The Effect of Environmental Regulation on the Efficiency of the Green Economy: The Intermediary Role of the Aggregation of Innovative Elements

Green development is the only way to realize harmonious coexistence between people and nature, so it is of great significance to create a benchmark for high-quality development. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces (except Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) in China from 2009 to 2020, the super-efficiency slacks-based measure model was used to calculate the green economic efficiency of various regions in China, and a related statistical model was used to verify the influence of different types of environmental regulation policies on green economic efficiency and the intermediary effect of innovation factor agglomeration. The results show that: (1) during the inspection period, the influence of public-participation environmental regulation on the efficiency of the green economy presents an “inverted U” trend, while command-control and market-incentive environmental regulation policies inhibit the improvement of green economic efficiency; (2) the agglomeration of innovative elements plays a significant intermediary role in the transmission path of environmental regulation affecting green economic efficiency, but the intermediary effects of different types of environmental regulation are slightly different. Finally, we discuss environmental regulation and innovative elements, and some corresponding suggestions are put forward.