Abstract
The interaction between green finance and other factors, such as ecological environment, has been a research hotspot nowadays. Especially, the reasonable guiding of capital into energy conservation and environmental protection industries would greatly affect those factors, so as to the relation between them. This paper aimed to analyze the relationships between green finance, technological progress, and ecological performance quantitatively. The entropy method was used to respectively construct the system of index for green finance and technological progress, and index for ecological performance was measured by the super-SBM model. The panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model was selected to empirically analyze dynamic relationships based on datasets from 30 provinces in China during 2008–2019 period. The results told that (1) from 2008 to 2019, China’s overall level of green finance, technological progress and ecological performance increased to varying degrees. Spatially, the areas with high-developed green finance greatly coincided with those such as large cities or the eastern coast that had good financial development. The distribution of technological progress index were similar, except some underdeveloped areas with relatively advanced scientific research institutes. The ecological performance, however, was high in the South and low in the north. (2) In the lag for 3 years, the influence of green finance on ecological performance in different regions was all positive for that all the coefficient symbols that passed the significance test were above 0, while that on technological progress was negative first and then positive. And the effects of technological progress on ecological performance were positive in ecological regions and negative in low ecological regions (0.0893 and -0.1211 in the case of three-stage lag respectively). (3) The contribution of green finance to ecological performance was high according to the results of variance decomposition, maintained at about 30%, and that of technological progress increased year by year (from 0.000 to 0.039). Therefore, we proposed to strengthen the development of green finance in underdeveloped regions. The emphasis should be laid on the researches and applications of green technology, the formulation of financing policies in innovation compensation and the establishment of a dynamic monitoring system for the ecological environment.
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Data sets used or analyzed in the current study are available from corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Funding
This study received financial support from the Philosophical and Social Science Planning Project of Henan Province: Long-term Mechanism of Green Finance Promoting the Development of Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Industry in Henan Province, Project No. 2018CJJ085; The Humanities and Social Sciences Project of Henan Education Department: Research on the Identification, Measurement and Control of Internet Financial Risk in the ‘14th Five-Year’ Period ,Project No. 2022ZZJH00247; Henan Science and Technology Development Plan Project: Systematic Financial Risk Identification and Prevention System in Henan Province ,Project No. 182102311068.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Lin Ge is responsible for topic selection and article writing; Haoxiang Zhao is responsible for data analysis and conclusion analysis; Junyao Yang is responsible for organizing ideas and honing words; Jingyue Yu is responsible for data collection and literature collection; Taiyi He is responsible for empirical model design.
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Ge, L., Zhao, H., Yang, J. et al. Green finance, technological progress, and ecological performance—evidence from 30 Provinces in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 66295–66314 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20501-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20501-w