Regional green technological progress is an important driver of regional green technology innovations. To explore in depth the impact of green finance and international technology spillover on regional green technology innovation, this study incorporates green finance, international technology spillover, and green technology innovation into the same analytical framework. In addition, based on a new perspective of regional innovation capabilities, this study analyzes the impact of green finance and international green technology spillovers on green technology innovation. The data were collected in 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2019 and analyzed by a panel fixed-effects model. The interaction between green finance, international technology spillover, and regional innovation capability was investigated to understand the impact of each interaction on green technology innovation. Second, regional innovation capability was used as an intermediary variable to identify its underlying mechanism. Finally, the spatial spillover effect of green technology innovation was analyzed using the spatial Durbin model. We found that: (1) green finance, import trade, outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), and regional innovation capability can promote regional green technology innovation, while inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) has an inhibitory effect on the innovation; (2) the interaction of green finance, international technology spillovers, and regional innovation capacity positively impacts green technology innovation; (3) green finance and international technology spillovers can promote green technology innovation by promoting regional innovation capabilities; (4) and green technology innovations have spatial spillover effects, and innovations in one region can promote the growth of green technologies in adjacent regions. This study provides a reference not only for China but also for other developing countries to promote green technology advancement and achieve sustainable development goals.

Rural tourism has been developing vigorously, and rural community functions are becoming diversified in China. Therefore, this paper takes China as an example to explore how sustainable rural tourism affects rural community development in the long and short run over the period 1994–2020. Sustainable rural tourism can be measured using two indicators: total rural tourism revenue and number of rural tourists. Rural community development is measured by the number of rural community service institutions. Then, by incorporating other variables and using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds co-integration technique to perform an empirical analysis, we found that, whether in the long or short run, sustainable rural tourism always plays a positive and significant role in promoting rural community development. In particular, in the long run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are identified as the major forces behind rural community development. Meanwhile, in the short run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are also major drivers of rural community development. This paper contributes to the current literature by filling in the existing gaps in several aspects.

With the continuous promotion of China’s new rural construction, rural tourism is considered to be an important driving force to promote the sustainable development of rural economy. Sustainable farmers’ income is a major part of the sustainable development of rural economy. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the effect of rural tourism on sustainable farmers’ income. Using China’s provincial panel data over the period of 2003 to 2020 and employing the mediation effect model to perform empirical analysis, four results are obtained: (1) rural tourism positively and significantly affects sustainable farmers’ income. However, among five kinds of farmers’ income, the coefficients in magnitude are different. (2) A mediation effect of rural ecological environment on the relationship between rural tourism and sustainable farmers’ income exists. (3) A mediation effect of urbanization on the relationship between rural tourism and sustainable farmers’ income also exists. (4) On the whole, the mediation effect of rural ecological environment on the relationship between rural tourism and sustainable farmers’ income is less than that of the mediation effect of urbanization. Based on the evidence this paper provides, corresponding suggestions are raised to promote sustainable farmers’ income.

Manufacturing, as an energy-intensive industry, plays a major role in economic growth. Its green growth is the focus of national planning for sustainable development, especially for a country such as Korea, which has a scarcity of fossil energy of its own. While internationalization has brought Korea scarce energy, serious carbon emissions have become a pressing issue. It is still necessary to explore the relationship between globalization and green growth in manufacturing. Thus, our paper aims to observe their relationship by using 24 manufacturing industries from 2011 to 2019. Through the panel Granger non-causality test and the Dumitrescu–Hurlin test, we find that imports and inward foreign direct investment (FDI) causes green growth at the overall manufacturing level, but their causality relationships exist in different industries. The green-growth causality relationship of inward FDI mainly exists in capital-intensive and internationally competitive manufacturing industries (manufacture industries of basic metals; furniture; food products; coke, briquettes, and refined petroleum products; and chemicals and chemical products, except pharmaceuticals and medicinal chemicals). Furthermore, the green-growth causality relationship of imports primarily exists in the fossil-energy-consumption-intensive manufacturing industry (manufacture industries of motor vehicles, trailers, and semitrailers and coke, briquettes, and refined petroleum products). Furthermore, in our regression analysis, we find that only inward FDI robustly promotes the Korean manufacturing sector’s green growth; the positive effect is in the range from 0.005 to 0.009. Though the parameter estimates are positive and significant for FDI, they are close to zero, suggesting very limited positive effects that are close to almost zero. Conversely, imports have no significant impact, which we speculate is related to the import structure of Korea. Hence, the Korean manufacturing development model suggests that developing countries with similar country characteristics need to develop and guide the formation of capital-intensive and competitive industries. Additionally, it is imperative to decarbonize energy-intensive industries and to work on renewable energy development and diffusion. Finally, it is essential to introduce various green monitoring mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions. The government needs to strengthen its support for research and development of innovative technologies to reduce carbon emissions as well as promote the development of environmental and energy-saving related professional service enterprises.

To test the impact of international R&D spillovers on China’s technological innovation, we collect and use province-country-level data from 23 provinces from 2001 to 2020 to fill a measurement gap of international R&D spillovers, so that our measurement can avoid ‘aggregation bias’ unlike the calculation methods in previous studies. We find that imports act as an effective international R&D spillover channel for improving technological innovation. Meanwhile, international R&D spillover through inward FDI and imports positively promotes China’s innovation performance. It suggests to policymakers that continuing to open up the economy and attract high-quality inward FDI is still required. Moreover, our results confirm that the eastern region enjoys a more significant international R&D spillover effect because of a more effective innovation environment. Hence, we suggest that given the inherent short board in the central and western regions, preferential policies to make up for this short board should be proposed to improve the innovation environment in the inland regions so as to enjoy a more significant international R&D spillover effect. Finally, we also observe that different periods of economic growth and the development levels of source countries also result in heterogeneous innovation impacts of international R&D spillover effects.