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| Green Finance, Green Innovation, and High-quality Economic Development |
| WEN Shuyang, LIU Hao, WANG Hui
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| Institute of Chinese Financial Studies, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics |
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Abstract Green is the “background color” of high-quality economic development. As the largest developing country and the world's largest carbon emitter, China's participation is necessary for achieving global carbon neutrality. China has pledged to achieve the goals of “carbon peaking” and “carbon neutrality” by 2030 and 2060, respectively. Green finance will have a major role in realizing green economic reform and promoting high-quality economic development. Thus, understanding the mechanism linking green finance and high-quality economic development and testing its actual effects are of interest to policymakers and academics. In recent years, many studies have focused on the macroeconomic effects of green finance. The latest empirical evidence suggests that green finance can indeed promote green economic growth, but its transmission mechanism remains unclear. Technological progress is the primary driving force for green growth, and one basic function of finance is to support technological innovation for economic development. A small number of studies have demonstrated that green finance can optimize resource allocation, but they do not explain the internal impact mechanism by which green finance improves the quality of economic growth. It is necessary to understand these issues from theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Starting from the literature and economic facts, this paper proposes a theoretical mechanism hypothesis: green finance can promote green economic development by supporting green innovation, building an endogenous green innovation and an economic growth model with financial sectors, and discusses in detail how green finance can support green innovation. Compared with previous green finance macro models, the model in this paper includes the endogenization of green innovation. Green innovation in this paper is different from the clean technology selection model. It is not a technology type that distinguishes industries but an endogenous emission reduction technology based on innovative research and development to reduce pollution emissions. This feature helps to describe the internal mechanism by which financial institutions influence the path of economic growth by supporting green innovation. The model in this paper not only explains the role of green finance in economic development through comparison of economic growth paths but also captures the relationship between green finance and quality of economic growth (environmental pollution per unit of output), which can be used for the estimation in the empirical part. In addition, the theoretical model in this paper considers both pollution tax policy and green finance policy. The analysis of the optimal growth path shows that the optimal green finance policy increases with the expansion of the economy and should decrease as pollution tax policy becomes stronger. Based on the theoretical model, the theoretical inference is tested using the provincial panel mediation effect model from 2005 to 2017; it is found that green finance does reduce the resource cost of economic growth by promoting green innovation.
The main marginal contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) It demonstrates the internal financial mechanism supporting high-quality economic development by promoting green technology. Thus, true green finance is not limited to support for a few clean industries. Financial services for upgrading environmental protection technologies in high-pollution and high-energy-consuming industries are crucial. This issue needs to be considered in future green finance policies, and it coincides with the current notion of transformation finance. (2) This paper discusses the optimal green financial policy from the theoretical level and points out that it must consider not only the stage of economic development but also the intensity of other environmental policies. This is a topic that previous research has not addressed. (3) In terms of theoretical modeling, endogenous green innovation supplants current modeling based on the “clean industry/polluted industry” binary. The modeling provides a reference for a theoretical framework for the macro analysis of green finance, promotes the “function” theory of green finance, and makes a marginal contribution to the literature on sustainable growth.
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Received: 16 July 2021
Published: 01 September 2022
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