The digital economy has become a key driver in transforming and upgrading China’s manufacturing industry. This study contributes to the existing literature by utilizing spatial econometrics on panel data from 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities across mainland China to capture the regional spatial effects of the digital economy and regional disparities on the technological complexity of China’s manufacturing exports. These areas are often overlooked in prior studies. Unlike prior research focusing on isolated mechanisms, this study simultaneously evaluates three mediating pathways: innovation, human capital, and industrial restructuring, providing a comprehensive understanding of digitalization’s impact on export complexity. The duration of the study spans from 2011 to 2020. The study’s findings reveal that the digital economy’s growth significantly improves the technological complexity of manufacturing exports. It achieves this through three primary channels: promoting technological innovation, enhancing human capital, and advancing industrial structures. Furthermore, the influence of the digital economy on export technology complexity varies by region, indicating regional heterogeneity. Therefore, to foster a strong industrial ecosystem, each region must refine its digital economy environment, elevate development levels, encourage collaboration, and facilitate information sharing, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of manufacturing.

This study investigates the contagion effects of the Evergrande collapse across international financial markets, with emphasis on tail-risk dynamics. Unlike prior work focusing on average spillovers or event windows, we employ a Quantile Vector Autoregression (QVAR) framework to capture state-dependent connectedness under bearish, median, and bullish market conditions, as well as calm versus turbulent volatility regimes. Using daily data for nine major stock indices (2015–2024), we find that the Evergrande crisis significantly amplified global spillovers, but with heterogeneous magnitudes across quantiles. At the 95 % volatility quantile, returns spillovers in the median quantile from Shanghai to the EU increased, during the Evergrande crisis, by approximately 3.5 % in the Net Pairwise Connectedness (NPC) case. In contrast, with very few exceptions, Canadian spillovers remained negligible, confirming its resilience and diversification potential. These results show that extreme market states reveal contagion patterns invisible in average-state analyses, underscoring the systemic role of Hong Kong as a transmission hub and the conditional global influence of Shanghai. The findings provide actionable insights for policymakers on monitoring tail-risk channels and for investors seeking hedging strategies in insulated markets.

In the era of escalating environmental challenges, such as climate change and resource depletion, efficient resource management is essential for fostering sustainable economic and ecological development. For newly industrialised economies (NICs), it is imperative to identify the factors influencing efficient resource management. Therefore, this aims to evaluate the effect of energy poverty, digital economy, and eco-innovation on efficient resource management (ERM) for NIC countries from 2000 to 2022, addressing a critical gap in the ERM literature. By confirming cross-sectional dependence, slope homogeneity, and the first order of integration, the study identifies cointegration among these variables. The study employed the “Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR)” approach to explore the distributional heterogeneity of established correlations across different quantiles of efficient resource management. The MMQR results highlight that energy poverty, industrial efficiency, digital economy, and eco-innovation enhance ERM in newly industrialised countries. In contrast, the economic growth abates the ERM. The study's findings are crucial for formulating effective policies to reduce energy poverty and promote efficient resource management to retain sustainable development and natural resource consumption.