| Abstract |
Green finance is an important financial tool designed to support environmental protection and sustainable development, including providing funding, investment, and financing for environmental protection projects. This research calculates provincial export product quality indices using customs export data and explores the impact of green finance on them. The findings reveal the following. First, green finance effectively enhances the quality of provincial export products. Second, green finance boosts product quality through four pathways: environmental regulation, pollution index, green total factor productivity, and technological innovation. Third, the positive impact of green finance is greater for technology-intensive products, products with high technological complexity, and digital products. Fourth, secondary indicators of green finance, including green insurance, green credit, and carbon finance, significantly influence product quality. Finally, environment regulations play a role of partial mediation whereby green finance affects export production quality in highly polluted provinces, but exhibits full mediation in lowly polluted provinces. Governments and decision makers should thus give green finance a higher priority and take China's example as being rather applicable to other districts. |