Research on the Impact of Technology Innovation on Quantity and Quality of Economic Growth in the Yangtze River Delta of China: A Comparative Study

Abstract

High-quality economic development (HQED) has recently become a crucial sustainable growth mode in China, which pursues economic growth while maintaining social equity and green ecology. The HQED of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) has played an exemplary role in achieving the leap from “China speed” to “China Quality”. In this paper, we first use the entropy-weight multidimensional comprehensive evaluation method to calculate the HQED index as a proxy for the quality of economic growth. Then, using panel data of 41 cities in the YRD, we conduct a comparative study to examine impacts of technological innovation (TI) on quantity and quality of economic growth by employing different panel estimation models over the period 2009-2019 and check the robustness in five ways. Finally, this paper investigates the TI-economic growth link based on the panel quantile regression across the conditional distributions of economic growth levels. Results show that TI has significantly positive effects in terms of both quantity and quality of economic growth, and the promoting effect on the quantity of economic growth is almost four times higher than that of quality under mean estimations by double fixed-effects. The effect on quantity of economic growth is also stronger than that of quality under the conditional distribution, and TI has a stronger impact for regions with higher levels of economic growth.

Environmental regulation, high-quality economic development and ecological capital utilization

“…This shift can prompt governments to establish ecological compensation mechanisms or markets for ecological services, making businesses responsible for the protection and restoration of ecosystems, and ensuring they pay a corresponding price for these efforts (Ren, 2018;Zhou and Huang, 2020). Moreover, high-quality development implies increased investment in research and development, encouraging the growth of green technologies and innovations to reduce resource wastage and environmental pollution (Cao and Ge, 2021;Li et al, 2021a;Li and Hu, 2021). Therefore, high-quality economic development can effectively protect and enhance the utilization of ecological capital.…”

“…China wants to change this situation, from a large manufacturing country to a strong manufacturing country, so it puts forward the strategy of high-quality economic development. Highquality economic development requires technological innovation, which provides technical production support and promotes industrial structure transformation and upgrading, thus improving ecological capital utilization (Cao and Ge, 2021;Xie and Zuo, 2022).…”

Evaluation and Spatial Equilibrium Analysis of High-Quality Development Level in Mainland China Considering Water Constraints

“…The difference between "high-quality growth" and "high-speed growth" lies in the quality of growth. "High-quality growth" not only means overall growth, but also indicates the progress in social, political, and religious factors [6]. For instance, Mlachila et al [7] argued that "high-quality growth" is higher and more durable than socially-friendly growth.…”