Abstract
Since the reform and opening up, China’s urbanization level has rapidly increased. However, urban civilization construction lags behind, creating a series of problems, such as environmental pollution, further restricting the healthy and sustainable development of cities. Therefore, China has carried out top-down civilized city construction led by the government. This paper regards the “national civilized city” selection implemented by the Chinese government as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically tests the impact of government-led civilized city construction on urban green innovation and the mechanism of this impact by using the progressive difference-in-differences (DID) model based on panel data of 281 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2018. The results show that civilized city construction contributes to increasing the level of urban green innovation, which is supported by a series of robustness tests conducted through variable substitution and sample adjustment. The quantile regression results show that the higher the level of green innovation, the stronger the green innovation effect of civilized city construction. This finding indicates that the marginal effect of green innovation in civilized city construction is gradually enhanced with the gradual increase in the level of green innovation in cities. The mediating effect analysis shows that civilized city construction can provide financial support for green innovation activities by promoting the expansion of the urban investment scale, which, in turn, increases the level of urban green innovation. In addition, environmental regulation can strengthen the promoting effect of civilized city construction on green innovation. These findings hold important theoretical and practical significance for understanding the green innovation effect of government-led civilized city construction and further leveraging the important role of government in the construction of the urban business environment as a means to promote urban investment clustering, lay the factor foundation for green innovation and strengthen the synergy between environmental regulation policies and civilized city construction policies.
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Data availability
The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The data are from the bulletin of China’s Seventh National Census.
The China Urban Statistical Yearbook is an annual statistical publication that comprehensively reflects the social and economic development of Chinese cities (http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/tjcbw/202201/t20220112_1826279.html).
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This work was financially supported by the Special Research Project on Clean Government Construction of Jilin University (2021LZY010) and Social Science Research Project of Jilin Provincial Department of Education (JJKH20211237SK).
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SY: conceptualization, formal analysis, and writing—original drift preparation and supervision. JL: methodology, formal analysis, writing—review and editing. DF: formal analysis, investigation, and writing—review and editing. FL: investigation, supervision and writing—review and editing.
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Yang, S., Lu, J., Feng, D. et al. Can government-led civilized city construction promote green innovation? Evidence from China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 81783–81800 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20487-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20487-5