The Impact of Environmental Regulation and Carbon Emissions on Green Technology Innovation from the Perspective of Spatial Interaction: Empirical Evidence from Urban Agglomeration in China

As an important means of reducing carbon emissions, environmental regulation and green technology innovation have become a top research topic in academia in recent years. Existing studies have investigated the phenomenon of green technology innovation responses to carbon emissions, but there is less existing literature explaining this phenomenon from a spatial perspective and exploring the effect of the joint mechanism of carbon emissions and environmental regulation on green technology innovation. Based on the spatial econometric model, this study used the panel data of 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2010 to 2019, to measure the impact of environmental regulation and carbon emissions on green technology innovation from the perspective of spatial interaction. The findings are as follows: green technology innovation in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration shows a trend of high in the east and low in the west and has spatial autocorrelation; green technology innovation responds positively to changes in environmental regulations and carbon emissions and, by decomposing the spatial effects, it can be observed that there is a spatial spillover effect of environmental regulations and carbon emissions on green technology innovation in the surrounding areas; there is a substitution effect between environmental regulations and carbon emissions. This paper combines the above results and proposes the corresponding policy recommendations.

Automated summary

In recent years, environmental regulation and green technology innovation have become a top research topic in academia as important means of reducing carbon emissions. Existing studies have investigated the phenomenon of green technology innovation responses to carbon emissions, but there is less literature explaining this phenomenon from a spatial perspective and exploring the effect of the joint mechanism of carbon emissions and environmental regulation on green technology innovation. This study used a spatial econometric model to analyze the impact of environmental regulation and carbon emissions on green technology innovation in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, and found that green technology innovation shows a trend of high in the east and low in the west, with spatial autocorrelation. Additionally, it was observed that there is a spatial spillover effect of environmental regulation and carbon emissions on green technology innovation in the surrounding areas, and a substitution effect exists between environmental regulation and carbon emissions. The findings of this study provide insights for policy recommendations.