China’s green finance and total factor energy efficiency

Abstract

Based on data on 280 prefecture-level cities from 2008 to 2019, this study uses a difference-in-difference (DID) model to first analyze the impact of China’s green finance pilot policy (GFPP) on total factor energy efficiency (TFEE) and then further investigate the mediating and heterogeneous effects of GFPP. Results indicate that first, GFPP effectively improves TFEE, and the robustness tests show that the estimation results are reliable. Second, GFPP mainly improves TFEE by promoting industrial structure optimization and green technology innovation. Last, the role of GFPP in improving TFEE is mainly reflected in cities with high environmental protection enforcement and intellectual property protection. Therefore, China must expand the GFPP scope, further improve the local green finance practice capability, actively guide green fund to support energy technology innovation, accelerate green industrial transformation, and pool social forces to jointly promote green economic development.

Emerging new themes in green finance: a systematic literature review

“…The authors focused on studies on sustainable investment options, analyzed how environmental, social, and governance aspects are incorporated into financial decision-making, and evaluated how sustainability affects financial performance. Researchers are expected to advance ethical and sustainable financial practices and help the world accomplish its sustainability goals by studying sustainability within the context of green finance [5,25,43,46,59,73,77,90,91,94,104,109,138,161,163,165,167,171].…”

Environmental regulatory intensity, green finance and corporate green sustainable development performance

“…The Chinese government has been actively advocating the establishment of a green financial system and initiated the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Area (GFRI) in 2017. Numerous studies have substantiated the significant impact of the GFRI on energy efficiency, green innovation, the costs of debt financing, and the level of financialization [ [37] , [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] ]. Core policy measures emphasize the development of diverse financing instruments, including green credit and green bonds, to expand the financing channels for green projects [ 39 , 41 ].…”

Can the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Improve Green Investment of Heavily Polluting Enterprises?

“…The DID model has become a common method for evaluating the implementation effect of a policy [33,34]. When evaluating the implementation effect of China's green finance policy, existing research widely uses the DID method for regression analysis [8][9][10]. To describe the policy impact and effectively overcome the related endogenous problems, we use the DID methodology to analyze the effect of GFRI on GI, take the pilot and nonpilot enterprises as the treated and control groups, respectively, and add other variables that have an impact on the GI effect.…”

“…One important policy is the implementation of the GFRI in 2017. Extensive research has shown that this GFRI significantly impacts energy efficiency, green innovation, debt financing costs, and financialization level [6][7][8][9][10][11]. The core measures of the policy include developing diversified financing tools such as green credit, green bonds, and green insurance to expand financing channels for green projects.…”