•  
  •  
 

Keywords

environmental regulation, Ambient Air Quality Standards, substantive green innovation, strategic green innovation

Abstract

Green technology innovation is a key factor in coordinating economic growth and environmental protection. On the one hand, the development of clean technology can effectively reduce pollution emissions, and on the other hand, technological transformation and upgrading to form new driving forces for economic growth are breakthroughs in implementing the concept of high-quality development. The core of the driving factors of green technology innovation lies in the establishment and improvement of various environmental regulation policies. Environmental regulation is crucial to promote green innovation, reduce pollution and carbon emissions, and ultimately achieve the strategic goal of “double carbon”. This paper takes the implementation of Ambient Air Quality Standard, a command environmental regulation tool by means of information disclosure, as a quasi-natural experiment, and selects the relevant data of 276 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019 as samples. Based on motivation, green technology innovation is divided into strategic green technology innovation and substantive green technology innovation, and the number of green utility model patent applications and green invention patent applications are respectively used to measure,and adopts the multi-time point difference-in-difference model to analyze the green technology innovation performance of cities before and after the implementation of the standard. It is found that the baseline regression shows that the implementation of “Ambient Air Quality Standard” significantly improves the quantity of substantive green technology in Chinese cities, promotes substantive green technology innovation, but has no significant impact on the strategic green technology innovation effect. After a series of tests such as parallel trend test, placebo test, excluding some other interfering factors, this result is still robust; The mechanism analysis shows that the implementation of the “Ambient Air Quality Standard” is to further strengthen the green technology innovation effect of environmental regulation by strengthening the urban government governance and public supervision awareness, especially to significantly promote the substantive green technology innovation; Heterogeneity analysis showed that the implementation of “Ambient Air Quality Standard” significantly promoted substantive green technology innovation and inhibited strategic green technology innovation in the eastern region, but had no significant impact on the two kinds of green technology innovation in the central and western regions, which may be due to the economic development and innovation environment in the central and western regions. The implementation of the “Ambient Air Quality Standard” not only promotes the change of urban innovation subjects’ response to environmental regulation from focusing on end management to focusing on the management of the whole production process, but also promotes the construction and improvement of the environmental governance system with “government as the lead, enterprises as the main body and public participation”. Therefore, the paper suggests the environmental quality standard system should be further improved, more environmental information should be incorporated into the national monitoring system, rely on the development of digital technology to build a big data information platform for environmental quality, and improve the mobility and flexibility of relevant policies, take precise policies according to local conditions, and accelerate the green and low-carbon transformation of production methods. This paper preliminarily investigates the green technology innovation effect of the “Ambient Air Quality Standard”, but due to the availability of data, there are still some limitations in this paper to be further expanded.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2023.05.008

Download

Share

COinS