Inflection Point of Green Total Factor Productivity by Low-Carbon Regulation from Chinese Economics Recovery

Youqiang Ding and Yufeng Hu
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Youqiang Ding: School of Finance, Tongling University, Tongling 244061, China
Yufeng Hu: School of Finance, Tongling University, Tongling 244061, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-15

Abstract: The sustainable growth path of emerging economies has transformed from the traditional extensive model to high-quality development. Due to the impulse force of low-carbon regulation, the measurement of input–output efficiency changed into green total factor productivity (GTFP) which considers environmental factors. Past research on GTFP focused on enterprise investments to promote green innovation for their resource allocation efficiency, but green investments are often limited from marketization that is interactively influenced by low-carbon regulation. Therefore, handing green investment to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions for green economics recovery is a big challenge. Then these hypotheses are tested by the main study of 170 cities in China. Results suggested that GTFP has an inverted S-shaped curve with three inflection points and four development stages under the influence of low-carbon regulation. It means that improving green productivity is costly toward making green investments without the driving of green innovation. However, the inflection point of the growth curve—when enterprise investment activities ignore the interaction between low-carbon regulation and green investment policy—will come slowly to a period of high-quality development. Moderating results suggested that the green productivity would be weakened and the inflection point would be delayed by the low-carbon marketization index if the low-carbon regulation intensity was neglected. Therefore, this research advanced an effectively co-ordinate growth curve to search for the inflection point of green economics recovery.

Keywords: low-carbon regulation intensity; low-carbon marketization index; green innovation; green investment; green total factor productivity (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 (2)

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