Abstract:    Environmental regulation and green technology innovation are important factors to achieve high-quality economic development. The influence relationship of the two factors is a hot issue in academic circles. The existing literature focuses on the impact of environmental regulation on the overall green technology innovation. This paper further subdivided the overall green technology innovation, constructed a mathematical model, deduced the impact mechanism of environmental regulation on heterogeneous green technology innovation, and employed the panel data collected from 30 provincial-level regions in China from 2010 to 2019 to establish static and dynamic panel regression models for empirical testing. The empirical research drew several conclusions. Firstly, with the improvement of environmental regulations, the trend of overall green technology innovation and clean production technology innovation decrease first and then increase, indicating a U-shaped relationship between the both types of technology innovation and environmental regulations. Secondly, the level of environmental regulation has a positive impact on pollution control technology innovation. Thirdly, in terms of controlling variables, enterprise size promotes overall green technology innovation; the ownership structure promotes clean production technology innovation, but it is not conducive to pollution control technology innovation; the degree of trade openness has a promoting effect on the innovation of pollution control technology; the effect of R&D on different types of green technology innovation varies. Based on the research findings, some policy recommendations are proposed to promote green technology innovation in terms of environmental regulatory intensity, environmental regulatory measures, enterprise scale and trade openness.

Key words: environmental regulation, green technology innovation, clean production technology innovation, pollution control technology innovation