Importing innovation or indigenous innovation: Evaluating the effect of climate finance on promoting environmental sustainability in developing countries

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-07-09 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108726

Jinhua Zhang , Yafei Li , Ruonan Du , Xiuping Hua

{"title":"Importing innovation or indigenous innovation: Evaluating the effect of climate finance on promoting environmental sustainability in developing countries","authors":"Jinhua Zhang , Yafei Li , Ruonan Du , Xiuping Hua","doi":"10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108726","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the influence of climate finance on the CO<sub>2</sub> emissions and explores the underlying mechanisms from the perspectives of external and indigenous innovations, with a cross-country panel dataset encompassing 140 developing countries from 2002 to 2022. The results indicate that climate finance has a negative and significant impact on CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in climate funds correlates with an approximate 3.31 % reduction in per GDP CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. However, heterogeneity analysis reveals that in the least developed countries, climate finance does not significantly reduce carbon emissions and, in some cases, may even enhance the carbon emissions. Mechanism analysis suggests that climate finance promotes environmental sustainability by introducing external innovation rather than promoting indigenous innovation in developing countries. These results shed new light on the pollution halo hypothesis in developing nations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":11665,"journal":{"name":"Energy Economics","volume":"149 ","pages":"Article 108726"},"PeriodicalIF":13.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Energy Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988325005535","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of climate finance on the CO₂ emissions and explores the underlying mechanisms from the perspectives of external and indigenous innovations, with a cross-country panel dataset encompassing 140 developing countries from 2002 to 2022. The results indicate that climate finance has a negative and significant impact on CO₂ emissions. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in climate funds correlates with an approximate 3.31 % reduction in per GDP CO₂ emissions. However, heterogeneity analysis reveals that in the least developed countries, climate finance does not significantly reduce carbon emissions and, in some cases, may even enhance the carbon emissions. Mechanism analysis suggests that climate finance promotes environmental sustainability by introducing external innovation rather than promoting indigenous innovation in developing countries. These results shed new light on the pollution halo hypothesis in developing nations.

查看原文本刊更多论文

引进创新或自主创新：评估气候融资对促进发展中国家环境可持续性的影响

本文利用涵盖140个发展中国家2002年至2022年的跨国面板数据集，研究了气候融资对二氧化碳排放的影响，并从外部创新和本土创新的角度探讨了其潜在机制。结果表明，气候融资对二氧化碳排放具有显著的负向影响。具体而言，气候资金每增加一个标准差，单位GDP二氧化碳排放量就会减少约3.31%。然而，异质性分析表明，在最不发达国家，气候融资并没有显著减少碳排放，在某些情况下甚至可能增加碳排放。机制分析表明，气候融资通过引入外部创新而非促进自主创新来促进发展中国家的环境可持续性。这些结果为发展中国家的污染光环假说提供了新的线索。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.