Growth of Green Total Factor Productivity and Its Determinants of Cities in China: A Spatial Econometric Approach

ABSTRACT

As pollution in Chinese cities worsens, there is renewed interest in promoting sustainable development across the country. This article introduces the global Malmquist–Luenberger productivity index (ML) to measure green total factor productivity (TFP) growth of 270 Chinese cities over the period 2003–2013. Empirical spatial econometrics is applied to analyze the spatial spillovers and the determinants of green TFP growth. Our results show that green TFP is a useful metric for measuring development, and that spatial spillover effects do exist among neighboring cities of similar development. Finally, the study provides some policy implications.

KEY WORDS:

• green TFP growth
• spatial spillovers
• the GML productivity index
• the spatial Durbin model

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding from the Projects 71333007 and 71301160 supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Project 14JZD021 supported by Ministry of Education of China, the Project 15JNKY001 supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the project supported by the Open Project of Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding from the Projects 71333007 and 71301160 supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Project 14JZD021 supported by Ministry of Education of China, the Project 15JNKY001 supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the project supported by the Open Project of Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences.