The Role of Government Innovation Support in the Process of Urban Green Sustainable Development: A Spatial Difference-in-Difference Analysis Based on China’s Innovative City Pilot Policy

Hongge Zhu, Zhenhuan Chen, Shaopeng Zhang and Wencheng Zhao
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Hongge Zhu: College of Economics and Management, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
Zhenhuan Chen: College of Economics and Management, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
Shaopeng Zhang: School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150040, China
Wencheng Zhao: Institute of Finance and Economics, School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 13, 1-19

Abstract: The role of government support in sustainable urban development has always been a research topic of scholars, but research focusing on the relationship between government innovation support and urban green sustainable development is still relatively rare. This article uses China’s innovative city pilot policy (ICPP) to represent the innovation support provided by the government and address the interaction mechanism and the spatial spillover effect of China’s innovative city pilot policy (ICPP), green technology innovation (GTI), and green sustainable development performance (GSDP) with the support of the mediating effect model and the spatial econometric model. Based on panel data of 24 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2001 to 2020, this paper establishes an evaluation index system of green sustainable development performance (GSDP), measuring with the SBM directional distance function based on the undesired output. This paper adopts the spatial difference-in-difference model (SDID) to study the impact mechanism of the ICPP on the GSDP in the Yangtze River Delta. The results show that (i) there is a positive spatial spillover effect of GSDP in the urban agglomeration of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration; (ii) ICPP has a significantly positive effect on GSDP, as verified by several robustness checks; (iii) green technology innovation plays a partial mediating effect in the relationship of the ICPP and GSDP.

Keywords: government innovation support; innovative city pilot policy; green sustainable development; green technology innovation; spatial difference-in-difference model; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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