Efficiency measures of environmental innovation: evidence from China

The contradiction between environmental innovation efficiency and economic growth has increasingly become a major problem that plagues the sustainable development of the global economy. In order to explore the spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics of China’s provincial environmental innovation efficiency and the spatial spillover effect of China’s provincial environmental innovation efficiency, the entropy weight TOPSIS model is adopted to measure the environmental innovation efficiency of China’s 30-provinces (cities) from 2000 to 2016 and to analyze its temporal and spatial evolution characteristics. This paper uses an exploratory spatial data analysis method to prove the agglomeration phenomenon of China’s provincial environmental innovation efficiency in the ground space. Finally, a spatial econometric model is introduced to study the impact of government R&D investment, environmental supervision, and environmental innovation efficiency on spatial spillover effects. The study found the following three conclusions. First, the efficiency of environmental innovation in China’s provinces has been fluctuating in stages, and the overall trend has been increasing year by year. The overall efficiency of environmental innovation in China’s provinces is low, and the overall development is uneven and uncoordinated. Second, from the results of the spatial autocorrelation test, there is a clear and positive spatial correlation between China’s provincial environmental innovation efficiency and agglomeration in geospatial space. Third, government R&D inputs and different types of environmental regulations have a significant impact on environmental innovation efficiency and have significant spatial spillover effects. Along from the eastern region to the central region, then to the northeast and western regions, the degree of effect on environmental innovation efficiency and the intensity of spatial spillover effects have gradually weakened. It is believed that the government should reduce R&D investment in the eastern region, increase environmental sewage charges. Instead, the government should raise R&D investment in the central region, northeast, and western regions, and offer enterprises environmental innovation subsidies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.