Exploring the impact of energy factor prices and environmental regulation on China’s green innovation efficiency

This study adopts super-DEA model to measure the current level of green innovation efficiency in Chinese provinces. At the same time, Tobit model is used to analyze the impact of energy factor prices and environmental regulation on its efficiency, the results are as follows: (1) Chinese green innovation efficiency average is 0.545, which is at a low level, but shows a steady upward trend. The results have shown that large differences exist in different provinces. Average value of efficiency is highest in the eastern and lowest in the western, and low green innovation efficiency is focus on main provinces of producing coal-based mineral resources. (2) The price change of energy factors inhibits the national green innovation efficiency. The impact on the eastern part of China is positive, but did not pass the significance test, and in central region is negative and also did not pass test, but in the western, it inhibits green innovation efficiency significantly. Environmental regulation has a negative effect on the national green innovation efficiency, the impact coefficient of east is positive, and also positive in the central part, but it fails to pass significance test, while in the west is negative. It can be seen that there are significant regional differences in the impact of the two on the efficiency of green innovation. This paper proposes that we can pay attention to the promotion of environmental regulation, encourages enterprises to actively carry out green innovation activities, continues to deepen the market-oriented reform of energy prices, and increases credit support and introduce financial resources for corporate R&D activities to explore policies to improve the efficiency of regional green innovation.