The effect estimation and channel testing of the technological progress on China’s regional environmental performance

To study the effects of and approaches to technological progress on China’s regional environmental performance, this study first estimates China’s regional environmental performance and its variation indexes by applying a slack-based model (SBM) and an entropy-based model (EBM). The results indicate that the environmental performance in different regions of China has improved, but the rate of improvement differs greatly. This may be attributed to heterogeneous characteristics and changes in the green technology innovation level in different regions. Considering the overflow effect of environmental pollution among different regions, we study the impact of various technological progress patterns on China’s regional environmental performance using spatial econometrics, and we find that there are significant spatial effects of technology innovation, technology transfer, and imitative innovation on China’s regional environmental performance. Also, different technological progress patterns have different effects. Specifically, independent innovation has failed to effectively improve regional environmental performance, whereas the introduction of technology and imitative innovation have significantly improved this performance. Moreover, after the cross-items of independent innovation and human capital are introduced, the effects of technology introduction and imitative innovation on China’s regional environmental performance through the absorptive capacity of human capital remain significant, whereas the effect of independent innovation on regional environmental performance via the absorptive capacity of human capital becomes more obvious. Based on this and from the perspective of environmental enhancement, we believe that China should strengthen human capital accumulation and give consideration to imitative innovation and technology introduction while emphasizing independent innovation.