Innovation and green total factor productivity in China: a linear and nonlinear investigation
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RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND INNOVATION
Innovation and green total factor productivity in China: a linear and nonlinear investigation Siming Liu 1 & Peng Hou 2
&
Yingkun Gao 3 & Yong Tan 4
Received: 22 May 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The empirical conclusions regarding the influence of innovation on green total factor productivity (GTFP) are relatively mixed. Based on China’s provincial panel data from 1999 to 2015, this paper uses the number of patent applications to measure regional innovation capacity, and comprehensively examines the linear and nonlinear effects of innovation on GTFP. Our results show that innovation plays a leading role in promoting GTFP growth in China in general. However, two different types of patents, invention patents, and non-invention patents have heterogeneous impacts on China’s green growth under the difference of innovation level. Additionally, the relationship between innovation and China’s GTFP also differs significantly before and after 2009. A further nonlinear effect analysis based on a panel threshold model reveals that the impact of innovation on GTFP is higher with the rise of human capital, knowledge stock, and financial development. However, only the appropriate environmental regulation stringency is conducive to promoting the influence of innovation on China’s green growth. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding regarding the impact of innovation on GTFP in China. Keywords Innovation . Green TFP . Patent . Heterogeneous effects . Nonlinear effects . Panel threshold model
Introduction Over the past decades, there has been an increasing concern about the issue of green growth around the world, especially in developing countries (Lorek and Spangenberg 2014; Ackah and Kizys 2015; Kwakwa et al. 2018; Lv et al. 2018; Huang et al. 2020). As the world’s largest developing country, China has achieved miraculous economic growth since 1978, with its real GDP increasing more than 30 times over the last four decades1. However, this growth is at the cost of huge energy consumption and environment pollution (Li and Wu 2017; Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Peng Hou [email protected] 1
School of Statistics, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing 100029, China
2
School of Economics and Management, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
3
Credit Card Center, Hua Xia Bank, Beijing 100043, China
4
Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK
Lin and Chen 2018; Wang and Feng 2018). According to British Petroleum (2018), China’s primary energy consumption reached 3132.2 million tonnes oil equivalent in 2017, accounting for 23.2% of the world’s total energy consumption. Whereas, referring to World Development Indicators (WDI) database from the World Bank2, China’s economy just accounted for 15.1% of the world economy in the same year. Additionally, China has become the biggest
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