Study On The Impact Of Green Finance Policy On Regional Environmental Performance

The problem of environmental pollution has been the focus of academic circles,and the Chinese government has also taken a series of measures to improve environmental performance.Among them,green finance policy has been adopted by governments at all levels as an important means to improve environmental performance.In June 2017,The State Council selected five provinces of Zhejiang,Jiangxi,Guangdong,Guizhou and Xinjiang to set up green finance reform and innovation pilot zones.In November 2019,Gansu Province was also included in the list of green finance reform and innovation pilot zones.So,how well have these policies been implemented?Do they contribute to improved regional environmental performance?The scientific answers to these questions are of great practical value.However,there is little academic research on this issue.Based on this,this paper regards the establishment of green finance reform and innovation pilot zone as a quasi-natural experiment,analyzes the status quo and evolution of regional environmental performance by combining the panel data of 30 provinces and cities in Chinese mainland(except Tibet)from 2013 to 2021,and comprehensively applies the multi-period differential model,the intermediary effect model and the spatial Durbin model.The effects of green finance policies on regional environmental performance and their mechanisms,heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects were tested.The main research conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,the regional environmental performance index measured by entropy weight method shows that the average environmental performance of the whole country and the eastern,central and western regions presents an increasing trend year by year,but the environmental performance of the eastern region is higher than that of the central and western regions.Second,the analysis based on the multi-period differential model shows that green finance policy can significantly promote the improvement of regional environmental performance,and this impact has no time lag effect,and shows a trend of first decreasing and then increasing over time.Third,the analysis based on the intermediary effect model and the spatial Durbin model shows that the green finance policy mainly improves regional environmental performance by improving the technical level,and the spatial spillover effect is significant.Fourth,the impact of green finance policy on regional environmental performance has significant regional heterogeneity and financial development level heterogeneity.The positive promoting effect of green finance policy in northern China is higher than that in southern China,and the higher the financial development level,the greater the positive promoting effect.These research conclusions have at least the following policy implications:First,give full play to the role of pilot zones,expand the coverage of pilot zones in a timely manner,and jointly explore the economic development model of developing internal economic benefits while paying attention to external environmental benefits.The second is to give full play to the role of technological progress and promote the improvement of technological level to achieve the effect of environmental governance.Third,make full use of the positive spatial correlation of regional environmental performance and the spatial spillover effect of green finance policy on regional environmental performance.