Abstract Institutional inertia and development path dependence have increasingly constrained improvements in green total factor productivity (GTFP). This study develops a theoretical framework to examine how public services influence urban innovation and GTFP, and conducts an empirical analysis using panel data from 272 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019. The results indicate that higher-quality public services significantly enhance urban innovation, which subsequently promotes GTFP, and this relationship remains robust across multiple sensitivity tests. Further analysis shows that public services foster urban innovation mainly through human capital accumulation and industrial agglomeration, which raise technological efficiency and thereby improve GTFP. These findings provide new evidence on the interplay between social development and economic performance, offering a productivity-based perspective to evaluate the role of public expenditure in supporting sustainable urban growth.
Liu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.