How Do Environmental Regulation and Environmental Decentralization Affect Regional Green Innovation? Empirical Research from China

Can public participation promote regional green innovation?--Threshold effect of environmental regulation analysis

Green innovation is the fundamental approach to harmonize economic and environmental sustainability. Public participation plays a crucial role in solving the problems of “government failure” and “market failure” in regional green innovation. Based on three perspectives: direct public participation, indirect public participation, and ENGOs participation, this paper takes 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2019 as samples, constructs panel fixed-effects models and adopts multiple linear regressions to investigates the impact of public participation on regional green innovation. The results show that all three types of public participation have a positive impact on regional green innovation, among which ENGOs’ participation has the greatest impact. The effect of direct public participation on green innovation is significantly positive in developed regions but insignificant in underdeveloped regions, while the impact of ENGOs participation is the opposite. The conclusion is still valid after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Besides, the threshold regression tests reveal that the impacts of public participation on green innovation shows a threshold effect depending on the intensity of environmental regulation, and only when the intensity of environmental regulation is greater than 0.7495 can public participation play the most effective role.

Bibliometric Analysis of the Research on the Impact of Environmental Regulation on Green Technology Innovation Based on CiteSpace

With increasing environmental regulation (ER), the requirements for green technology innovation (GTI) in enterprises are also rising. However, there are relatively few systematic summaries of the themes of ER-affecting GTI. Adopting the method of bibliometrics and visual analysis, this research discusses the status of research and development trends of ER-affecting GTI and summarizes the research in this field. The paper takes 738 papers from 2001 to 2021 in the core database of Web of Science as the research sample. Based on CiteSpace, this paper makes a visual analysis of the number of published papers, institutions, authors, keywords, countries (regions) and journals. The study found that to some extent, favorable collaboration between authors and institutions in this field needs to be strengthened. Research hotspots in this field include innovation, technology, performance, policy and environmental regulation. Renewable energy consumption, the pollution haven hypothesis, sustainable development, carbon dioxide emission, energy technology and environmental Kuznets curve are the current research frontiers in this field. In terms of the number of published papers, research in this field has been conducted in a national (regional) layout with China as the core force, and Italy, America, Britain, Germany and other European countries as important forces. This field covers three main research areas: enterprise performance, policy instruments and research methods, going through the start-up phase (2001-2011), the growth phase (2012-2018) and the development phase (2019-2021). Future research can further incorporate the digital economy and synergy of multiple environmental regulation policies into this field, which will continuously enrich the theoretical research system in this field. The content, methods and conclusions of research in this field are becoming increasingly diverse.

Promote Green Innovation in Manufacturing Enterprises in the Aspect of Government Subsidies in China

Green innovation is vital for manufacturing enterprises to achieve a balance between economic, environmental and social benefits. This paper empirically investigates the mechanisms of government subsidies, R&D investment and public participatory environmental regulation on green innovation in manufacturing enterprises, selecting a sample of 1308 manufacturing firms listed on Chinese A-shares from 2010–2019. The results show that government subsidies can significantly promote green innovation in manufacturing enterprises, with private enterprises being more pronounced. R&D investment plays a mediating role in green innovation in manufacturing enterprises, while public participatory environmental regulation has a negative impact. The moderating effect of public participatory environmental regulation on government subsidies is different on different green patents, with a more negative effect on green invention patents than on green utility model patents. Public participatory environmental regulation has a negative moderating effect on the green innovation of state-owned manufacturing enterprises while having no significant effect on private manufacturing enterprises.