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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1522197
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancing Carbon Reduction and Pollution Control Policies Management: Theoretical, Application, and Future Impacts View all 24 articles
Does Institutional Innovation Improve Environmental Performance? -A Quasi-natural Experiment Based on China's Service Trade Innovative Development Pilot Policy
Provisionally accepted- 1 Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, China
- 2 Research Center for the Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of Hubei Province, WUHAN, China
- 3 Wuhan Railway Vocational College of Technology, Wuhan, Hebei Province, China
This study employs Chinese urban panel data and a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the effects of China's service trade innovative development pilot policy on environmental performance and its underlying mechanisms. The findings indicate that institutional innovation in the service trade sector substantially enhances regional environmental performance, and this conclusion remains valid after a series of validity tests and robustness tests. The mechanism test results show that institutional innovation can improve environmental performance mainly by promoting green innovation ability and industrial structure upgrading. Heterogeneity analysis found that regions with greater government support, a higher level of service industry development, and a higher degree of openness were more likely to rely on institutional innovation to improve their environmental performance. This research offers valuable policy insights for advancing institutional innovation in service trade and formulating pollution control strategies in China and other developing nations.
Keywords: Environmental protection, institutional innovation, Service trade, environmental performance, Green development
Received: 04 Nov 2024; Accepted: 05 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xu, Wang and Lei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Siqi Wang, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, China
Lei Lei, Wuhan Railway Vocational College of Technology, Wuhan, Hebei Province, China
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