Abstract
This study uses the green finance reform and innovation pilot zone policy approved by the State Council in 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment to explore whether the implementation of the policy has improved the level of green finance development and environmental quality in Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above. The results show that the green financial reform and innovation pilot zone policy can significantly improve the level of regional green financial development and environmental quality, and the results are robust. Further heterogeneity analysis finds that the green financial reform and innovation pilot zone policy have heterogeneous effects on the level of green financial development and environmental quality in different regions, sizes, environmental regulation intensity, financial development levels, and cities of different administrative levels. Based on this conclusion, suggestions are made that the scope should be further expanded and green finance policies should be formulated differently.
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The data and materials are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Funding
This research was supported by Chinese National Funding of Social Sciences (No.18BJY081). And Hebei GEO University (KJCXTD-2022-02).
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Guozhu Li and Liqi Wang are the co-first authors, Liqi Wang is the corresponding author, Zining Li is the third author, Zhengran Guo is the fourth author, and all authors contributed equally to this work.
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Li, G., Wang, L., Li, Z. et al. Has pilot zones policy for green finance reform and innovations improved the level of green financial development and environmental quality?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 68667–68676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27243-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27243-3