绿色信贷政策与高排放产业链集聚

Abstract

Against the backdrop of rising global uncertainty, local governments in China have increasingly shifted their development strategies from traditional industry-oriented investment promotion toward an industrial chain-based approach. This transition aims to encourage the spatial co-agglomeration of upstream, midstream, and downstream activities within the same industrial chain. For emission-intensive industries, such co-agglomeration is particularly important. Beyond reducing production costs and increasing efficiency through labor sharing and knowledge spillovers, closer spatial integration along the chain facilitates circular production processes and supports the green transformation of the entire industrial chain. Despite its growing policy relevance, however, little is known about how industrial chain agglomeration can be effectively promoted in emission-intensive industries. This paper argues that whether emission-intensive industries can move from single-industry agglomeration to industrial chain agglomeration crucially depends on the financing environment they face. Emission-intensive industries are typically capital-intensive and face substantial financing needs, making their location choices highly sensitive to external financing conditions. In China 's bank-dominated financial system, changes in the availability of bank credit to emission-intensive industries can therefore serve as a key lever in reshaping the spatial patterns of their industrial chains. To operationalize this idea, we construct an industry relatedness matrix for China 's manufacturing sectors based on multiple dimensions, including labor-pooling linkages, technological spillovers, input-output relationships, and shared markets or resources. This matrix allows us to identify sets of industries that are connected along the same industrial chain. We then measure the agglomeration level of each industry and its chain-related industries at the prefecture-city level using location quotients. Industrial chain agglomeration is captured by the correlation between the agglomeration of a focal industry and that of its related industries within the same chain. Building on this framework, we exploit the green credit policy as an exogenous shock to bank credit availability faced by emission-intensive industries. Using firm-level data from China's Industrial Enterprise Database (2004-2015), we examine how this financing shock reshapes the spatial co-agglomeration of emission-intensive industrial chains. Our empirical results show that the green credit policy significantly promotes the spatial co-agglomeration of different production stages within emission-intensive industrial chains at the city level. This finding remains robust after excluding alternative explanations, mitigating endogeneity concerns, and conducting pre-trend tests as well as a series of additional robustness checks. Mechanism analysis indicates that, following the policy-induced green credit shock, emission-intensive industries relocate toward clusters of upstream and downstream industries in order to obtain greater access to trade credit, which constitutes the primary channel through which industrial chain agglomeration is strengthened. Moreover, we find that, unlike single-industry agglomeration that mainly reduces emissions through scale effects, industrial chain agglomeration generates a circular emission-reduction mechanism by enhancing water recycling and reducing external wastewater discharges. This paper contributes to the existing literature in three main ways. First, while prior studies on green credit policy focus primarily on firm-level outcomes such as emission reduction and green innovation, this paper extends the analysis to the spatial patterns of emission-intensive industries. Second, whereas most studies on industrial spatial patterns in China emphasize single-industry agglomeration, this paper shifts attention to industrial chain agglomeration and identifies a policy channel through which such agglomeration can be fostered in emission-intensive industries. Third, in contrast to existing studies that highlight scale-based emission reductions within single industries, this paper demonstrates that industrial chain agglomeration can generate additional environmental benefits through enhanced resource recycling and inter-industry coordination.