Towards Sustainable Development: The Impact of Data Elements on the Quantity and Quality of Urban Green Technology Innovation in China

Abstract

Identifying new drivers of urban green technology innovation is important for sustainable development. Drawing on Marx’s theory of productive forces, this study examines how data-element development relates to the quantity and quality of urban green technology innovation, using a balanced panel of 297 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities over 2011–2023, a city-level data-element development index based on the entropy weighting method, and two-way fixed-effects models. Data-element development is positively associated with both dimensions, and this association holds across a series of robustness checks. Mechanism analysis links data-element development to lower resource misallocation, which raises both dimensions, and to stronger university–industry research collaboration, with a relatively larger contribution to quality. Environmental regulation intensity reinforces the effect on both dimensions; the interaction with government internet-service responsiveness is significant over 2015–2023, the period for which the measure is consistently recorded, and is reported as supplementary evidence. Heterogeneity tests show larger effects in less-developed cities for both dimensions; across the Hu Huanyong Line and by population size, the between-group differences are significant for the quantity dimension. The results are consistent with the effect depending on whether a city has the complementary conditions in place that make data usable rather than on economic development level alone.