Climate Finance and Export Technological Sophistication of Manufacturing Firms: Evidence from China

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_75How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Climate finance; Export technological sophistication; Multi-source panel data

Abstract

Climate finance has become an important institutional arrangement linking climate governance, financial resource allocation, and low-carbon industrial transformation. Under the dual pressures of green transition and changing international trade requirements, manufacturing export upgrading should be evaluated not only by export scale but also by technological sophistication. This study examines whether city-level climate finance is associated with the export technological sophistication of Chinese manufacturing firms. Using a multi-source firm-city-year panel dataset covering Chinese manufacturing listed firms from 2008 to 2024, this paper matches firm-level product export information and financial characteristics with city-level climate finance indicators and regional economic variables. The empirical analysis applies a two-way fixed-effects model with firm and year fixed effects, and standard errors are clustered at the city level. The results show that city-level climate finance is positively associated with firms’ export technological sophistication. Mechanism analysis suggests that R&D input, export resilience, and financing constraints are plausible channels linking climate finance to export upgrading. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the association is more pronounced among non-state-owned firms, smaller firms, firms located in non-eastern regions. Overall, this study provides firm-level evidence on how local climate-finance conditions are related to manufacturing export upgrading and offers a computer-assisted multi-source data integration and product-level index computation framework for economic management, sustainable finance, and international trade research.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yulin Hu
AU  - Hongwei Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/08
TI  - Climate Finance and Export Technological Sophistication of Manufacturing Firms: Evidence from China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 7th International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 755
EP  - 770
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_75
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-758-3_75
ID  - Hu2026
ER  -