FinTech-Enabled Green Innovation in Emerging Urban Economies: A Configurational Study of Digital Finance, Talent, and Structural Upgrading
Main article
Abstract
Green technological innovation (GTI) has emerged as a strategic priority for emerging urban economies seeking to reconcile rapid industrial growth with decarbonisation targets. Yet the question of which configurations of enabling conditions actually deliver high-level GTI in cities outside the advanced-economy core remains largely unsettled, in part because most prior work has relied on net-effect estimation rather than on configurational logic. This study develops a five-dimensional analytical framework—technology, finance, governance, human capital, and structural foundation—and applies it to a panel of 312 mid-sized urban economies drawn from Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Türkiye, South Africa, and Viet Nam over the 2014–2023 window. We combine Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) with fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to disentangle prerequisites from sufficient configurations and to test for causal asymmetry between high and non-high GTI outcomes. Three findings emerge. First, no single antecedent is universally necessary, but FinTech readiness and economic maturity display robust necessity-like behaviour in the upper GTI range, with bottleneck thresholds rising steeply above the 50% performance band. Second, two equifinal sufficient configurations explain the bulk of high-GTI cities: a technology–structure pathway anchored by FinTech and economic maturity, and a technology–finance–talent pathway in which green finance and human capital play the core role. Third, the configurations associated with non-high GTI are heterogeneous and asymmetric, reflecting four distinct failure modes (foundational, compound, structural mismatch, and regulatory mismatch). The findings contribute to the green innovation literature by extending the configurational lens beyond the Chinese setting, by quantifying FinTech as the load-bearing common pivot across heterogeneous cities, and by surfacing policy levers that emerging economies can deploy according to their endowment profiles. Robustness checks involving frequency-threshold relaxation and consistency-threshold tightening confirm the stability of the identified configurations.
