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Keywords

producer services agglomeration; green development; green total factor productivity; environmental regulation

Abstract

Under the background of high-quality and green development, improving green total factor productivity can make green become a bright background color for high-quality development. As an important part of the modern industrial system, the producer service industry relies on cities as the carrier of benign agglomeration, which can improve labor productivity, promote technological innovation, manufacturing upgrading, energy conservation and emission reduction, thereby affecting the green total factor productivity. Under this background, the question ‘Does producer services agglomeration promote urban green development?’ has important practical significance. The academic research conclusions on the impact of producer services agglomeration on GTFP have not been unified, whichcan be summarized in two viewpoints. The first is that the relationship between them is linear, while the second view is that there is a nonlinear relationship between them. Although some scholars have paid attention to the nonlinear relationship, the conclusions based on different samples or research methods are quite different, and there is a lack of rigorous testing of the nonlinear relationship and endogenous problems. Theoretically, producer services are characterized by intensive elements of capital, talent, technology, information and knowledge. Under the policy background of tightening environmental regulations, the agglomeration of producer services formed through the spontaneous adjustment of market economy will bring about positive externalities such as scale economy effect, talent agglomeration effect, knowledge and technology spillover effect, which can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and urban green development. However, the agglomeration effect is not always positive, and the negative effects brought by excessive and blind agglomeration are not conducive to the improvement of urban green development. Specifically, excessive agglomeration will bring negative effects such as rising costs of production factors, aggravating traffic congestion and even increasing comprehensive carrying capacity of cities. Excessive or even vicious competition in agglomeration areas will also lead to a decline in economic efficiency. Blind agglomeration without scientific and rational planning will lead to the imbalance of local industrial structure, and these negative effects are not conducive to the improvement of green development. The agglomeration development of producer services can help to inject innovation momentum into its own and other industries through the scale economy effect, specialization effect, cooperation effect, competition effect and learning effect, accelerating the pace of urban green technology innovation, reducing environmental pollution, saving energy and promoting urban green development. However,the excessive agglomeration of producer services will lead to the rise in prices of production factors such as land, capital and labor, reducing the enthusiasm of green technology innovation, hindering the flow of human capital, and not conducive to the improvement of green technology innovation level, thus bringing negative impacts on urban green development. Thus, producer services agglomeration can affect urban green development through the inverted U-shaped relationship with green technology innovation. In addition, combined with the current policy background of tightening environmental regulations, from the perspective of the public, enterprises and the government three stakeholders, areas with strong environmental regulations have the following characteristics: first, enterprises will tend to speed up green technology innovation to reduce pollution costs; second, the government will tend to encourage enterprises to green transformation through subsidies, tax incentives and other ways; third, the public will tend to support environmentally friendly industries and products. Additionally, the improvement of living environment will attract more high-end technical talents. Therefore, theoretically, environmental regulations can positively regulate the inverted U-shaped relationship between producer services agglomeration and green development. Thus, this paper attempts to verify the inverted U-shaped relationship between producer services agglomeration and green development, the mediating role of green technology innovation, and the positive moderating role of environmental regulation between them. To verify the above hypothesis, this paper selects the panel data of Chinese prefecturelevel cities from 2011 to 2019, incorporates the non-expected output into the evaluation system, adopts the SuperSBM model and GML index method to measure urban GTFP, explores the nonlinear impact of producer services agglomeration on urban green development, and constructs Bartik tool variables to solve the endogenous problem, investigates the environmental regulation, an important external constraint, on the inverted U-shaped relationship, in order to make up for the shortcomings of existing research results. The empirical results show that: There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between producer services agglomeration and urban green development. At present, the agglomeration of producer services is conducive to promoting urban green development on the whole, but the negative effects of excessive agglomeration and blind agglomeration should be vigilant in the long run. The impact of producer services agglomeration on urban green development mainly through the inverted U-shaped relationship with substantive green innovation. The intensity of environmental regulation can positively regulate the agglomeration effect of producer services on urban green development. The impact of producer services agglomeration on green development has significant heterogeneity in industrial level, agglomeration model, geographical distribution and human capital. Based on the empirical research results, this paper puts forward corresponding policy implications: Firstly, encourage the agglomeration development of producer services and accelerate the upgrading of industrial levels. Secondly, with green innovation as the driving force, promote the green transformation of urban development. Thirdly, promote the coordination and linkage mechanism between environmental regulation and producer services agglomeration. Finally, guide the coordinated development of producer services in different regions.

DOI

10.16315/j.stm.2024.03.002

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