This randomized trial evaluates the relationship between green innovation and urban sustainable development efficiency, indicating significant implications for urban planning.
As the pivotal component of the innovation-driven strategy, green innovation has been increasingly recognized as a viable pathway to achieve harmony among economy, society, and ecological environment. Therefore, it holds significant guiding implications to investigate how green innovation drives the improvement in urban sustainable development efficiency. Employing China’s prefecture-level panel dataset (excluding Xizang Autonomous Region, Hong Kong Special Administration Region, Macao Special Administration Region, and Taiwan Province due to missing data) during 2004–2022, this study evaluated the direction and extent of the impact of green innovation on urban sustainable development efficiency through adopting combining super-efficiency Slack Based Measure (SBM) model and Driving-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. The results indicated that green innovation could make improvements in urban sustainable development efficiency through improving energy efficiency and driving industrial structure upgrading. In addition, compared with utility model green innovation, invention-based green innovation exerted a more pronounced role in urban sustainable development efficiency. Heterogeneity tests demonstrated that large cities and cluster cities enable themselves to enhance urban sustainable development efficiency through green innovation more than small to medium-sized cities and non-cluster cities. Spatial analysis revealed that green innovation imposes a significant spillover effect. Specifically, supported by the pollution haven hypothesis and siphon effect, the increased green innovation level in the neighboring cities may inhabit the local city’s sustainable development efficiency to certain degree. Based on these findings, the government can regularly hold cross-city seminars to share green technology case studies and provide financial and technological compensation to surrounding areas that have sacrificed development opportunities for the sake of protecting the environment, so as to better promote China’s green innovation capability and sustainable development efficiency.
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Niu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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