasible generalized least square (FGLS) method to examine the effects of digital infrastructure on the green innovation efficiency across 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland, utilizing panel data from 2011 to 2020. Additionally, this investigation delves into the intervening role of industrial structure upgrading and the amplifying effects of environmental regulation and human capital on the process. Findings indicate that, to begin with, digital infrastructure contributes to the meaningful enhancement of green innovation efficiency within provinces. Subsequently, the industrial structure upgrading partially mediates the impact of digital infrastructure on the efficiency of provincial green innovation. Lastly, both human capital and environmental regulations amplify the beneficial influence of digital infrastructure on the effectiveness of green innovation at the provincial level. This study provides valuable insights into the mechanisms through which digital infrastructure boosts green innovation efficiency, aiding policymakers in formulating appropriate policies to augment digital infrastructure, thereby promoting provincial green innovation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selecting the panel data for 280 Chinese cities during 2011–2019, we first measure the digital infrastructure (DI) development level in each city by adopting the entropy method and then employ the two-way fixed effect model to examine the effect and its mechanisms of DI on urban green innovation (GI). Empirical results robustly show that DI can significantly promote urban GI, especially in large, high-grade, and high-level economic development cities. Mechanism analysis suggests that DI mainly promotes urban GI through three channels: promoting economic agglomeration, boosting digital inclusive finance (DIF) development, and raising public environmental attention. Meanwhile, the stronger the intellectual property protection (IPP) by local governments, the greater the promoting effect of DI on urban GI. Further research shows that GI can reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in both total and intensity dimensions. Our findings not only demonstrate the positive externality effect of DI, but also provide valuable references for government departments to further layout DI in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing volume and importance of digital communication has prompted a major development in digital infrastructure for its storage and overall management—the cloud infrastructure owned for the most part by giant tech companies such as Amazon. Many governments have chosen to store their records in the cloud rather than invest in the increased digital infrastructure now required to manage them. Non-governmental institutions and private individuals are also using the cloud instead of their own infrastructure. The implications for public archives of this historic shift away from the publicly owned infrastructure long employed by them are profound. Yet, archivists and archival perspectives have not been much involved in public discussion of this change. They are largely absent from the public square. The shape of the emerging infrastructure underpinning the management of digital communication may well be the most significant lasting feature of the digital environment for societies and their archives. This article discusses why that development requires archival voices in the public square to address it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital infrastructure construction (DIC) and low-carbon transformation are important engines and objective functions of the superior economic development, and the synergistic drive between the two is essential to achieving lasting economic development. Based on the panel data of 279 cities in China between 2007 and 2019, the econometric model system is used to explore the impact mechanism of DIC on carbon total factor productivity (CTFP), and the impact of DIC on carbon rebound effect (CRE) is further studied. Research findings that, first, the expansion of DIC has a nonlinear effect on CTFP, with a U-shaped link between the two; multiple robustness tests confirm that this is still true. Second, DIC and optimization of the energy consumption structure in a "U" curve relationship, and the major strategy for increasing CTFP is to reduce energy consumption, while industrial structure optimization and technical innovation have less of a intermediary effect. Third, further analysis reveals that there is a "U" shaped nonlinear connection between the DIC and the CRE, and energy savings and emission reductions in the later stages of DIC fall short of expectations. The current DIC is still dominated by episodic expansion. The findings of the study can better enhance CTFP, curb the CRE, put a limit on total carbon emissions and accelerate the decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adherence to the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) put in place to mitigate the spreading of infectious diseases is a multifaceted problem. Several factors, including socio-demographic and socio-economic attributes, can influence the perceived susceptibility and risk which are known to affect behavior. Furthermore, the adoption of NPIs is dependent upon the barriers, real or perceived, associated with their implementation. Here, we study the determinants of NPIs adherence during the first wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Colombia, Ecuador, and El Salvador. Analyses are performed at the level of municipalities and include socio-economic, socio-demographic, and epidemiological indicators. Furthermore, by leveraging a unique dataset comprising tens of millions of internet Speedtest® measurements from Ookla®, we investigate the quality of the digital infrastructure as a possible barrier to adoption. We use mobility changes provided by Meta as a proxy of adherence to NPIs and find a significant correlation between mobility drops and digital infrastructure quality. The relationship remains significant after controlling for several factors. This finding suggests that municipalities with better internet connectivity were able to afford higher mobility reductions. We also find that mobility reductions were more pronounced in larger, denser, and wealthier municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief comparative analysis of US and Chinese infrastructure projects is provided. The world-system approach, which sets the objective possibilities and limitations of the strategies of the United States and China as interconnected parts of the world economy and politics, was chosen as the methodological basis. The first part of this article describes the world-system approach, as well as the position of the People's Republic of China in the modern system of international relations. The second part is devoted to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. The third part provides an analysis of counterinitiatives put forward by the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the functioning of Online Black-Markets (OBMs), i.e. a digital infrastructure operating in the Dark Net that enables the exchange of illegal goods such as drugs, weapons and fake digital identities. OBMs exist notwithstanding adverse conditions such as police interventions, scams and market breakdowns. Relying on a longitudinal case study, we focus on the dynamics of interactions among actors and marketplace technologies and we identify three mechanisms explaining OBMs operations. In particular, we show that OBMs infrastructure is the result of commoditization, platformization and resilience processes. Our contribution relies on the identification of community-based mechanisms that generate the OBMs infrastructure, extending the current understanding of e-commerce and social commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main motivation behind this study is the importance of tourism and ICT industry in the economic development of a country and their potential effects on the country's environmental quality in the digital era. For empirical analysis, the study applies FMOLS, DOLS, and quantile regression techniques for Asian economies. The findings of the study confirmed that tourism and digitalization improve environmental quality in FMOLS and DOLS models. In the basic quantile regression model, the estimates attached to tourism arrival are positive 5th quantile to 40th quantile and then turn negative from 60th quantile and onwards. Likewise, the estimates attached to tourism receipts in the robust quantile regression model are positive from quantile 5th to quantile 20th and negative and increasing from quantile 30th and onwards. Conversely, the estimates of digital infrastructure are insignificant in the basic quantile model at all quantiles except the 95th. However, the estimated coefficients of digital infrastructure in the robust model are negative and rising from 40th quantile to 70th quantile and negative and declining from 80th quantile to 95th quantile. In general, we can say that as the tourism and digital sectors grow, the CO2 emissions decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the experience of the structural and functional design of the digital infrastructure of the national patent office. Based on the basis of methodological communication of the sciences of information, economics, and management cycles, the concept of the digital infrastructure is clarified. The structural and functional model of the digital infrastructure of the national patent office is presented and substantiated, including the specification of subjects, conceptual schemes of processes, the architecture of a unified information environment, the conceptual schemes of the processes of harmonization of information systems and services at the macro level and corporate information systems, the conceptual schemes of the functioning of legacy systems, and a system of models that reveal functional, organizational, and other structural relationships. The necessity of new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study and design of digital development in the field of intellectual property is proven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open access (OA) to publications has become a major topic in science policy. However, electronic publication providing free access to research via the internet is more than a decade older, was invented in the 1990s and driven by parts of the scientific community. This paper focuses on two disciplines (astronomy and mathematics) in which green OA is well established. It asks how authors and readers use the central disciplinary repository and how they are thereby included in the communication system of their disciplines. Drawing on an interview study with 20 scientists from both disciplines, we analyze the main characteristics of an inclusion, possible problems that result from it and how they are being solved. The empirical results show that there is a complementarity between the routines of authors and readers that co-stabilize each other. This finding suggests that the emergence of complementary routines could be a necessary condition for the green OA model to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The first wave of COVID-19 pandemic period has drastically changed people’s lives all over the world. To cope with the disruption, digital solutions have become more popular. However, the ability to adopt digitalised alternatives is different across socio-economic and socio-demographic groups. Objective: This study investigates how individuals have changed their activity-travel patterns and internet usage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic period, and which of these changes may be kept. Methods: An empirical data collection was deployed through online forms. 781 responses from different countries (Italy, Sweden, India and others) have been collected, and a series of multivariate analyses was carried out. Two linear regression models are presented, related to the change of travel activities and internet usage, before and during the pandemic period. Furthermore, a binary regression model is used to examine the likelihood of the respondents to adopt and keep their behaviours beyond the pandemic period. Results: The results show that the possibility to change the behaviour matter. External restrictions and personal characteristics are the driving factors of the reduction in ones' daily trips. However, the estimation results do not show a strong correlation between the countries' restriction policy and the respondents' likelihood to adopt the new and online-based behaviours for any of the activities after the restriction period. Conclusion: The acceptance and long-term adoption of the online alternatives for activities are correlated with the respondents' personality and socio-demographic group, highlighting the importance of promoting alternatives as a part of longer-term behavioural and lifestyle changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the societal impact of digital transformation, with the prospects of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, has led to an innovation imperative in European policymaking regarding higher education institutions (HEIs). However, not only is the institutional strategic planning of HEIs still understudied, as the individual perceptions of faculty members about existing constraints to digital innovation have been particularly overlooked. This article examines Portuguese universities and polytechnic institutes, the two components of the national higher education system, to (1) characterize the quality of the available digital infrastructure and resources (hardware and software) and (2) identify the main constraints to digital innovation. The study conducts the most comprehensive online questionnaire available to date on these topics across Portuguese HEIs (N = 547). The main constraints to digital innovation correspond to limited infrastructure and resources, lack of funding opportunities, insufficient technological resources, a conservative academic culture, and a lack of technical support. These barriers impact Portuguese regional development, as discussed in this study, highlighting the need for the modernization of HEIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing technology presents a case of centralised digital infrastructure that requires adherence to standards and planned approach for its adoption and implementation. There is little knowledge on how institutions could influence the successful migration to the cloud considering the known challenges of adopting technology infrastructure. This research questions: How can institutions positively influence the adoption of cloud computing services? It examines the case of adopting government cloud computing in Sultanate of Oman. It adopts concepts from institutional theory as a theoretical lens to synthesis and explains empirical results. The study shows the practices that exerted institutional forces and the role they play in the successful adoption and migration to cloud services. It reveals that not all institutional forces carry equal weight in their influence, and this depends on the context of adoption. In the case study, we found that both coercive and mimetic forces to be playing prominent roles in pushing the adoption and migration to the cloud forward easing potential resistance from normative forces. We conceptualise this as a smart intervention that took the context of adoption seriously into consideration and was tailored accordingly. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the information produced in hospitals is clinical, and stored for the purposes of documentation. In practice, most of it is never used. The potential of analytics is to reuse this information for other purposes. This is easier said than done, because of technical, semantic, legal and organizational hindrances. In particular, hospitals are not organized to leverage the value of big data. In this study we ask, how can we conceptualize analytics as an integrated part of hospital processes? And, how can we develop and organize an analytics capability in a large hospital? Our empirical evidence is a longitudinal study in a high-tech hospital in Norway, where we followed the development of an analytics capability, and assessed the organizational benefits. We offer two findings. First, we show how the analytics process interacts with the hospital logistics processes in a sense- and respond cycle. Second, we demonstrate how analytics capability is built on the institutionalized network of technology, an analytics team and the administrative and clinical decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of multiagent systems, the features of their application, architectures, and data storage methods is presented. Tools for security analysis and information services are analyzed in terms of the possibility of automatic or automated data exchange. A method for integrating multiagent systems with tools for security analysis (information services) for modern digital infrastructures is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prospects for using low-code and no-code technologies in designing digital infrastructure for high-tech enterprises are analyzed. Such technologies are intended to automate the creation and integration of software components into the existing digital infrastructure on the basis of a simplified visual interface. This approach permits system design not only by programmers and engineering specialists but also by financial officers without specialized engineering expertise. Consequently, integrated interdisciplinary teams of developers may be formed to ensure integration of the new infrastructure not only in the enterprise's engineering systems but also in the economic software and the general structure of the enterprise's business processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sussan and Acs (Small Business Economics, 49(1), 55–73, 2017) proposed the "Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem" (DEE), a novel framework to guide our understanding of entrepreneurship in the digital age. By integrating literatures on digital ecosystem and entrepreneurial ecosystem, they brought to attention the importance of examining entrepreneurship as an outcome of interactions between biotic and abiotic entities represented by four concepts: Digital User Citizenship, Digital Entrepreneurship, Digital Infrastructure Governance, and Digital Marketplace. This paper revisits, critiques, and refines the framework through the following reconfigurations: (1) Digital User Citizenship is reintroduced as a heterogeneous group of users differentiated by their primary activity, as either consumers or producers. (2) Digital Technology Entrepreneurship encompasses all agents that build complementary products and services connecting to platforms. (3) Digital Multi-sided Platform is the intermediary for transaction of goods and services, and also a medium of knowledge exchanges that enables and facilitates experimentation, entrepreneurial innovation, and value creation. The main contribution of the paper is in the reconfigurations that clearly lay the ground for a more sustainable DEE—one in which user privacy is protected, platform efficiency enhanced, market competition encouraged, and digital infrastructure secured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic principles, framework conditions, and specific measures aimed at creating a modern digital infrastructure of scientific and technological information in the Russian Federation are discussed along with the organizational, political, economic, and legal aspects of setting up a digital infrastructure of scientific and technological information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I provide a comparative perspective on current digital infrastructure policies for the humanities in Europe and the US. Thereby I mean to move beyond analyzing the shaping of technology within individual infrastructure projects and instead trace in a more encompassing way how dynamics at the institutional and policy level mediate the reorganization of disciplinary tool development. Drawing conceptual inspiration from the work of Sheila Jasanoff, I propose that digital infrastructure actually functions as a regulatory technology, i.e. as an interface through which the different actor groups (researchers, funders, policy makers) rearticulate their mutual relations. European initiatives, I argue, are based on a more centralizing, technology-driven vision of digital infrastructure that serves the European Commission's policy goal of integrating national research systems in institutional and epistemic terms. This causes a certain disconnect between tool developers and prospective scholarly users who are often unfamiliar with digital approaches, but the emphasis on central coordination also ensures that no single community gains exclusive control over technology development. In the US, by contrast, the original impetus to adopt a concerted strategy for digital infrastructure has not been provided by science policy makers and administrators, but by researchers in the area of digital humanities. These scholars have successfully promoted a sociotechnical view of infrastructure as an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon, which also implies that conceptual and managerial authority should be situated at well-established digital humanities centers. While avoiding problems related to the implementation of technology in more traditional scholarly practices, this arrangement will tend to privilege the intellectual and technological preferences of existing elites within digital humanities over those of other research communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant gap exists in the conceptualization of entrepreneurship in the digital age. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for studying entrepreneurship in the digital age by integrating two well-established concepts: the digital ecosystem and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The integration of these two ecosystems helps us better understand the interactions of agents and users that incorporate insights of consumers' individual and social behavior. The Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem framework consists of four concepts: digital infrastructure governance, digital user citizenship, digital entrepreneurship, and digital marketplace. The paper develops propositions for each of the four concepts and provides a theoretical framework of multisided platforms to better understand the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem. Finally, it outlines a new research agenda to fill the gap in our understanding of entrepreneurship in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]