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| Inter-city Environmental Regulation Heterogeneity and Green Innovation Quality: A Knowledge Influence Perspective |
| Lin Ziqiu,Li Yingbo |
| (School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 10084, China) |
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Abstract Green innovation is an important method of decoupling economic growth from the perspective of environmental pollution. As global climate change, energy shortage and sustainable development issues are gaining increasing attention, so is the demand for such innovations. Green innovation covers green product innovation, green process innovation, cleaner production technology innovation, and pollutant end-of-pipe management innovation. Although various studies have not yet reached a unified definition of the concept of green innovation, most researches cover the two objectives of green innovation, i.e., reducing natural resource dependence and reducing pollution emissions. In contrast to green innovation behavior, green innovation quality is innovation outcome-oriented, and technological complexity, economic efficiency, and technological impact are the main ways to measure green innovation quality.#br#Environmental regulation policy is considered to be an important tool to promote green innovation against the "double market failure". In recent years, the central and local governments in China have paid more attention to environmental protection issues than ever. The amount of investment and financial expenditure in environmental protection have been increasing year by year, but the quantitative increase in China’s innovation has not been accompanied by a qualitative improvement. This phenomenon raises the question of how China's environmental regulatory affect the quality of green innovation. At present, environmental regulation in China is mainly decentralized, and the differences in the implementation of environmental regulation standards by local governments have led to inter-city heterogeneity in environmental regulation. As the central government pays more and more attention to environmental protection, the "bottom-up competition" among local governments is changing to an asymmetrical pattern of "bottom-up competition" and "race to the top". The heterogeneous regulation among cities directly affects the green innovation behavior of subjects within their jurisdictions. In answering the question of the impact of heterogeneity of environmental regulations on urban green innovation, most of the existing studies focus on corporate incentives and pollution transfer: the main arguments are the "Porter Hypothesis" and the "Pollution Paradise". However, the quality of green innovation is different from the quantity of green innovation or green innovation activities. While the incentives and responses of the innovators are important, the knowledge base in innovation often has a more important impact on the quality of innovation. The diversity, complexity and uncertainty of the knowledge base of green innovation is more pronounced than that of non-green innovation.#br#Environmental regulation, as an institutional response to public environmental demands, transfers environmental pressure into the selection of specific knowledge and the reshaping of knowledge structures through standard setting and attention guidance, enabling polluting emitters and green innovators to adjust their technological orientation and change their innovation inputs and knowledge production. However, existing studies have generally paid insufficient attention to the knowledge influence role of environmental regulation. Therefore this paper introduces a knowledge influence perspective to analyze the relationship between inter-city environmental regulation heterogeneity and green innovation quality. #br#Drawing on the panel data of 279 prefecture-level cities in China, this paper introduces a knowledge influence perspective to analyze the mechanism of environmental regulation’s inter-city difference on green innovation quality. A negative binomial regression model is employed to fit the count data. It is found that (1) neighbor cities’ high environmental regulation has a suppressive effect on local green innovation quality; (2) neighbor cities’ high environmental regulation affects local green innovation quality through mechanisms of inter-cities’ "knowledge breadth reduction effect" and "knowledge distance expansion effect"; (3) the above relationship is moderated by the inter-city knowledge balance. Effect of neighbor cities’ high environmental regulation on local green innovation quality turns from negative to positive when the inter-city knowledge balance is high.#br#The contributions of this study include the following three aspects. First, high-quality patents and the number of patent citations are introduced to reflect the quality of urban green innovation, and inter-city environmental regulation heterogeneity and green innovation quality are integrated into a unified analytical framework, providing a theoretical basis for understanding the high-quality local environmental governance. Second, a mediation mechanism of environmental regulation affecting green innovation based on knowledge width and knowledge distance is proposed. Accordingly, the policy recommendations are proposed to provide a theoretical basis for local governments to carry out collaborative environmental governance and build a complementary pattern of environmental and technology policies.#br#
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Received: 06 June 2022
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