HOW DOES FOREIGN CAPITAL IMPACT URBAN GREEN DEVELOPMENT?EVIDENCE FROM CENTRAL CHINA

Background: Foreign capital, a significant component of the contemporary export-oriented economy, helps to solve ecological and environmental issues and encourages the green transformation of urban development techniques. This study develops an assessment framework for urban green development using panel data from 80 cities in Central China between 2007 and 2022. Simultaneously, the impact of foreign capital on urban green development was tested through the mechanism of green technological innovation using the panel mediating effect model, and the impact of economic development level on the impact of foreign capital on the same was tested using the threshold effect model. The primary research findings are as follows: (1) Foreign capital has greatly enhanced urban green development in Central China; (2) Green technology innovation acts as a major mediating variable in the process by which foreign capital influences urban green development; (3) Economic development has a single threshold effect on foreign capital influencing urban green development. This article suggests that the government focus more on the prudent use of foreign capital in light of the findings above. The study's findings offer an empirical foundation for more effectively encouraging urban green development as well as some theoretical direction for the long-term growth of human society in underdeveloped nations or areas. Objective: The objective of this study is to explore the key factors affecting urban green development in Central China, including the direct impact of foreign capital, the mediating effect of green technology innovation and the threshold effect of economic development, with the aim of improving urban green development in Central China. Theoretical Framework: This study mainly refers to Sustainable Development Theory and Schumpeterian Innovation Theory

Originalidade/Valor: Este estudo contribui para a literatura por se basear em dados oficiais do Departamento Nacional de Estatísticas da China e usar uma série de métodos empíricos reconhecidos para estudar o desenvolvimento verde urbano da China Central e os principais fatores de influência.que não só enriquece a investigação sobre o desenvolvimento verde urbano na China Central, como também fornece uma referência para o desenvolvimento verde e o desenvolvimento internacional noutras regiões em desenvolvimento na China e noutros países ou regiões em desenvolvimento em todo o mundo.

¿CÓMO IMPACTA EL CAPITAL EXTRANJERO EN EL DESARROLLO VERDE URBANO?
EVIDENCIAS DE CHINA CENTRAL RESUMEN Antecedentes: El capital extranjero, un componente importante de la economía contemporánea orientada a la exportación, ayuda a resolver problemas ecológicos y ambientales y fomenta la transformación verde de las técnicas de desarrollo urbano.Este estudio desarrolla un marco de evaluación para el desarrollo verde urbano utilizando datos de panel de 80 ciudades del centro de China entre 2007 y 2022.Simultáneamente, se probó el impacto del capital extranjero en el desarrollo verde urbano a través del mecanismo de innovación tecnológica verde utilizando el modelo de efecto mediador de panel., y el impacto del nivel de desarrollo económico sobre el impacto del capital extranjero sobre el mismo se probó utilizando el modelo de efecto umbral.Los principales hallazgos de la investigación son los siguientes: (1) El capital extranjero ha mejorado enormemente el desarrollo urbano verde en China central; (2) La innovación en tecnología verde actúa como una variable mediadora importante en el proceso por el cual el capital extranjero influye en el desarrollo verde urbano; (3) El desarrollo económico tiene un efecto de umbral único sobre el capital extranjero que influye en el desarrollo verde urbano.Este artículo sugiere que el gobierno se centre más en el uso prudente del capital extranjero a la luz de los hallazgos anteriores.Los hallazgos del estudio ofrecen una base empírica para fomentar más eficazmente el desarrollo verde urbano, así como alguna dirección teórica para el crecimiento a largo plazo de la sociedad humana en naciones o áreas subdesarrolladas.
Objetivo: El objetivo de este estudio es explorar los factores clave que afectan el desarrollo verde urbano en China central, incluido el impacto directo del capital extranjero, el efecto mediador de la innovación en tecnología verde y el efecto umbral del desarrollo económico, con el objetivo de mejorar las zonas urbanas.Desarrollo verde en China Central.
Método: El método de la entropía se utiliza para medir el grado de desarrollo verde urbano.La regresión de referencia se utiliza para analizar el impacto directo del capital extranjero en el desarrollo verde urbano.El modelo mediador se utiliza para analizar el papel mediador de la innovación en tecnología verde en el impacto del capital extranjero en el desarrollo verde urbano.El modelo de umbral se utiliza para analizar el efecto umbral del desarrollo económico sobre el capital extranjero al afectar el desarrollo verde urbano.

Implicaciones de la investigación:
Se discuten las implicaciones prácticas y teóricas de esta investigación, que proporciona nuevas ideas para el desarrollo urbano verde en China central desde la perspectiva del capital extranjero.Y no se puede ignorar el papel de la innovación en tecnologías verdes y el desarrollo económico.Esto no sólo está en consonancia con el tema mundial del desarrollo verde y sostenible, sino que también favorece la aceleración del proceso de internacionalización de China Central.Y esta investigación también proporciona apoyo teórico para el desarrollo verde en países o regiones en desarrollo.

INTRODUCTION
Foreign capital is an important symbol of a country or region's opening up to the outside world and an important driving factor for sustainable development.Theory A researcher and developer, and also the founder of neo-Schumpeterism, C. Freeman also focuses on the key role of technological innovation in promoting the increase of social welfare.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS
Ecological and environmental issues have become internationalized (Milani, C. R.,2009).With the growing importance of the concept of sustainable development (Pires, F. M., & Fischer, A. L.,2014),studies have indicated that foreign direct investment (FDI) has the potential to impact the host nation's environmental protection as well as economic growth (Yue, S., Yang, Y., & Hu, Y., 2016).All things considered, it benefits China's cities' efforts to safeguard the environment and promote green growth.Positive effects result from increased green total factor productivity (Yu, D., Li, X., Yu, J., & Li, H., 2021) 6 sustainable economic growth and development be accomplished (Khan, M. A., & Ozturk, I., 2020).As a result, the first hypothesis (H1) of this article is that using foreign capital will make positively impact urban green development directly in Central China.
In order to foster technological innovation, capital is crucial (Ding, C., Liu, C., Zheng, C., & Li, F., 2021).Many academics have currently investigated the connection between foreign capital and technological or green innovation.Foreign capital inflows have the potential to stimulate the global diffusion of innovative technologies (Wu, J., Ma, Z., & Zhuo, S., 2017).
This, in turn, may enhance the technological innovation level of the receiving nation (  (2) Construct the original data matrix.Among them, X={xaij|0≦i≦m,0≦j≦n}. (1) (3) Standardized processing.Since indicators contain many dimensions, there are also great differences in measurement units between indicators.In order to eliminate the impact of this dimensional problem on data analysis, all indicators need to be standardized.Indicators are divided into positive and negative.In addition, in order to avoid meaningless status after logarithmic processing of data, it is also possible to consider whether it is necessary to shift the  In the above formula, Sai represents the comprehensive evaluation score of the i-th year in the a-th region.The larger the value, the higher the comprehensive evaluation level.

MEDIATING EFFECT MODEL
The following are the steps to test the mediating effect.To find out if foreign capital has a major impact on urban green development, a direct effect model is first built.And to ascertain if foreign capital will influence urban green development through green technology innovation, an mediating variable is added to the model.Based on the research hypothesis, a basic model of the impact of foreign capital introduction on urban green development was constructed to measure its direct effect.After that, a model of the mediating effect is constructed in two steps.To build a regression model first, based on the independent variable foreign capital and the mediating variable green technology innovation; then, to build a regression model based on the dependent variable urban green development, utilizing the independent variable foreign capital and the mediating variable green technology innovation.
(11) (12) In the above formula, UGDi,t represents the urban green development of the i-th city in year t; FCi,t represents the foreign capital of the i-th city in year t; GTIi,t represents the level of foreign capital in the i-th city in year t; The green technology innovation level of city i; CVi,t represents the total effect of the control variables of city i in year t; μi, δt, and εi,t represent individual fixed effects, time fixed effects and random error terms respectively.

THRESHOLD EFFECT MODEL
In order to further examine the impact of foreign capital utilization on urban green development under the influence of complex variables, this article will construct a threshold effect model (as shown below) to test the threshold effect of the threshold variable economic development in the process of foreign capital utilization affecting urban green development.
(13) Among them, φ is the coefficient, reflecting the impact of foreign capital utilization levels on urban green development under different economic development conditions, γ is the threshold value, I(.) is the indicator function, which takes 1 when the conditions in the brackets are met, otherwise takes 0, and the rest symbols represent the same meaning as Formula (8).

Variables
Dependent Variable(DV).Urban green development is a comprehensive concept.This study establishes an indicator system for urban green development from three aspects: government management, enterprise development, and residents' lives.The urban green development level score (UGD) measured using the entropy method will be used as the dependent variable.Table 1 shows the urban green development level of 80 cities in Central China from 2007 to 2022 measured using the entropy method (due to the limited page width, this part only displays data for 9 years and 20 cities).This will serve as a proxy indicator for urban green development.Independent Variables (IV).The introduction of foreign capital is an important symbol of a country's foreign economic development.This article chooses actual utilization of foreign capital (FC) as a measure of foreign capital because it is more accurate and detailed than FDI.Furthermore, the primary sources of data used in this article are the "China Urban Statistical Yearbook", "Government Work Report", and "Wind Database".It is hereby stated that in order to facilitate measurement statistics and eliminate the influence of heteroskedasticity, this study has cleaned the original data, and the logarithmized data will be used as research data for empirical analysis.In addition, due to missing data for individual cities in individual years, this study uses interpolation methods to scientifically supplement the data.Table 2 shows the results of descriptive statistical analysis.It can be seen from the results in Table 3: In the past ten years, Central China's urban green development level has been greatly improved, but it is still at a medium stage.With China's continuous reform and opening up, and the deepening of globalization, Central China's actual use of foreign capital.The level of green technology innovation in Central China has been greatly improved.Although the improvement in Central China's green technology innovation level is not obvious, the quality of economic development as a threshold variable has been greatly improved.The standard error data are not at the same level.This is because Central China has a vast territory and the development of various indicators in various cities is uneven.But this does not affect the conclusion of this article.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This article will use Stata17.0 software for empirical analysis.

BASELINE REGRESSION RESULTS
First, as shown in Table 4, the baseline regression model verifies the direct impact of foreign capital on urban green development.The first column shows the direct impact of FC on UGD without control variables; the second column shows the impact of FC on UGD when control variables are added and the city is controlled; the third column shows the impact of adding controls After variables, and controlling for year and city, the impact of FC on UGD.
Table 3 shows that the results are significant regardless of which baseline regression method is used.Therefore, hypothesis 1 is proved to be true.

ROBUSTNESS TEST
In order to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the regression results, this article tests the robustness of the regression results by reducing the sample size and changing the regression method.

Reduce Sample Size
This study will test the robustness of the regression model by reducing the sample size.First, the time dimension of the sample is reduced from the original 2007-2022 to 2013-2022.Second, since the development of provincial capital cities is relatively complete, the data of six provincial capital cities, namely Taiyuan, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Changsha, Nanchang and Hefei, were deleted.After data processing, regression analysis was performed.Figure 3 shows that the results are still significant, indicating that the model is robust.

Replacing the Regression Method
This study initially used regression analysis based on fixed effects.This part will use the least squares method for regression testing.Figure 4 shows that the regression results are still significant, indicating that the model is robust.

Figure 4
Regression Results of Robustness Test (2)

MEDIATING EFFECT RESULTS
Figure 5 shows the results of the mediating effect tested based on the Bootstrap method.
It can be seen that the direct effect of foreign capital level on promoting urban green development is 0.0017741, and the confidence interval is [0.000609, 0.0029391], excluding 0; through green technology innovation The resulting indirect effect _bs_1 coefficient is 0.0038465, and the confidence interval is [0.0005618,0.0071312],excluding 0. The results show that both the intermediary effect and the direct effect are significant, indicating that the actual level of foreign capital utilization has significantly improved urban green development in Central China through green technology innovation.Therefore, hypothesis 2 is proved to be true.

Figure 4 Mediation Effect Test Results Based on Bootstrap Method
Source: Author (2024)

THRESHOLD EFFECT RESULTS
The degree of economic growth was employed as the threshold variable, and 300 samples were taken regularly for testing using the Bootstrap technique.The threshold value is 2.8931, and Figure 6 and 7 demonstrate that the p value of the single threshold effect is less than 0.01 and significant at the 1% confidence level.The double-threshold effect and the threethreshold effect are not shown in this section since they failed the significance test.As a result, hypothesis 3 is validated.(12) Among them, γ is the threshold value 2.8931, I is the indicator function, and the threshold value is the dividing point, and "0~1" dummy variables I1 and I2 are set.When GDPi, t≤2.8931,I1=1, otherwise I1=0; when GDPi, t>2.8931,I2=1, otherwise I2=0.Table 4 displays the individual regression results.The findings show that, at the 5% level, the impact coefficient of foreign capital utilization on urban green development is always significantly positive.Furthermore, the regression coefficient of the foreign capital variable, or the impact of foreign capital on urban green development, increases as the level of economic development rises above the 2.8931 threshold.Foreign capital will always have a stronger promoting influence on urban green development when economic development beyond a certain threshold.

CONCLUSION
This article focuses on the viability and influencing aspects of urban green development, using 80 cities in Central China as its research objective.The following are the primary conclusions: First, the infusion of foreign investment will greatly and favorably encourage the green growth of central region cities.Second, innovation in green technology will be leveraged by foreign finance to advance urban green development.Third, the effects of foreign capital utilization on urban green development vary depending on the stage of economic expansion.
Lastly, we made several recommendations for future improvements to urban green development in Central China.This research still has certain shortcomings.For instance, the statistical indicators used in this study could not be adequate or able to adequately capture the more important problems or occurrences of the research item.Future research on the relationship between foreign capital consumption and urban sustainable development can be conducted with greater rigor if pertinent statistical data is added.
Figure 1Research Framework

For
Capital Impact Urban Green Development?Evidence from Central China ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.3 | p.1-21 | e06719 | 2024.8 logarithmic data to the left or right by a number of units to ensure that the data is meaningful.The steps for standardization processing are as follows: In the formula, Zaij is the standardized value, xmax and xmin respectively represent the maximum and minimum values of all j-th indicators.(4) Normalization of indicators.Refers to calculating the weight of the j-th indicator in the i-th year in the a-th region.
Calculate the entropy value Ej of the j-th indicator.Capital Impact Urban Green Development?Evidence from Central China ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.3 | p.1-21 | e06719 | 2024.9 In the above formula, K=1/ln(c×m), and K needs to satisfy K>0.c×m represents the total number of samples, ln is the natural logarithm sign, and the value of Ej satisfies 0≦Ej≦1。 (6) Calculate the redundancy Dj of the j-th indicator.The redundancy of indicators is also called the information utility value or difference coefficient.For the j-th index, the greater the difference between the index values xaij, the greater the evaluation effect of the index on the research, and the smaller the entropy value.(7) (7) Calculate the comprehensive weight coefficient Wj of the j-th indicator.Weighted summation Formula is used to calculate the final comprehensive evaluation score of each sample.

First
and foremost, the government must direct the flow of foreign capital and enhance the standard of foreign capital use.The development, reform, and opening up of Central China's economy and society are significantly aided by foreign investments.As a result, we need to be mindful of both the amount and the quality of foreign capital introduced, manage the flow of foreign capital driven by the market, and direct foreign capital into mid-to high-end green industries.This could raise the standard of urban green development and hasten the transfer of technology across industries.Second, the government ought to support the advancement of green technology research and development as well as scientific and technological innovation.The government should create incentive policies, encourage businesses, universities, and scientific research institutions to strengthen green technology research and development, and increase its support for green technology innovation.It should also offer tax breaks, loan support, and investment in R&D funds to businesses that are involved in ecological protection and green technology.steps to boost interest in its advancement.Third, high-quality development and economic change should be accelerated by the government.The government should give green companies greater advantageous policies and expedite the optimization and restructuring of the economic structure.In addition to achieving integrated and coordinated development of economic growth and the ecological environment, this can support high-quality and sustainable economic development.This would strengthen the beneficial impact of economic expansion on the development of green urban areas.

Table 1
Urban Green Development Index From 2007 To 2022 In Central China

Table 2
Descriptive Statistics

Table 3
Baseline Regression Results

Table 4
Threshold Effect Regression Results