Abstract
Facing increasingly severe urban issues such as resource scarcity and environmental pollution, the enhancement of green total factor productivity (GTFP) plays a crucial role in the sustainable development of cities. Considering unique policy advantages and high-quality business environments in free trade zone (FTZ) cities, this paper utilizes the quasi-natural experiment policy evaluation theory and the multi-period difference in difference (DID) method to study the policy effects and transmission mechanisms of FTZs on GTFP. Empirical examinations are based on the data from 239 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2019. Results show that: (i) The FTZ policies have an average positive effect of 8.17% on urban GTFP. (ii) The mechanism test reveals that openness to trade and technological innovation have significant mediating effects on the impact of FTZs on GTFPs. (iii) According to regional heterogeneity research, the influences of FTZ on GTFP are higher in the eastern and central areas. According to the multi-period heterogeneity analysis, the second and third batches of FTZs have more significant policy effects. (iv) Further spatial effect analysis finds that the FTZ construction can drive the green development of the surrounding cities. Accordingly, a series of suggestions are put forward to optimize the spatial layout of the FTZs, coordinate technological innovation and green development, and improve the policy system of the FTZs.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the editor’s and the anonymous reviewers’ insightful comments, which helped to enhance our paper. This research was partially supported by “the Major Special Projects of National Social Science Fund”, China (Grant No. 19ZDA080).
Funding
This paper is supported by the major project of the National Social Science Foundation of China “Research on index system and evaluation method of high-quality development of China’s marine economy” (No. 19ZDA080).
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Appendices
Appendix A
FTZ establishment areas and batches
Appendix B
Table
11 presents the correlation coefficient matrix. Following the methodology of Asteriou and Hall (2021), this study considers a correlation coefficient between two variables to be acceptable if it is less than 0.8. It can be observed that the coefficients between any two variables in this study meet this criterion.
Table
12 displays the results of the VIF test. It is evident that all VIF values are below 10, indicating the absence of multicollinearity.
Appendix C
In this paper, we used the kernel density matching method. The basic idea of kernel density matching is to match each experimental group individually with all control group individuals and do a weighted average of the existing control variables. A common support test is performed after kernel density matching. The paired samples are similar if the absolute deviation of the control variables after pairing is below 10%. As shown in Appendix Fig.
Common support test
6, the absolute deviation value after matching is less than 10%, proving that the matched samples are similar.
As shown in Table
13, of the total 2834 observations in the control group, only 308 were not in the common range (off support), and the remaining 2526 observations in the control group were in the common range (on support), so most of the sample information was utilized and only a small portion of the sample was lost in addition. The information from 273 samples in the experimental group was matched.
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Guan, H., Wang, J. & Zhao, A. Free trade zone policies and green development: an empirical examination based on China’s free trade zone cities. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-05123-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-05123-1