How does haze pollution affect green technology innovation? A tale of the government economic and environmental target constraints.

Numerous studies have revealed that developing green technology innovation is extremely important for minimizing haze pollution. However, limited by serious endogenous problems, research rarely focuses on the effect of haze pollution on green technology innovation. Based on a two-stage sequential game model including both production and government departments, this paper mathematically deduced the effect of haze pollution on green technology innovation. Then China's central heating policy is considered a natural experiment in our study to verify whether haze pollution is the key factor affecting the development of green technology innovation. The result that haze pollution significantly inhibits green technology innovation is confirmed, and this negative impact is mainly concentrated on substantive green technology innovation. Robustness tests have been performed, and the conclusion is still valid. Moreover, we find that government behavior can significantly affect their relationship. Specifically, the government's economic growth target will increase the haze pollution's ability to block the development of green technology innovation. However, if the government has a clear environmental target, their negative relationship will weaken. Based on the findings, targeted policy insights are presented in this paper.

Effects of Urban Producer Service Industry Agglomeration on Export Technological Complexity of Manufacturing in China.

Based on the measurement of producer service industry agglomeration and export technological complexity of manufactured products in 288 Chinese cities from 2000 to 2015, this paper illustrates the evolvement and spatial characteristics of the two factors through visualization figures, and discusses the effects of producer services agglomeration on export technological complexity of manufacturing through robust panel data models. The findings are as follows: as with the influence of industrial connection, empirical outcomes indicate that urban producer service agglomeration can promote technological complexity of export manufacturing on the full-sample level. Visualization analysis shows that the scale of producer service industry agglomeration and the export technological complexity of manufactured products around Chinese cities kept rising constantly during the study period. However, although the export technological complexity displayed a trickle-down effect, the producer service industry agglomeration experienced continuous polarization both on the national and the regional levels. Accordingly, as is shown in the empirical analysis by areas, regions with strong support from producer service industry saw a remarkable promotion in the export manufacturing technology, while the northwest and the northeast gradually lagged behind. Such results sufficiently prove that heterogeneity does exist in the performances of industrial connection between producer service industry and export manufacturing in cities of different regions in China.

The innovation effect of green finance reform-based on the green innovation vitality perspective.

In order to develop green finance and realize the coordinated development of environment and economy, China set up green finance reform and innovation pilot zones in 2017. Taking the establishment of green finance reform and innovation pilot zones in China as an exogenous shock and based on the synthetic control method, this paper explores the impact of the pilot policies on green innovation vitality by taking five pilot provinces as the experimental group and 25 provinces without pilot policies as the control group. It is found that the pilot policy significantly enhances the level of green innovation dynamism in the pilot regions, but due to the different policy focuses, the innovation effect is immediate in Zhejiang, Guangdong, Guizhou, and Jiangxi, while the policy effect is significantly lagging behind in Xinjiang; government incentives are an important channel through which the policy enhances the green innovation dynamism; and the above findings are more significant in the samples of substantial green innovation dynamism and the eastern region. In addition, the extended economic consequences analysis shows that the pilot policy can significantly improve energy efficiency in the pilot region with a significant time lag. The findings of the study not only provide empirical evidence for the implementation effect of the green finance pilot policies, but also have practical implications for improving the green finance system and replicating and extending the green finance reform and innovation pilot zones.