Digital–Real Technological Integration and Manufacturing Green Invention in Chinese Cities: Evidence on Green Knowledge Creation and Production Performance

Vollständiger Abstract

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Digital technologies may support environmental innovation when combined with production-specific knowledge, but green knowledge creation and realized production performance are distinct stages. Using an unbalanced panel of 280 Chinese prefecture-level cities, we examine associations between patent-based digital–real technological integration (DRTI) and manufacturing green invention during 2014–2024, with production outcomes during 2014–2022 as a separate production-stage assessment. DRTI is positively associated with invention volume and population-normalized intensity in the main models; invention share is retained as a secondary compositional outcome and is less robust to measurement stress tests. Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimates imply that a 10% increase in (1 + DRTI) is associated with about 3.5% more invention applications. In an additional patent-level reconstruction for 2014–2023, excluding entire patents with any green-related IPC removes about 45% of the digital–real pair counts. The resulting Conservative Non-Green DRTI remains positively associated with invention volume and population-normalized intensity, including under PPML, while the share association becomes statistically insignificant. Production evidence is mixed: level and selected long-difference estimates are positive, the city-specific trend estimate is null, the environmental productivity results vary by outcome, and lagged invention measures do not show a stable positive short-run relationship with production performance. Overall, DRTI is more consistently related to green knowledge creation than to realized production performance. The findings are associational rather than causal.