绿色金融影响下中国污染性产业技术创新及其空间差异

Technical Innovation and Its Spatial Disparity of Chinese Polluting Industries Under the Impact of Green Finance

基于2015—2018年中国335个地级以上城市,使用面板数据模型剖析绿色金融对污染性产业的技术效应,探讨其与环境规制、研发投入的交互作用,区分不同产业类型,厘清绿色金融技术效应的空间差异。结果表明:绿色金融能够在不同区域促成污染性重工业和轻工业技术创新;绿色金融与环境规制协同互补,并且这种协同对轻工业更有效,在中西部地区更突出;对于污染性轻工业,绿色金融通过提升研发投入激励技术创新的现象广泛存在,而污染性重工业仅在西部地区出现类似现象。绿色金融的技术效应呈现轻工业强于重工业,西部地区优于中部和东部地区的特征,结合中国环境治理与科技创新现实,绿色金融与环境和科技政策有望相互增益。

Green finance is an essential innovation in financial system, which contributes to sustainable development by optimizing investment and financing. The concept of green finance is increasingly popular in China since it is in line with Chinese national strategies, namely, industrial upgrading and environmental protection.Therefore, many strong policies have been enacted in China and the scale of green finance has enjoyed rapid growth since 2015. This study takes green finance as a new type of environmental policy and tests its technical effects on different types of polluting industries through Chinese regions. Based on the data of 335 prefecturelevel cities from 2015 to 2018, we apply panel data models to explore the technical effects of green finance and its interaction with environmental regulation and R&D investment. The results show that, consistent with the Porter Hypothesis, green finance can stimulate technical innovation of both heavy polluting industry and light polluting industry in different regions. Green finance and environmental regulation are complementary to each other. Such a synergy effect is more significant for the light polluting industry and more common in the central and western regions. By enhancing R&D investment, green finance can promote the technical innovation of light polluting industries in all regions. While for the heavy polluting industry, such a phenomenon can only be found in the western regions. This article suggests that green finance has a more substantial technical effect on the light polluting industry than heavy ones and performs better in the western regions than the eastern and the central regions. Regarding the reality of Chinese environmental governance and technical innovation, green finance may play an important role in promoting the effect of both environmental and technical policies in the future.