Spatio-Temporal Characteristics,Regional Differences and Dynamic Evolution of Green Finance Development Level in China

As an emerging field that integrates finance and environmental protection, green finance aims to promote sustainable development and environmental protection through financial instruments and market mechanisms. The Chinese green finance market is rapidly emerging as a significant force in the global green finance arena. This paper applies methods such as entropy weight method, Dagum Gini coefficient, kernel density estimation, and spatial Markov chain to analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics, regional differences, and dynamic evolution of China’s green finance development level from 2010 to 2021. The results of the study indicate that the comprehensive index of China’s green finance development level has been increasing, with the mean comprehensive index of green finance development level showing a pattern of "East >National>Central>West". The overall level of green finance development in Chinese provinces has been increasing as a whole, and the level of some provinces has been moving upwards. The regional differences in green finance development level have been decreasing over the study period, with the central region having the smallest regional differences and the eastern region having the largest. From the perspective of distribution dynamics, it can be seen that the degree of imbalance in the green finance regional development in China is gradually increasing, with polarization phenomenon existing. The green finance development of Chinese provinces does not exist in isolation, and there is a certain degree of interdependence among them. When the green finance development level of neighboring provinces is better than that of the local area, it is conducive to the improvement of the local green finance development level, and there is the possibility of leapfrogging transfer.