Does innovative city construction improve urban carbon unlocking efficiency? Evidence from China

Abstract

As the implementation carrier of innovative development, innovative city construction provides a new impetus and direction for China's pollution reduction and carbon reduction effort. Exploring the carbon unlocking effect of the national innovative city pilot policy (NICPP) would help accelerate the process of urban carbon neutralization and provide decision support for solving the dilemma of urban economic development and environmental protection. Based on the panel data of 283 cities from 2006 to 2020, this paper takes the NICPP as a quasi-natural experiment, constructs a progressive difference-in-difference (DID) model to verify its impact on the carbon unlocking efficiency (CUE), and further analyzes its transmission mechanism, heterogeneity effect and spatial spillover effect. The results show that: (1) The NICPP can significantly improve the urban CUE, which is still valid after a series of robustness tests. (2) The estimation results of mediating effect show that the NICPP can improve the CUE by promoting technological innovation of enterprises, strengthening the guidance of government strategy and promoting the transformation of social and economic development. (3) The promotion effect of the NICPP on the CUE has a negative spillover on the surrounding cities. (4) Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of the NICPP on the CUE shows a decreasing spatial pattern from east to west, and the promotion effect on cities with different urban areas shows an inverted U-shaped feature. The larger the population size, the stronger the promotion effect of NICPP on the CUE. This study provides empirical support for the continuous promotion of the NICPP and the acceleration of carbon unlocking to promote the implementation of the “dual carbon (carbon peak and neutrality)” strategy.