Do sci-tech finance policies improve urban environmental quality? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Offers robust causal evidence on the effectiveness of sci-tech finance policies for environmental quality, useful for researchers studying green transition and policy evaluation.

🏛政策担当者:Demonstrates that targeted financial policies can enhance environmental quality without sacrificing economic growth, informing policy design for sustainable urban development.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires policy instruments that can improve environmental quality without undermining economic development, particularly in rapidly urbanizing economies. This study examines whether China’s sci-tech finance pilot policy contributes to urban green transition. Treating the policy as a quasi-natural experiment, this study constructs a panel of 294 prefecture-level cities from 2001 to 2023, including 49 pilot cities, and estimates a difference-in differences model to identify its environmental effect. The baseline results show that the policy significantly improves urban environmental quality, with an estimated coefficient of 0.087. This finding remains robust when using the Callaway and Sant’Anna estimator, which yields an average treatment effect on the treated of 0.102. Mechanism analysis indicates that the policy operates through two quantitatively important channels: the indirect effect through green technological innovation is 0.040, while the indirect effect through industrial upgrading is 0.059. Both effects are statistically significant and supported by bootstrap confidence intervals that exclude zero. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the environmental effect is stronger in cities with weaker conventional financial development and remains significant in both resource-dependent and non-resource-dependent cities. Additional analyses show that the policy effect is positive across the distribution of environmental quality and is not associated with significant losses in GDP per capita, population agglomeration, or aggregate economic growth. Overall, the findings indicate that market-oriented financial intervention can support environmentally sustainable urban development while maintaining development stability, thereby offering empirical evidence relevant to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1856383first seen 2026-06-22 05:18:28