Research On The Impact Of Regional Green Finance Development On Energy Efficiency

Energy is the foundation and power of social and economic growth.However,as a big consumer of resources,China has a low energy efficiency for a long time,which not only wastes resources,but also causes environmental pollution problems.Improving energy efficiency is an important step in Chinese transition to a modern green economy.As a key link in promoting carbon neutrality,green finance can promote capital flow to green environmental protection industry and effectively improve energy efficiency by adjusting financing behavior.However,there has been relatively little research on the impact of green finance on energy efficiency,most scholars have qualitatively analyzed the impact of green finance on energy efficiency when studying the overall financial development’s impact on energy efficiency,a few scholars have empirically studied the impact of green finance development on industrial structure and technological innovation.Firstly,this paper theoretically analyzes the possible path of regional green finance development affecting energy efficiency,and proposes two mechanisms of industrial structure optimization and technological innovation.Secondly,based on the availability of data,this paper takes the period from 2007 to 2018 as the research period,adopts the mediating effect model,and empirically tests the specific situation of the impact of regional green finance development on energy efficiency in China through step-by-step testing of regression coefficient method and Sobel method.And this paper compares and analyzes the impact of regional green finance and overall financial development on energy efficiency.Then,this paper analyzes the heterogeneity according to the samples of eastern,central and western regions,as well as resource-based provinces and nonresource-based provinces.This paper find that Chinese regional green finance development can improve energy efficiency significantly,and it can play a role through partial mediating effects of industrial structure optimization and technological innovation,but the direct effect is greater than the two mediation effects.By comparing the two mechanisms,this paper finds that the mediating mechanism of technological innovation plays a greater role than the role of industrial structure optimization.By comparing the effects of regional green finance and overall financial development on energy efficiency,this paper finds that the overall improvement effect of regional overall financial development on energy efficiency,and the mediating effect of the two mechanisms are significantly lower than the development level of regional green finance.By comparing the sub-sample regression results of the eastern,central and western regions,this paper finds that the development of green finance in the eastern region has a significant positive impact on energy efficiency,while the promoting effect of the development of green finance in the central and western regions is not obvious,and the impact on energy efficiency is not significant.By comparing the sub-sample regression results between resource-based provinces and non-resource-based provinces,this paper finds that the development of green finance has no significant impact on energy efficiency in resource-based provinces,while the development of green finance has a significant positive impact on energy efficiency in non-resource-based provinces.Finally,this paper puts forward policy suggestions from three aspects: improving the development level of regional green finance,improving the construction of green finance system and closely combining green finance development with energy efficiency.There are three possible contributions to this paper.First,this paper confirms the impact of regional green finance development on energy efficiency,and finds that regional green finance development in China can promote the improvement of energy efficiency,and will play a part of the intermediary effect through industrial structure optimization mechanism and technological innovation mechanism.Second,this paper makes a comparative analysis of the impact of regional green finance development and overall financial development on energy efficiency to reflect the impact of regional green finance development on energy efficiency in a more comprehensive way.Third,this paper takes resource-based provinces and non-resource-based provinces as samples to analyze the specific situation of the impact of green finance development on energy efficiency under different resource endowments.to analyze the impact of green finance development on energy efficiency.We find that in Chinese resource-based provinces,the impact of green finance development on energy efficiency is not significant.However,in nonresource-based provinces,the regional green financial development has a significant effect on the improvement of energy efficiency,and the improvement effect is greater than the overall financial development.