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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Sustainable Development in Green
Finance for the Yellow River Basin
1
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China
2
Ningxia Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Mechanics and Scientific Computing, Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China
3
Ningxia Basic Science Research Center of Mathematics, Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China
4
School of Business and Economics, Universiti Putra Malaysia, UPM Serdang, Malaysia
5
Econometrics Department, Tashkent State University of Economics, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
6
Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau, Macau, China
Submission date: 2024-03-07
Final revision date: 2024-06-05
Acceptance date: 2024-09-04
Online publication date: 2024-11-13
Publication date: 2025-11-04
Corresponding author
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2025;34(6):6913-6926
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
The Yellow River Basin (YRB) is renowned for its environmental importance. However,
the complex contradiction between protecting water resources and escalating water needs of a region’s
energy and food sectors could be regarded as an obstacle to local sustainable development. In light
of this dilemma, to help policymakers clearly understand the effective path of sustainable development
from the interactive relationship between environmental quality and green finance, this study explored
the environmental quality in the YRB with a particular focus on the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus
and the potential role of green finance. It utilized provincial data that evaluated WEF and green finance
separately and attributed the factors influencing the WEF under the scheme of the environmental
Kuznets curve. The results revealed that the exact relationships among the WEF elements varied among
the provinces of YRB but showed a clustered characteristic and a U-shaped relationship between
the WEF and economic development, while green finance significantly promoted the WEF. Finally,
it confirmed that industrial upgrading and green innovation, not environmental regulation, played
a complementary role in stimulating environmental quality.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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