Can the Special Economic Zones Promote the Green Technology Innovation of Enterprises? An Evidence From China

Abstract

Addressing global climate change is the responsibility of all mankind, and original green technology innovation is the key to achieving the goal of “carbon neutrality”. Under the target of “carbon neutrality”, it remains to be seen whether China’s special economic zones can promote the green technology innovation of enterprises, which is very important for achieving green and high-quality development. This study examines the impact of special economic zones (SEZs) on enterprises’ green technology innovation by constructing a quasi-natural experiment using data of Chinese listed companies (collected from 2000 to 2017) and green patent applications. The empirical results showed that the SEZ program significantly promoted the green technology innovation of enterprises. The number of green patent applications of enterprises in zones has increased by 17.02%. The promotion effect was more significant on enterprises in provincial development zones, those that are owned by the central state, and those in central and eastern regions. In the short term, the green innovation promotion effect is mainly derived from the effect of preferential policy subsidies, while in the long run, the role of the agglomeration effect gradually emerged. This study provides empirical evidence for green and high-quality development. This study also provides a new policy reference for achieving a win–win situation between industrial agglomeration and ecological environment.

Location-Oriented Policies in China: Establishment of State-Level Development Zones and Enterprise Innovation Behaviors

“…In addition, enterprises have different paths of innovation in terms of input, output, and quality [36,37]. However, most of the existing literature focuses on only one of these aspects, neglecting the multidimensional relationship between development zones and enterprise innovation [38]. Enterprises should pay more attention to innovation efficiency, which represents the level of technology development and commercialization process and reflects more comprehensively the technological innovation capability [39].…”

EDZs and Firms’ Environment Performance: Empirical Evidence From Chinese Firms

“…Like other place-based programs, EDZs aim to foster agglomeration economies, enhance employment, and attract technologically advanced industrial facilities. A number of studies have analyzed the effect of EDZs on economic growth, such as increasing the number of firms and employment (Cusimano et al, 2021: Givord et al, 2018Zheng, 2021), improving firm productivity (Koster et al, 2019; and industrial land use efficiency (Lu et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020c), boosting innovation (Zheng and Li, 2020;Liu et al, 2022), fostering agglomeration economies (Wang et al, 2022) and attracting foreign capital (Delimatsis, 2021). Over the past 3 decades, China's economy has grown at an impressive pace by means of various reforms and economic liberalization policies, and EDZs have been widely adopted as a key industrial policy and EDZs accounted for more than 60% of gross national industrial output value and more than 50% of GDP (Bao, 2013).…”