Abstract
Under the leadership of China's "dual-carbon" goal, clarifying the interaction between the digital economy, artificial intelligence, and the sports industry is an important guarantee to promote the structural upgrading of China's sports industry and achieve low-carbon development. Therefore, a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model is constructed based on the panel data of 15 provinces in China from 2014 to 2020 to investigate the interaction between the three. It is found that (1) every 1-unit increase in the level of digital economy in the lagged period can cause a 0.008-unit increase in the level of AI application in the current period at the 10% significance level, i.e., the digital economy has a short-term and weakly facilitating effect on AI. (2) Every 1 unit of digital economy level in the lagging period can cause 9.539 units of value added to the sports industry at a 1% significance level. That is, the digital economy has a short-term but strong enhancing effect on the development of the sports industry. (3) Their internal driving force mainly drives the development of digital economy and artificial intelligence, and the self-contribution rate is 72.7% and 91.5% respectively. In contrast, the self-driving force of the sports industry is weaker, and the self-contribution rate is only 68.2%. (4) The contribution rate of the digital economy and artificial intelligence to the development of the sports industry is 12.3% and 19.6% respectively, i.e., the sports industry is more affected by the degree of application of artificial intelligence than the level of development of digital economy.