How to design regional characteristics to improve green economic efficiency: a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach

Developing green economy has become the focus of governments, scholars, and entrepreneurs all over the world; however, the realization path of green economic efficiency for the regions under the interaction of multiple factors has still been uncertain. This study takes 30 provincial-level regions in China as the empirical object and applies a new method of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the configuration of conditions for achieving green economic efficiency, which effectively improves the link between theory and practice. This study reveals that the improvement of green economy efficiency is the result of the joint action of multiple factors, and one factor in isolation is not enough for explaining it. Besides, there exist three equivalent paths to achieve high green economic efficiency; therefore, regions can design the most appropriate promotion strategy according to the determined paths. The result shows that high marketization is the core condition for achieving high green economy efficiency. Among the three paths, the combination of environmental regulation, urbanization, marketization, and technological innovation has the highest unique coverage, which alone explains how most regions have achieved high green economic efficiency. Third, four paths for achieving low green economy efficiency have been identified in this study, which provides lessons for regional governments to avoid the decline in green economy efficiency. And specially, the combination of high urbanization, high environment regulation, and high technological innovation can lead to low green economy efficiency because of low marketization. The conclusion improves the theory of green development and provides a practical reference for the regional government to develop green economy.