Environmental Regulation, Government R&D Funding and Green Technology Innovation: Evidence from China Provincial Data

Yingyuan Guo, Xingneng Xia, Sheng Zhang and Danping Zhang
Additional contact information
Yingyuan Guo: School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
Xingneng Xia: School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
Sheng Zhang: School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
Danping Zhang: School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-21

Abstract: The “environmental pollution–economic development” circle is a problem in the process of national sustainable development. As a complex concept of environmental protection and technology innovation, green technology innovation is the key to cracking this strange circle. This paper divides green technology innovation into green product innovation and green process innovation and measures green technology innovation based on the perspective of energy saving and emission reduction. Furthermore, we examine the effects of environmental regulation and government R&D funding on green technology innovation. The empirical findings are as follows: (1) from the dynamic point of view, we test whether there is a significant ”U-shaped” relationship between environmental regulation and green technological innovation, and we find there exists an “inflection point” in the role of environmental regulation in green technology innovation, and China is at the stage of inhibition before the “inflection point”; (2) direct government funding and tax incentives can promote green technology innovation, but the promotion of government tax incentives to green technology innovation is not significant; (3) the interaction between environmental regulation and government R&D will promote green product innovation and inhibit green process innovation, which is closely related to the imbalance of environmental regulation intensity in energy saving and emission reduction. In addition, this paper also gives out three kinds of control variables (the level of regional development, the proportion of the regional manufacturing industry, and the development level of regional export-oriented economy) and presents their effects on green technology innovation.

Keywords: environmental regulation; governmental R&D funding; governmental R&D funding; green product innovation; green process innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (91)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/4/940/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/4/940/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:4:p:940-:d:137738

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().