Green digital finance and technology diffusion

Abstract Technology diffusion is essential for sustainable development. However, traditional financing faces structural problems in supporting technological innovation and diffusion. Fortunately, greening and digitalisation have become important directions for the financial development. It’s well worth examining whether green digital finance would promote the diffusion of technology among regions. Therefore, this study explores the causal relationship between green digital finance and technology diffusion using the panel data of 35,532 ‘citing city-cited city’ pair observations from 2002 to 2015. Considering different spatial spillover effects of administrative boundaries and geographic distances, it applies and extends the classic spatial Dubin model with a dual-weighted boundary and distance. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, green digital finance shows significant and considerable spatial stimulus effects, particularly in terms of spatial diffusion across cities. A slight cumulative phenomenon is revealed for different technology diffusion durations. Green digital credit, investment, and support have better stimulating effects on technology diffusion. Second, digital economy and market integration are effective mechanism pathways during this stimulating process of green digital finance on technology diffusion. Digitalisation innovation has a better mechanism effect than others. Third, considering the direction of technology diffusion, the diffusion effect from the east-region cities was better than that from the central-west-region cities.