The Impact of Green Finance Pilot Policy on Carbon Intensity in Chinese Cities—Based on the Synthetic Control Method

Libin Feng and Zhengcheng Sun ()
Additional contact information
Libin Feng: School of Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China
Zhengcheng Sun: School of Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 15, 1-21

Abstract: As an innovative and efficient approach, green finance unlocks the potential to achieve China’s carbon peak and neutrality goals. This study takes China’s Green Finance Pilot Scheme as a quasi-natural experience and adopts the synthetic control method to evaluate the carbon intensity reduction effects of the Green Finance Pilot Policy (GFPP) based on the city-level panel data in China from 2008 to 2019. We find that the GFPP significantly reduces the carbon intensity of pilot cities in eastern China, such as Guangzhou, Huzhou, and Quzhou. However, implementing GFPP does not achieve the desired reduction effect in Nanchang and Guiyang situated in central and western China. After multiple robustness tests, it can be proved that the preceding conclusions are robust. The mechanism analysis results show that the GFPP can promote carbon intensity reduction through financial agglomeration and green innovation. This study is conducive to assessing the policy effectiveness of China’s GFPP and provides empirical evidence for promoting green finance system construction in China.

Keywords: synthetic control method; green finance pilot policy; policy evaluation; carbon intensity reduction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11571/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11571/ (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:15:y:2023:i:15:p:11571-:d:1203248

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 ().