ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Energy Res.
Sec. Energy Efficiency
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2025.1610157
This article is part of the Research TopicEnergy Management, Energy Efficiency Policies, and Energy System StudiesView all 12 articles
Green Innovation Effects and Energy Efficiency Enhancement of China's Innovative Industrial Cluster Pilot Policies: Evidence from 281 Cities
Provisionally accepted
- School of Economics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
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National innovative industrial clusters serve as key platforms for promoting technological innovation and play a vital role in advancing urban green technological innovation (GTI) by integrating green development goals with innovation-driven strategies to support sustainable urban development. This paper empirically examines the impact of the pilot innovative industrial cluster policy on urban GTI using panel data from 281 prefecture-level cities in China (2006–2021) and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to treat the policy as a quasi-natural experiment and explore its underlying mechanisms. Findings reveal that the pilot policy for innovative industrial clusters has profoundly catalyzed green-tech innovation in urban areas. After conducting multiple robustness tests and endogeneity treatment including parallel trend test, placebo test, PSM-DID, the conclusions remain robust. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that pilot policy's promotion effect on innovative industrial clusters on urban green technological innovation presents significant differences because of differences in urban location, environmental concern as well as intellectual property protection (IPP) level. Its transformative impact is more particularly pronounced in eastern and western cities, environmentally focused urban centers, and municipalities with high IPP levels after implementing the policy. Mechanism analysis indicates that from factor agglomeration's perspective, the policy mainly promotes urban green technological innovation through three channels, namely, enhancing urban entrepreneurial activity, making sci-tech innovation talents denser, as well as strengthening financial and scientific and technological investment. Further
Keywords: innovative industrial clusters, Green technology innovation, urban entrepreneurial activity, double-difference modelling, Sustainable urban development
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 09 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou and Ning. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pinglu Zhou, zhoupl@lzu.edu.cn
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