An Empirical Study on the Efficiency of Green Innovation Supported by Urban Financial Development in the Pearl River Delta Cities

Abstract

Green innovation is the technological innovation under the premise of environmental protection, energy conservation and emission reduction. Both technological innovation and green development need a lot of financial support. Does financial development effectively support the promotion of green innovation? This article selects 2009- 2018 panel data of nine cities in the Pearl River Delta and uses the non-radial direction distance function (NDDF) method of Data Envelopment Analysis to measure their efficiency of green innovation. Then, we use the Tobit model to verify to the effects of financial development on green innovation. The results showed that the index reflecting financial development scale of the Pearl River Delta’s cities, there is significantly negative correlation between the number of financial institutions and green innovation; the number of practitioners in financial institutions, the proportion of fiscal expenditures on science and technology, energy saving and environmental protection in total expenditures showed an evidently positive correlation between them. It indicates that financial development of the nine cities is good for the improvement of green innovation efficiency. Further, this paper uses substitution variables to conduct robustness test, and the above conclusions are still valid.