Technological innovation on economic growth from the perspective of investment-oriented environmental regulations: considering the threshold effect of China human capital

ABSTRACT

An investment-oriented environment and its regulations are the inevitable background when major economies face investment-driven economic development. While technological innovation helps form a compensatory or cost-based development path for economic growth, human capital plays a regulatory role in this development path as the largest dynamic and unstable variable. This research thus conducts a regulatory framework with an empirical study of the threshold effect from different levels of human capital investment on technological innovation and economic growth in four industries. The main conclusions are as follows: 1)We divide technological innovation caused by investment-based environmental regulation into active technological innovation.Passive technological innovation and subsequently identify the quantitative change effect of technological innovation on economic growth under investment-based environmental regulation. 2)Taking the human capital of different industries as threshold variables, we examine the threshold effect of investment-based environmental regulations and confirm the threshold value of different industries. 3)Through lagging second-order stability analysis, we basically solve the endogenous problem of investment-based environmental regulations, in which the relevant estimation conclusions appear more robust. Lastly, this research offers corresponding policy recommendations.

KEYWORDS:

• Investment-based environmental regulation
• technological innovation
• threshold effect
• human capital

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the 2020 National Social Science Fund Project [Number 20BTJ018]; Key projects of the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences key research base under Grant [Number 13ZBZD01]; Jiangxi Provincial Department of Education in Science and Technology project 2019 under Grant [Number GJJ190271];2020 Philosophy and social sciences academic excellence training project in Nanchang University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2020 National Social Science Fund Project [Number 20BTJ018]; Key projects of the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences key research base under Grant [Number 13ZBZD01]; Jiangxi Provincial Department of Education in Science and Technology project 2019 under Grant [Number GJJ190271]; 2020 Philosophy and social sciences academic excellence training project in Nanchang University.