Can informal environmental regulation induce green innovation?: verification from the perspective of ENGOs.

Green innovation is the key to achieving a win-win situation between economic growth and environmental pollution control. Informal environmental regulation, represented by ENGOs, is playing an increasingly important role. This article used the 'Pollution Information Transparency Index' (PITI) of 113 cities in 2008, jointly published by two ENGOs (IPE and NRDC), as a quasi-natural experiment, and evaluated the 'net effect' of green innovation of informal environmental regulation by the identification methods of DID and DID-PSM. The main research conclusions were as follows: (1) Informal environmental regulation did induce urban green innovation. After passing a series of parallel trend tests, DID-PSM regression tests and placebo tests, the results were still robust. (2) From the perspective of regional heterogeneity, it was concluded that more attention was paid to informal environmental regulation in the eastern and western regions, which responded more positively to the release of PITI, while the central region received less impact. From the perspective of time trend, the green innovation effect induced by informal environmental regulation was the strongest in the first year of policy implementation, and then showed a trend of weakening year by year. (3) The green innovation effect of informal environmental regulation was more obvious in cities with higher level of government environmental information disclosure. In addition, the information diffusion level of cities also affected the green innovation effect to a certain extent. In comparison with the level of urban information diffusion, the green innovation effect of informal environmental regulation was more significantly affected by the level of environmental information disclosure. (4) After eliminating a series of other environmental policy shocks that were likely to affect urban green innovation activities, such as carbon emissions trading pilots in the same period, carbon emissions trading pilots in five provinces and eight cities, and sulfur dioxide emissions trading pilots, the green innovation of informal environmental regulation still existed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]