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Influence from highways’ development on green technological innovation: the case of Yangtze River economic belt in China

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Abstract

Although the effect of highways on economic growth has been widely discussed, its role in green technological innovation has not yet attracted attention facing today’s strong emphasis on the green economy. To fill this gap, this paper aims to provide empirical evidence by investigating the effects of highways on regional green technological innovation in China. The paper elaborates theoretically on three mechanisms through which the development of highways may influence regional green technological innovation, namely the agglomeration effect, spatial spillover effect, and network effect. To advance the empirical analysis, this paper constructs a spatial Durbin model accounting for spatial interdependencies among regions. Unlike previous literature, this paper uses “the strength of economic linkage” to indicate the development of highways in each city and discusses geographic distance and time-distance effect (spatio-temporal effect) resulting from highways. Using panel data of 105 prefecture-level cities in China's Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2001 to 2013, we find that: (1) highway has a significant role in promoting regional green technological innovation; (2) significant spatial spillover effects resulting from highways exist and the magnitude of the influence varies with geographical and temporal distance effect. Our findings provide references for developing transportation infrastructure and green innovation in China.

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Notes

  1. China City Statistical Yearbook coedited by the NBS include 285 prefecture-level administrative cities altogether. Among them, four municipalities (Peking, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing) are directly under the control of the national central government. Due to data limitations for some periphery cities, this paper refers to 105 cities in YREB. Region and city are used interchangeably throughout this paper.

  2. There are three types of patents in China: invention, utility model and external design. Invention refers to a new technical solution proposed for a product, method or improvement.

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Funding

This work was supported by the < National Natural Science Foundation of China #1 > under Grant [number 72003141];  < Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project #2 > under Grant [number 2019BJB012].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International College of Football, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Xiaoli Hu

  2. School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Tongji Building A, Siping Road 1500, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Jieping Chen & Shanlang Lin

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  1. Xiaoli Hu
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Correspondence to Jieping Chen.

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Appendix

Appendix

Considering the possible endogeneity problem resulting from the choice of the indicator for the control variable “environmental regulations” (\(er\)), we apply the IV method to do additional robustness estimates. Referring to Chen et al. (2022), we use the “urban green cover” (\(gspace\)) as a proxy for the control variable “environmental regulations.” The results are in Table

Table 9 Endogeneity test results
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9.

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Hu, X., Chen, J. & Lin, S. Influence from highways’ development on green technological innovation: the case of Yangtze River economic belt in China. Environ Dev Sustain 25, 11095–11120 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02519-9

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