Sustainable Circular Path of Green Finance, Technological Innovation and Resident Ecological Welfare: Against the Background of Carbon Neutrality and Energy Transition

Many current studies have purely regarded green finance as green credit, ignoring the background of carbon neutrality and energy transition. This paper investigates the relationships among green finance, green technological innovation, and urban ecological welfare performance. Using 279 Chinese cities as examples, this paper reveals the following: there is (1) a direct positive effect, where a 0.1-unit absolute increase in the green finance index (GFI) is associated with an average 0.0605-unit rise in ecological welfare performance (EWP); (2) a partial mediation mechanism through green technological innovation, establishing a “finance → technology → ecology” pathway; (3) temporal persistence of positive effects across pre-2012 and post-2012 policy periods; and (4) regional disparities with significant impacts in Eastern/Western/Northeastern China but insignificant effects in Central China due to lower green credit allocation and weaker R&D intensity. Robustness checks, including Winsorization and subgroup analyses, validate these results. This study advances the integration of environmental finance with sustainable development theory, offering actionable insights for achieving ecological welfare goals.