Green Technological Progress and the Backwardness Advantage of Green Development: Taking the Sustainable Development Strategy of Central and Western China as an Example

Huaide Wen and Jun Dai
Additional contact information
Huaide Wen: Qianjiang College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Jun Dai: Qianjiang College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 310018, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-17

Abstract: It is generally believed that research and development on green technology are difficult, but this paper finds that the gap in green technological progress between the central and western regions and the eastern region in China is significantly smaller than the gap in technological progress, and the per capita green GDP of the central and western regions caught up with the eastern region significantly faster than the per capita GDP. This paper proposes that the comparative advantage of human capital level in the central and western regions is the reason why these regions choose the direction of green technological progress, and the choice of the direction of green technological progress in the central and western regions may further bring about the backwardness advantages of green development in these regions. Through the system generalized method of moments (sys-GMM) estimation, empirical research using panel data from 29 provinces as well as the regional panel data in the mainland of China from 1995 to 2017 proved the above proposition. Specifically, due to the comparative advantages of human capital level, the central and western regions have chosen the direction of green technological progress; further, the central and western regions will obtain greater benefits of green GDP growth from the green technological progress, that is, the green technological progress enables these regions’ backwardness to take advantage from green development. This is a useful supplement to the theory of sustainable development and the theory of backwardness advantage.

Keywords: green development; human capital level; green technological progress (GTP); backwardness advantage; comparative advantage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/14/7567/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/14/7567/ (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:13:y:2021:i:14:p:7567-:d:589646

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 ().