Does green technology innovation contribute to energy efficiency improvement: Empirical evidence from Chinese cities

To achieve carbon neutrality, energy efficiency improvement is an essential step. This paper measures the Malmquist energy productivity index (MEPI) to model the dynamics of total factor energy productivity utilizing the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method. We found evidence that city-level total factor energy efficiency (TFEE) has been greatly improved in China. However, there are significant regional differences among different cities. Then, this paper empirically examines the heterogeneous impacts of green technology innovation (GTI) on energy efficiency, and takes environmental regulation into consideration. The results show that GTI contributes to improving energy efficiency in cities with higher environmental regulations. Further, green innovation mainly improves the total factor energy productivity through technological progress instead of the catch-up effect. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).