Revisiting the nexus between financial agglomeration and energy efficiency: A spatial spillover approach

ABSTRACT

Financial agglomeration (FA) may play an essential role in enhancing energy efficiency (EE) and, thus, is important from both theoretical and empirical viewpoints. However, few studies have investigated the causal nonlinear relationship between FA and EE. Hence, we first extend the novel ray slacks-based measure with global technology to evaluate the urban EE in China during 2003–2018. Next, we reexamine the nonlinear causality of FA on EE and then explore the underlying impact mechanism. The empirical results show that China’s urban EE is generally relatively low with distinct patterns of regional differences. Moreover, we find that the causal relationship between FA and EE follows an inverted U-shaped function rather than a linear one. FA promotes the improvement of EE only up to a certain threshold point, after which it reverses into an inhibitory effect. A further analysis based on the two-regime spatial Durbin panel model suggests that FA can indeed improve the EE of surrounding cities through positive externalities when the degree of FA in focal cities is not substantially greater than that in surrounding cities. However, when financial resources absorbed in certain focal cities become increasingly higher than that in most surrounding cities, the positive spillover effect would gradually disappear and even reverse into an undesirable siphon, thereby inhibiting the improvement of overall EE. These findings provide new insights for understanding the role of FA in sustainable development.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial agglomeration
• energy efficiency
• ray slacks-based measure
• spatial spillover effect
• siphon effect

Abbreviations

EE	=	Energy Efficiency
FA	=	Financial Agglomeration
GOVE	=	Government Intervention
FDI	=	Foreign Direct Investment
PGDP	=	Gross domestic product per capital
INFO	=	Information Development
PD	=	Population Density
PAT	=	Patent Applications
IS	=	Industrial Structure

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper

Authorship contribution statement

Fengrong Wang: Validation, Review, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Chenxi Zhang: Writing – original draft, Data curation, Investigation, Formal analysis. William Mbanyele: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Review, Formal analysis. Hongyun Huang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Tomas Balezentis: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15567249.2022.2118902

Notes

¹ Figure 1 (a), (b), (c), and (d) reported the oil, natural gas, coal energy consumption, and carbon emissions of China and the US from 1978 to 2018. All the data sources from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Available at: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics.html.

² See the Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers an important speech at the general debate of the 75th UN General Assembly. Available at: http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2020-09/22/content_5546168.htm..

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71573159); the Shandong Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. ZR2021MG011); the Shandong Social Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 21CJJJ09, 2020-NDJJ-07); the Major project of Humanities and Social Sciences Research of Shandong University (Grant No. 19RWZD05).