Sustainable utilization of mining resources: Exploring the impact of FinTech on green development from the perspective of mining enterprises

The advancement of eco-friendly mining is a crucial pathway for reforming and progressing China's mineral resource management system in the modern era. This approach serves as an essential response to the mining sector's distinctive resource landscape and developmental stage, aimed at promoting ecological civilization and implementing the revised orientation of land resource governance. FinTech emerges as a novel mechanism that facilitates the integration and efficient allocation of financial resources, thus catalyzing the eco-friendly transformation of mining enterprises. This study explores the effects and underlying mechanisms of FinTech on the eco-friendly transformation of mining enterprises by examining mineral enterprises listed on China's A-share market from 2013 to 2021. The analysis demonstrates that FinTech positively influences the eco-friendly transformation of these enterprises, a finding supported by rigorous robustness tests that include changes in estimation methods, substitution of explanatory variables, variations in sample size, and addressing endogeneity concerns. Moreover, a heterogeneity analysis, which examines enterprises' nature, size, and regional private finance levels, reveals that FinTech primarily enhances the eco-friendly transformation of private enterprises, with less substantial impacts on state-owned enterprises. Notably, the effectiveness of FinTech in promoting eco-friendly transformation is particularly significant in smaller mining enterprises and regions with lower levels of private finance. Mechanistic analysis further underscores FinTech's role in facilitating eco-friendly transformation through enterprise digitalization and technological upgrading.