The Effects of Environmental Regulation, Cooperation and Green Innovation on Regional Green Growth

Abstract

Over past twenty years, green growth has been practiced by a lot of countries. Questions of factors driving green growth have become hot topic. Although some studies discuss determinants of green growth, a few studies integrate them in a methodological framework. In addition, innovation cooperation is considered as an effective method to improve green growth, but there is few significant attempt to investigate the relationship in quantity. As a result, this paper proposes an integrated model to explore determinants of green growth, including environmental regulation, innovation cooperation, and green innovation. Structural equation model is used to test the proposed model with research data of 30 Chinese provinces. In turn, we have several valuable findings. Firstly, new empirical relationship between innovation collaboration, green innovation and green growth development is examined. Our empirical results show that innovation collaboration significantly positively influences green innovation and green growth performance. Secondly, the findings display that environmental regulation is a significant positive determinant of innovation cooperation, green innovation and green growth performance respectively. Thirdly, the theoretical model is powerful and robust, which can make us advance the understanding of green growth performance in environmental regulation context. Finally, several implications are discussed while some limitations are also showed.

Keywords: Environmental regulation; innovation collaboration; green innovation; green growth; structural equation model