环境分权、地方政府竞争对绿色技术创新影响的“本地—邻地”效应

随着绿色发展成为五大发展理念之一，各地政府推进绿色技术创新成为降低环境污染和提高增长质量的主要途径。为了考察地方政府环境分权和竞争对绿色技术创新影响的“本地—邻地”效应，本文利用非期望产出EBM模型测度绿色技术创新程度，并将绿色技术创新指数引入动态空间杜宾模型。最后，结合2003-2017年中国省级面板数据进行实证分析。研究发现：(1)绿色技术创新具有显著的路径依赖、空间集聚以及邻近地区的策略竞争效应；(2)环境分权对本地和邻地绿色技术创新的影响呈“U型”变动特征，且现阶段并未跨越分权驱动创新的临界点；(3)环境分权与地方政府竞争的交互效应整体为负，环境行政分权、环境监察分权和环境监测分权等不同类型环境分权采取的策略并不相同；(4)区域环境分权产生的绿色技术创新激励效应存在异质性，中西部地区环境分权对绿色技术创新的激励效果更强。

The “Local—Adjacent” Effect of Environmental Decentralization and Local Government Competition on Green Technology Innovation

Green technology innovation is a main approach for enterprises to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Due to the imbalance between the cost and return of green technology innovation, the greening of technological advances can hardly be realized by market mechanism alone. Hence, government incentives are of particular importance in encouraging corporate green technology innovation. Under the Chinese decentralized system featured by political centralization and economic decentralization, when the central government transfers lots of environmental power to lower administrative units, local departments tend to distort or partially execute national environmental policies for the sake of profit maximization. Moreover, in view of the diversity in the management of environmental affairs, different types of environmental power transferred to local governments vary in their impacts on green technology innovation. Furthermore, while improving the level of local green technology innovation, environmental decentralization shows significant spatial spill-over effects. Existing research rarely touches upon the influence of environmental decentralization on the local area and adjacent areas. Therefore, drawing on provincial panel data between 2003 and 2017, the undesired output EBM model is employed to measure the level of green technology innovation and introduced the green technology innovation index into the dynamic spatial Durbin model to analyze the impacts of environmental decentralization and local government competition on the “local-adjacent” effects of green technology innovation. The research findings are listed below. (1)Green technology innovation has significant route reliance, spatial agglomeration and strategic competition effect in neighboring areas. The change in the influence of environmental decentralization on green technology innovation showed U-shaped fluctuations. Currently the provincial decentralization level is generally lower than the threshold. (2)Administrative decentralization has a nonlinear influence on green technology innovation, supervisory decentralization has a negative influence and the influence of monitoring decentralization is not significant. It was found from examining the interactivity between decentralization and competition that as supervisory power is transferred to local governments, the “race-to-the-bottom” competition between them will be intensified, while the expansion of environmental administrative decentralization contributes to the formation of a healthier competition mechanism. This indicates while reforming environmental administration in China, the central government should incrementally expand the scope of responsibilities for the environmental administration of local governments and shift up the supervisory and monitoring decentralization of environmental power, in order to ensure the authority and authenticity of monitoring results. (3) Environmental decentralization varies in their stimulation effects on green technology innovation depending on regions—the effects are stronger in the central and western regions than in the eastern region. Therefore, differentiated strategies of environmental decentralization should be developed for different regions. For the eastern coastal region where environmental government is in better conditions, environmental decentralization can be weakened, while capital and technological support can be strengthened to match the path dependence of green technology innovation in the region. Meanwhile, in the ecologically fragile central and western regions, the central government may reinforce the power of local governments for environmental supervision and intervention so as to construct the ecological framework through the joint efforts of the central government and central and western provinces. An in-depth study is performed on how green technology innovation is affected by local government competition and the diversity of environmental decentralization and conclusions are drawn that can provide reference for designing an effective stimulation and restrictive mechanism to improve the positive influences of decentralization on green technology innovation.