Does Green Credit Promote Enterprise Technological Catch-up?

Jin Xiangyi, Sun Mengling

Journal of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Vol. 26, Issue 05, pp. 60 - 74 (2024)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jsufe.2024.05.005

Summary

The Chinese economy is currently in a dual trap of widening technological gap and declining environmental governance effectiveness, indicating that the allocation of financial resources, which serves as a lubricant for economic operation, has a certain degree of distortion. Traditional credit resource reallocation cannot alleviate the contradiction between environmental governance and production technology improvement for enterprises. Therefore, how green credit guides manufacturing enterprises to achieve technological catch-up is an important practical exploration for enterprise development and ecological environment improvement. Adopting data from China’s manufacturing listed companies from 2008 to 2018, this paper utilizes the Green Credit Guidelines introduced in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the effect of green credit policies on enterprise technological catch-up using the DID method. The results show that green credit policies significantly increase the speed of manufacturing enterprises catching up with technology, and have a “reverse-pressure” effect on polluting enterprises. In the robustness test, after considering issues such as replacement of technological measurement methods, key industries with restrictions, segmenting pollution indicators, extreme pollution index values, and sequence correlation, the driving effect of green credit on technological catch-up of manufacturing enterprises still exists. Heterogeneity testing finds that green credit policies have a more significant driving effect on state-owned domestic enterprises, large enterprises, enterprises in the eastern region, and high capital-intensive enterprises. Mechanism testing shows that deepening enterprise digital transformation and alleviating resource allocation distortion are effective channels for green credit to promote manufacturing enterprises to achieve technological catch-up. This paper analyzes and explains the role of green credit in enterprise technological catch-up, providing inspiration for the green and intelligent transformation and upgrading of Chinese manufacturing enterprises.

Keywords

technological catch-up; manufacturing industry; green credit; digital transformation; resource allocation distortion