Research On Efficiency Evaluation And Influencing Factors Of Green Innovation In Low-carbon Pilot Cities

The achievements of China’s economic development have caught the world’s attention,however,a series of environmental protection issues and resource consumption problems caused during the development process have had a large negative impact on the healthy and sustainable economic development.The traditional sloppy development model has put tremendous pressure on the country’s ecological governance,which will surely be unsustainable.In order to crack this situation,the Chinese government has launched a low-carbon pilot project,making innovationdriven and green transformation the main theme of economic development.Lowcarbon pilot cities are the core carrier to carry out pilot work,and can accumulate valuable experience about green development and low-carbon construction for other cities,while green innovation is the key means to break the resource and environmental constraints and promote China’s economic shift to green and sustainable development.Therefore,it is of great significance to scientifically evaluate the current level of green innovation in pilot cities,analyze the changing characteristics of green innovation efficiency and its key influencing factors,and explore various paths to drive green innovation efficiency improvement in pilot cities,in order to promote the achievement of the dual carbon goal and healthy and sustainable economic development.In this paper,under the background of innovation-driven and green transformation,we focus on the academic theme of green innovation and take low-carbon pilot cities as the research object,firstly,we do a systematic literature review on the connotation of green innovation,the evaluation of green innovation,the influencing factors of green innovation and the green innovation research focusing on low-carbon pilot cities,and find the places where the current research needs to be in-depth.Secondly,based on efficiency theory,sustainable development theory and regional innovation theory,we construct a green innovation efficiency evaluation index system for pilot cities containing energy consumption indicators,green desired output and non-desired output,select panel data of 62 pilot cities from 2016-2020,measure them using the superefficiency SBM model,and analyze the evolutionary trajectory and characteristics of efficiency values by combining the kernel density estimation method.Finally,six types of factors affecting the efficiency of regional green innovation,namely,the level of economic development,the level of industrial structure,the level of information development,the level of government support,the level of financial development,and the level of human capital,were selected,and the driving effects of individual influencing factors and their group configurations were studied empirically through Tobit regression and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fs QCA).The research results show that:(1)China’s low-carbon pilot work is generally fruitful,and the green innovation level of pilot cities shows a fluctuating upward trend over time,but the green innovation efficiency values of more than half of the cities have not reached the average level,and there is still a relatively broad room for improvement.From the evolution trajectory of efficiency values,the number of cities with high green innovation efficiency values is increasing,and the number of cities with low green innovation efficiency values is decreasing year by year,and the concentration of efficiency values in each pilot city has increased,and the overall internal dispersion is gradually decreasing.The differences in the level of green innovation and polarization among cities all tend to diminish,and the imbalance problem has improved.(2)Tobit regression results show that the level of economic development,the level of information development,and the level of financial development can significantly and positively affect the efficiency of green innovation in low-carbon pilot cities,while the level of human capital passes the significance level test but has an inhibitory effect on the drive of green innovation,and the level of economic development and government support have a positive but insignificant effect.(3)There are four paths for driving green innovation efficiency in low-carbon pilot cities,which can be summarized as "information technology-led synergistic development of industry,finance and government support","economic,financial and government-supported synergistic development of information and human capital","information technology-led government-supported development",and "economic,financial and governmentsupported synergistic development" according to the differences of leading factors.Among them,none of the influencing factors alone can constitute the necessary conditions to drive the green innovation efficiency of pilot cities,while the level of information technology development and financial development play an important role as the core conditions.The level of economic development and government support can also play a central role when they act in combination with other factors.