Centre for China Public Sector Economy Research, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China.
School of Economics, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2023 Jul;30(34):81783-81800. doi: 10.1007/s11356-022-20487-5. Epub 2022 May 3.
Since the reform and opening up, China's urbanization level has rapidly increased. However, urban civilization construction lags behind, creating a series of problems, such as environmental pollution, further restricting the healthy and sustainable development of cities. Therefore, China has carried out top-down civilized city construction led by the government. This paper regards the "national civilized city" selection implemented by the Chinese government as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically tests the impact of government-led civilized city construction on urban green innovation and the mechanism of this impact by using the progressive difference-in-differences (DID) model based on panel data of 281 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2018. The results show that civilized city construction contributes to increasing the level of urban green innovation, which is supported by a series of robustness tests conducted through variable substitution and sample adjustment. The quantile regression results show that the higher the level of green innovation, the stronger the green innovation effect of civilized city construction. This finding indicates that the marginal effect of green innovation in civilized city construction is gradually enhanced with the gradual increase in the level of green innovation in cities. The mediating effect analysis shows that civilized city construction can provide financial support for green innovation activities by promoting the expansion of the urban investment scale, which, in turn, increases the level of urban green innovation. In addition, environmental regulation can strengthen the promoting effect of civilized city construction on green innovation. These findings hold important theoretical and practical significance for understanding the green innovation effect of government-led civilized city construction and further leveraging the important role of government in the construction of the urban business environment as a means to promote urban investment clustering, lay the factor foundation for green innovation and strengthen the synergy between environmental regulation policies and civilized city construction policies.
自改革开放以来，中国的城市化水平迅速提高。然而，城市文明建设却相对滞后，造成了环境污染等一系列问题，进一步制约了城市的健康和可持续发展。因此，中国政府自上而下开展了文明城市建设。本文将中国政府开展的“全国文明城市”评选视为一项准自然实验，利用 2003-2018 年中国 281 个城市的面板数据，基于渐进双重差分（DID）模型实证检验了政府主导的文明城市建设对城市绿色创新的影响及其作用机制。研究结果表明，文明城市建设有助于提高城市绿色创新水平，这一系列稳健性检验结果支持了该结论。分位数回归结果表明，文明城市建设对绿色创新的促进作用随着城市绿色创新水平的提高而逐渐增强。中介效应分析表明，文明城市建设可以通过促进城市投资规模的扩大为绿色创新活动提供财政支持，进而提高城市绿色创新水平。此外，环境规制可以强化文明城市建设对绿色创新的促进作用。这些发现对于理解政府主导的文明城市建设的绿色创新效应以及进一步发挥政府在城市营商环境建设中的重要作用，促进城市投资集聚、为绿色创新奠定要素基础、加强环境规制政策与文明城市建设政策协同具有重要的理论和实践意义。
