Green innovations for sustainable development of China: Analysis based on the nested spatial panel models

Hongyun Huang, Fengrong Wang, Malin Song, Tomas Baležentis and Dalia Streimikiene

Technology in Society, 2021, vol. 65, issue C

Abstract: Improving green innovation efficiency (GIE) is crucial for attaining sustainability in China's stage of high-quality development. However, there is a paucity of research on the roles of and links among the government and market in GIE. This study bridges this research gap by unifying marketization, local government competition, and GIE into one empirical framework. First, we extend a super-efficiency Ray slacks-based measure model to evaluate provincial GIE in China during 1997–2018 and then analyze its evolution of spatial-temporal dynamics. Subsequently, marketization, local government competition, and GIE are incorporated into a nest of spatial panel models to address the endogeneity concerns resulting from model misspecification and omitted variables. The empirical results show that China's GIE at the national level is only 0.4813, and above 80% of provinces are far from reaching the green innovation frontier. Moreover, the observed imbalance in GIE between regions continues to worsen; notably, this coincides with the emergence of a pattern under which the gap between the north and south is widening. Furthermore, the seven spatial panel models assessed in this study reveal that local government competition not only has a direct inhibitory effect on GIE, but also indirectly impedes the corresponding promotional effect of marketization. This finding provides new evidence supporting the “grabbing hand of government” view and sheds light on the behaviors of the market and government in green innovation development.

Keywords: Green innovation efficiency; Sustainable development; Marketization; Local government competition; Super-efficiency ray slacks-based measure model; Spatial panel models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X21000683
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:teinso:v:65:y:2021:i:c:s0160791x21000683

DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101593

Access Statistics for this article

Technology in Society is currently edited by Charla Griffy-Brown

More articles in Technology in Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().