Environmental benefits of innovation policy: China's national independent innovation demonstration zone policy and haze control

In recent years, China has focused its development on technological innovation, trying to achieve a win-win situation between environmental protection and economic growth, and it has formulated a series of policies to promote technological innovation. Taking China's national independent innovation demonstration zone (NIIDZ) policy as an example, this paper empirically investigates the impact of China's innovation policy on haze pollution by using a difference-in-differences (DID) model. The results show that the NIIDZ policy promotes the governance of urban haze pollution and confirms the applicability of the experimentalist governance model in the practice of innovation policy in developing countries. Dynamic analysis shows that the NIIDZ policy has an experience accumulation effect. This policy can continue to promote haze control for at least 6 years, and the policy effect increases year by year. Action mechanism analysis shows that the NIIDZ policy can inhibit urban haze pollution by promoting urban technological innovation and high-tech industrial agglomeration. The estimation results of the spatial DID model show that the NIIDZ policy not only inhibits haze pollution in NIIDZ cities but also has an inhibitory effect on haze pollution in the surrounding non-NIIDZ cities and the NIIDZ cities, which confirms the positive externality characteristics of policy diffusion theory and environmental governance. The conclusions of this paper have important theoretical value for understanding the ecological effect of innovation policy and provide experience for developing countries to implement an experimentalist governance model.