Can Green Finance Promote the Optimization and Upgrading of Industrial Structures?—Based on the Intermediary Perspective of Technological Progress

Abstract

In the context of today’s sustainable development, green finance and industrial structure optimization and upgrading are important components of sustainable development and are new trends in today’s society. Based on the relevant data from 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2020, this study considers the role of green finance in optimizing and upgrading industrial structure from the technological progress perspective. The entropy weight method and the principal component downscaling method are used to measure the level of green finance development and industrial structure optimization and upgrading indexes of each province; the existence of the intermediary effect is verified using stepwise regression and the Sobel test. Through model construction comparison, the two-step system GMM is optimal, and the corresponding final two-step system GMM model is constructed to verify the promotion effect of green finance on the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure. The model introduces the control variables of openness to the outside world, government support, human resources, environmental regulation, and urbanization rate. Except for the insignificant effect of the urbanization rate control variable, the rest of the control variables have a significant promotion effect on the optimization of industrial structure because the corresponding urbanization rate in China at this stage does not bring about the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure. After the robustness test of the model, a sub-regional regression using the constructed model reveals that the effect of green finance on the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure is most significant in the central region, whereas the central and western regions are weaker compared to the east.