Interaction and spatial effects of green technology innovation and financial agglomeration: Empirical evidence from China under the goal of “double carbon”

Abstract

Green technology innovation is an important means to help reduce carbon emissions. Most of the current researches focus on the evaluation of green technology innovation and its relationship with economic factors, while ignoring its relationship with financial factors. In fact, financial development is an important driving force for further improving the efficiency of technological innovation, especially in developing countries. China, which has put forward the “double carbon” strategy (achieve peak carbon dioxide emission and carbon neutrality) in recent years, has a lot of interaction between green technology innovation and financial development, which is a good research sample. Based on the provincial panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2003 to 2020, this paper follows the research steps: 1) From the perspective of carbon emissions, we use the non-radial super-efficiency SBM-ML model to measure the total factor productivity of green technology innovation. 2) We analyze the temporal and spatial changes of green technology innovation and financial agglomeration in each province. 3) We establish a spatial simultaneous model of generalized three-stage least squares to study the intrinsic relationship between green technology innovation and financial agglomeration. The results show that: 1) The financial agglomeration level of each province is basically stable due to the fixedness of the financial core area, but the development speed of green technology innovation in the southeast coastal area is significantly higher than that in the inland area. 2) The interaction between green technology innovation and financial agglomeration has a nonlinear mechanism of “low-level inhibition and high-level promotion,” that is, low-level financial agglomeration has an inhibitory effect on green technology innovation, and as the level of financial agglomeration increases, its impact on green technology innovation gradually develops positively, and vice versa. 3) The green technology innovation and financial agglomeration in the surrounding provinces have positive and significant promoting effects on the green technology innovation and financial agglomeration in the province, but the impact of green technology innovation is significantly stronger than that of financial agglomeration. Finally, suggestions are put forward for further reducing carbon emissions, realizing the sustainable economic growth and approaching goals of “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality.”