Abstract
Green innovation is an important topic of research worldwide currently due to the attention to climate change and environmental issues. To have an understanding of the green innovation evaluation, this study measured the green innovation efficiency by using a meta-frontier Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index. The study results indicated that the growth rate of green innovation efficiency found differs greatly based on the environmental issues. Taking the research capacity of research and development institutions as the threshold variable, a double threshold effect is found as an inverted N-shaped. The study explored that the educational level and maturity of the technology market have a significant positive correlation with regional green innovation efficiency. Unlike environmental regulation and degree of openness, an improvement in green innovation efficiency is found fully dependent on the technological progress and regional green innovation efficiency. This study will be useful for policymakers and researchers to enhance green innovation efficiency in China and the rest of the world with similar economic settings.
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Notes
This study refers green innovation as a kind of innovative activity which is based on the concept of sustainable development.
Malmquist productivity index represents an index of change, specifically depicting the degree of change in productivity of the DMU from period t to t + 1, rather than a specific year.
Chung et al. (1997) proposed ML index to introduce the directional distance function of bad output into Malmquist index.
If EC > 1, it implies that the technical efficiency has improved.
If BPC > 1, it means that the contemporaneous benchmark technology frontier has shifted towards the intertemporal benchmark technology frontier (Oh 2010).
If TGC > 1, it refers that technical gap ratio is decreased in a technical gap and the global frontier technology.
Referring the scope is proposed by Hansen (1999).
This study used the similar study scope as addressed by Miao et al. (2017).
The resource used as indicated by Chen et al. (2018).
Patents contain an important indicator to measure the green technology (Fujii and Managi 2019).
Each region has its own provincial-level administrative structure, and abbreviations are used to represent different provinces in this study.
The Malmquist index in the group frontier is mainly a comparison between each indicator region, representing the situation of the region, while the Malmquist index and each indicator in the meta-frontier represent the status of the country.
Abbreviations
- MML:
-
Meta-frontier Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index
- R&D:
-
Research and development
- DEA:
-
Data envelopment analysis
- RAM:
-
Range adjusted measure
- SFA:
-
Stochastic frontier approach
- TOPSIS:
-
Technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution
- SBM:
-
Slack-based model
- DMU:
-
Decision-making units
- TC:
-
Technical change
- EC:
-
Efficiency change
- ML:
-
Malmquist–Luenberger index
- TE:
-
Technical efficiency
- BPR:
-
Best practice gap ratio
- TGR:
-
Technical gap ratio
- BPC:
-
Best practice gap change
- TGC:
-
Technical gap ratio change
- Pgdp:
-
Per capita GDP
- GDP:
-
Gross domestic product
- Egdp:
-
Proportion of total environmental investment to GDP
- Stu:
-
Number of students in colleges and universities per 0.1 M population
- FDI:
-
Foreign direct investment
- Market:
-
Technical market turnover
- RD:
-
R&D projects of R&D institutions
- SO2 :
-
Sulfur dioxide
- GEC:
-
Group frontier efficiency change
- GTC:
-
Group frontier technical change
- GML:
-
Group frontier Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index
- MEC:
-
Meta-frontier efficiency change
- MTC:
-
Meta-frontier technical change
- LR:
-
Likelihood ratio
- EKC:
-
Environmental Kuznets curve
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Luo, X., Zhang, W. Green innovation efficiency: a threshold effect of research and development. Clean Techn Environ Policy 23, 285–298 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-020-01977-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-020-01977-x