Impact of Innovative City Construction on Green Growth Evidence from China's Innovative Pilot Cities

Abstract

This essay investigates how innovative city policy affect green growth. It employs data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China between 2007 and 2019, green total factor productivity index as a gauge of green growth, innovative city policy as a quasinatural experiment, and a multi-period DID approach to examine how such policy affects green total factor productivity. The results of the study show that on the average the green total factor productivity of innovative pilot cities is 0.95% higher compared to non-pilot cities, indicating that an innovative city policy has a significant contribution to green growth. This result also survived in robustness tests. In addition, this study finds that in the impact of innovative city policy on green growth is heterogeneous across city scale and resource, with the driving effect being more pronounced in medium-sized cities and nonresource-based cities.