Green Innovation under the Constraint of Economic Growth Targets: Evidence from Prefecture Level Cities in China

Abstract

The demand for sustainable economic growth highlights the trade off between environmental and economic targets. From the perspective of economic growth target (EGT) management and green innovation (GI) practice, in this study, we constructed dynamic panel, spatial Dubin, quantile, and threshold models to measure the impact of EGT on GI using the panel data of 284 prefecture cities in China from 2006 to 2018. The results show that EGT has a negative impact on GI, which is characterized by dynamic, superposition, spatial, and nonlinear effects; there is remarkable heterogeneity in different regions, development stages, and urban characteristics, and the empirical conclusion is still credible under many robustness tests. We also studied the heterogeneous impact of economic growth targets with different characteristics on green innovation. This study puts forward policy implications from two perspectives: optimizing top-level design and maximizing the trade off in multi-objective accountability.