Abstract
Green total factor productivity (GTFP) improvement is an important way to achieve sustainable development, and how to improve GTFP has become the focus of attention of governments and scholars. This paper constructs a GTFP evaluation index system to characterize social, economic, ecological, cultural, and politically sustainable development, and analyzes the impact of environmental regulations on GTFP in the context of increasing innovative labor force. The results of the study are as follows: Firstly, China’s GTFP continues to improve, with a decrease in low-value provinces and an increase in high-value provinces; there is an agglomeration effect of GTFP in the eastern and western regions. Secondly, under the role of innovative human capital, the threshold effect of China and the eastern and western regions is significantly positive in the first stage and insignificant in the second stage. The threshold effect of the central region is not significant in the first stage, but significantly negative in the second stage (− 11.650); the effect of environmental regulation in the eastern region is the strongest. Thirdly, the control variables in the upper period GTFP, national and eastern R&D investment, level of foreign openness, local fiscal expenditure, central and western information construction, western tertiary industry development, urbanization, foreign direct investment, level of foreign openness, and local fiscal expenditure can increase GTFP. In this regard, the government should adhere to innovative talent cultivation and investment in science and technology to build a talent ecological environment for regional sustainable development, adjust environmental regulations in time to meet the demand for sustainable development to realize the GTFP regional linkage enhancement.
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Data availability
The datasets used in the current study are available in the National Bureau of Statistics (http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/).
Notes
Based on the analysis of “11–16 Foreign Direct Investment by Industry (2021)” in China Statistical Yearbook (2021).
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Funding
Social Science and Humanity on Young Fund of Ministry of Education of China (grant number: 18YJC790065); Statistics Project Grants for Research Foundation of China (grant number: 2020LY029); Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (grant number: NYY220024); Nanjing Social Science Foundation (grant number: 22YB06).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Conceptualization: Wei Jin; formal analysis: Wei Jin; funding acquisition: Wei Jin; methodology: Wei Jin; project administration: Wei Jin; writing — original draft: Wei Jin and Shuhan Gao; writing — review and editing: Shuhan Gao; investigation: Shuhan Gao; data curation: Sifan Pan. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Jin, W., Gao, S. & Pan, S. Research on the impact mechanism of environmental regulation on green total factor productivity from the perspective of innovative human capital. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 352–370 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22120-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22120-x