The Effect of Innovation City Construction on Carbon Emissions in China

Abstract

Innovation, as a driving force to economic growth, has been referred to as an important development strategy by the central government of China. In order to improve the innovative capability of cities, Chinese officials started to construct innovation cities in 2008. Previous studies have investigated the ecological and economic effects of innovation city construction; however, the environmental effect of the project remains unclear. In this study, we constructed an annual panel of 285 cities in China, from 2007 to 2015, to assess the effect of innovation city construction on carbon emissions. Our baseline results are obtained from a difference-in-differences estimator, comparing cities with and without introducing innovation city construction, whose results show that innovation city construction reduces carbon emissions by about 2% on average. We found a similar effect of innovation city construction on carbon emissions when we controlled for the estimated propensity of a city to launch the innovation city construction based on a series of urban characteristics, such as gross regional product and population. We obtained comparable estimates when we used the propensity score as weights to balance urban characteristics between cities with and without launching the innovation city construction. Our results also show that innovation city construction has a larger effect on carbon emissions in western, poorer, and fewer population cities than in those with opposite characteristics. We found suggested the persistence of the effect that innovation city construction had on carbon emissions, implying that the Chinese government should encourage innovation to reduce carbon emissions. Besides, we performed a series of robustness tests, including the leave-one-city-out test, the bootstrapping test, and the permutation test, to illustrate the robustness of our results.

Impact of National Innovative City Policy on Enterprise Green Technology Innovation—Mediation Role of Innovation Environment and R&D Investment

“…Research has also been conducted on the essence of the innovative city policy. Wei and Kong [7] argued that the core connotation of the innovative city policy lies in improving macro-level innovative facilities and mobilizing micro-level inputs for innovation. Fang et al [8] argued that science and technology development in a city can influence innovation in the region, which was confirmed by Yu et al [9].…”

“…The essence of the national innovative city policy lies in the construction of a vibrant urban innovation ecosystem and the mobilization of micro-subjects' input of innovation resources, so as to foster city development driven by scientific and technological innovations [7]. In the previous sections, it was established that the innovative city policy promotes enterprise green innovation.…”

Innovation-Driven Development and Urban Land Low-Carbon Use Efficiency: A Policy Assessment from China

“…The second branch of the literature assesses the policy effects of NIIDZ construction. Most papers investigate the construction effect of innovative cities from the perspectives of carbon emissions [29], environmental pollution [30], green technology progress [31], and ecological efficiency [32]. Other studies look at the policy design, regional differences, and strategic positioning of NIIDZs [15] and evaluate the construction effect of NIIDZs from the perspectives of innovation capacity [33] and environmental pollution [15].…”

How Big Data Affect Urban Low-Carbon Transformation—A Quasi-Natural Experiment from China

“…With the global warming caused by carbon dioxide becoming increasingly serious, some researchers began to use carbon emission intensity [ 7 , 8 ], carbon emission efficiency, or carbon emission performance [ 9 , 10 , 11 ] to evaluate the low-carbon transformation of the economy. Other researchers have considered the influencing factors of low-carbon economic transformation from the perspectives of economic spatial agglomeration [ 12 ], green innovation [ 13 ], global value-chain embeddedness [ 14 ], urbanization [ 15 ], low-carbon policy [ 16 ], innovation policy [ 17 ], etc. In addition, a number of studies have focused on the green and low-carbon effects of the digital economy.…”