The direction choice of green technological progress and late-development advantage in Central and Western China

Abstract

The ecological environment is more fragile in Central and Western China, and it is a vital and difficult issue to achieve both economic catch-up and environmental protection. This paper tries to release the above dilemma by combination of the late-development advantage with the choice of the direction of green technological progress. It is concerned with whether Central and Western China are more likely to choose green technological progress due to the comparative advantage of human capital under environmental regulation, and whether green technological progress brings late-development advantages to these regions. Based on theoretical analysis, this paper adopts the system generalized moment estimation method to make empirical research on China's provincial and regional panel data from 1995 to 2020. The results indicate that human capital significantly promotes the progress of green technology; environmental regulation has a U-shaped impact on green technology progress, whereas China's current environmental regulation is propitious to promoting green technology progress; the human capital in Central and Western China is vitally important in promoting the progress of green technology, and the inflection point of environmental regulation to promoting the progress of green technology is lower than that in Eastern China, so the central and western China choose the direction of green technology progress more between the two types of technologies and therefore obtain greater growth benefits from the progress of green technology. The above results show that the comparative advantage of human capital in Central and Western China promotes the direction choice of green technological progress under reasonable environmental regulations, then the green technological progress further brings the late-development advantage of economic growth in Central and Western China. This research has a certain contribution to the research of green development and late-development advantage.