Green Technological Progress and the Backwardness Advantage of Green Development: Taking the Sustainable Development Strategy of Central and Western China as an Example

Abstract

It is generally believed that research and development on green technology are difficult, but this paper finds that the gap in green technological progress between the central and western regions and the eastern region in China is significantly smaller than the gap in technological progress, and the per capita green GDP of the central and western regions caught up with the eastern region significantly faster than the per capita GDP. This paper proposes that the comparative advantage of human capital level in the central and western regions is the reason why these regions choose the direction of green technological progress, and the choice of the direction of green technological progress in the central and western regions may further bring about the backwardness advantages of green development in these regions. Through the system generalized method of moments (sys-GMM) estimation, empirical research using panel data from 29 provinces as well as the regional panel data in the mainland of China from 1995 to 2017 proved the above proposition. Specifically, due to the comparative advantages of human capital level, the central and western regions have chosen the direction of green technological progress; further, the central and western regions will obtain greater benefits of green GDP growth from the green technological progress, that is, the green technological progress enables these regions’ backwardness to take advantage from green development. This is a useful supplement to the theory of sustainable development and the theory of backwardness advantage.

Research on Green Innovation Performance of Manufacturing Industry and Its Improvement Path in China

“…Moreover, for the western region, with the support of the national innovation policy, the innovation vitality and innovation soft environment of manufacturing industry have been strengthened, as well as the green innovation productivity has been significantly improved. As a result, the growth rate of green innovation efficiency (dynamic green innovation productivity) of manufacturing industry in the western region, is significantly higher than that in the eastern region, reflecting the potential "advantages of backwardness" of green innovation development [70].…”

The Environmental Values Play a Role in the Development of Green Entrepreneurship to Achieve Sustainable Entrepreneurial Intention

“…As a result, the intention for sustainable entrepreneurship will decrease. Although economic value has attracted the attention of entrepreneurs, an increasing number of sustainable entrepreneurs are focused on greening the bottom line of their company to deal with environmental issues [11]. However, the impact of conflict on entrepreneurial decisions varies depending on multiple factors.…”

“…Consequently, entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a potential remedy for social injustice and environmental degradation rather than the root cause of these issues [10]. This has led researchers to coin the term "sustainable entrepreneurship" [11] to investigate the interplay between traditional entrepreneurship, society, and the environment.…”

Weeding Out the Deadly Threats Behind the Boom

“…1) After reviewing a large amount of GGDP -related literature [2][3] [4][5] [6], the GGDP model based on climate-environment costs (Wang F, et al 2020 [7]) was selected as the base model (Section 3.1); the serious shortcomings of some existing climate-environment cost models were pointed out, and a model based on shadow prices of climate-environment costs was established (Section 3.2). Then we proposed our macro GGDP model(Section 3.3).…”