Smart city and green development: Empirical evidence from the perspective of green technological innovation

The smart city emerges as an innovation-driven strategy to achieve green development. While a large body of existing literature has assessed the environmental performance of the smart city, rarely does literature investigate the effect of smart city on green technological innovation, an essential part of and path to green development. This paper analyzes the impact of the smart city on green technological innovation through the Multi-period DID approach, using a dataset of Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2016. The baseline results show that smart city can promote green technological innovation. The heterogeneous tests show that the smart city's green technological innovation effects are heterogeneous by geographic location, urban population size, economic development level, and information facilities infrastructure. Moreover, the paper explores the role of green technological innovation as an essential mechanism of the other aspects of green development. The mediating effect analyses show that smart city can promote urban industry structure upgrading and green efficiency through green technological innovation.