Research Information System
Environmental Modeling and Assessment, vol.30, no.5, pp.1147-1167, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Balancing economic growth and environmental sustainability has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges for emerging markets, such as China, where accelerated industrialization remains a significant source of high-carbon emissions despite green investment and advanced innovation. This paper investigates the effect of green technology (GT) on green investments, energy investments, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across economically significant provinces of China from 1998 to 2020. We adopted the new Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) method to investigate the relationship between the variables. Our empirical results suggest that green technology does not contribute to green investments in China and, contrary to expectations, leads to higher CO2 emissions. Green technology is found to lead to energy investments. Verifying an inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve indicates that China has not yet reached the threshold on the Kuznets curve, which explains these results. It was found that industrial value is vital in strengthening green and energy investment, while financial value does not deliver the same effect, exhibiting heterogeneous impacts across provinces. This implies approval of an inverted U-shaped EKC in the environmental-economic relationship, but this relationship has not yet reached a turning point in China. As provinces develop economically, environmental effects that are detrimental to the environment accompany economic development and diminish as that development matures, a shift that has not yet been realized regarding the implementation of green technology.