Spatiotemporal consistency effect of green finance on pollution emissions and its geographic attenuation process

Improving the ecological quality is one of the essential goals of green finance, while interaction between green finance and environmental development has not reached an agreement yet. Using the panel data of 30 provinces from 2010 to 2020, based on the advantage of PTRM-SPDM (Spatial Panel Threshold Durbin Model), this study empirically analyses the relationship between green finance and pollutants emissions from the perspective of the spatiotemporal combination process. After confirming the characteristics of nonlinear constraints and spatial spillovers between green finance and pollutants emissions, the spatiotemporal consistency effects are explored, and the geographic attenuation process, including spatial spillover boundary and influencing dense areas, is also calculated. Results show that: (1) with the development of green finance in China, the environmental effects of green finance transfer gradually from local to adjacent areas, the unit elasticity of green finance decreases by 0.15, 0.19, and 0.22 on emissions of industrial sulfur dioxide, wastewater, and dust in local areas, respectively, while increases by 0.64, 0.02, and 0.82 in neighbouring regions correspondingly. (2) from the evolution trend of the peak value of Kernel density, it could be captured that the overall degree improves and the regional gap narrows for China's green finance in the past decade. (3) the effects of green finance on pollutants emissions merely exist in areas with a radius of about 1500–1750 km and reach the peak in the vicinity of around 1450–1750 km.