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Keywords

carbon emission trading pilot policy; green innovation efficiency; DID; two-stage value chain

Abstract

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that green and lowcarbon development is the key to achieving high-quality development, and innovation-driven development is an inevitable choice for achieving high-quality development. Green innovation takes into account both technological innovation activities and environmental protection requirements. The improvement of urban green innovation plays an important role in promoting China��s economic development from a high-speed growth stage to a high-quality development stage with deepening supply-side structural reform as the main line, and it is also an inexhaustible driving force for achieving a win-win situation between economic growth and environmental protection, as well as sustainable social development. The Party and government have carried out a series of reforms and explorations in promoting green innovation and development. One of the institutional innovations is the carbon trading pilot policy, which aims to achieve the core goal of coordinated development of economy and environment. It is also a core policy tool for China to achieve the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality. In 2011, the National Development and Reform Commission issued a notice on carrying out carbon emission trading pilot work, selecting Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Tianjin, Hubei, and Chongqing as pilot areas for carbon emission trading. The carbon emission trading policy officially started trading in the second half of 2013, showing great development potential over the years. As of November 2020, the cumulative trading volume of carbon quotas in various pilot provinces and cities was about 430 million tons of carbon dioxide, with a cumulative transaction value of nearly 10 billion RMB, effectively promoting the work of pilot provinces and cities in addressing climate change and controlling greenhouse gas emissions. China launched the national carbon market online trading system in 2021, gradually establishing a national carbon trading market. It can be said that the carbon emission trading policy marks a watershed in 2021, divided into two stages: the pilot stage from 2011 to 2021, and the implementation stage after 2021, basically achieving the transformation from local pilot to comprehensive promotion. In this context, this paper explores the causality between carbon trading pilot policies and the efficiency of urban green innovation. We divide the green innovation efficiency into green technology R&D efficiency and green achievement transformation efficiency in perspective of the two-stage innovation value chain. This study aims to discuss the impact of the implementation of carbon emission trading pilot policy on urban green innovation efficiency, the quasi-nature experimental design is conducted with the data of 245 prefecture-level cities in China from 2008 to 2021. The difference-indifference (DID) methods are adopted to explore and verify the causal relationship between carbon emission trading pilot policy and the efficiency of urban green innovation. The results of this study are as follows: The implementation of the carbon emission trading pilot policy has a positive effect on improving the efficiency of green innovation in the two stages, and the results remain valid after a series of robustness tests such as PSM-DID and placebo. The heterogeneity analysis results denote that the effect of carbon emission policy on urban green innovation efficiency varies among cities of different geographical locations:in the eastern region, carbon emission trading pilot policy plays positive roles in boosting the efficiency of green innovation in the two stages, while for the cities in the central and western regions, the policy can contribute significantly to the improvement of green achievements transformation efficiency , but has no obvious effect on the efficiency of green technology research. Further, it is found that the beneficial effect on the two-stage green innovation efficiency is larger and more significant in non-resource-based cities than in resource-based cities. In non-resource-based cities, the policy promotes green innovation efficiency in the two stages, but doesn’t play any role for the cities in the resource-based cities.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2024.02.001

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