Abstract:
The State Council of China has issued the
Outline of the Construction Plan for the Chengdu–Chongqing Economic Circle, emphasizing the coordinated development of environmental protection and economic growth between the two cities, and providing policy guidance for regional finance to empower industrial green transformation and promote high-quality development. From a geoeconomic perspective, this study examines whether and how financial agglomeration contributes to industrial green development through spatial spillover effects. We employ a two-way fixed-effects Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) to analyze panel data from the Chengdu–Chongqing region. The model further decomposes total effects into direct and indirect components to identify spatial transmission channels. To uncover the underlying mechanisms, technological innovation and corporate supervision are incorporated as mediating variables, while heterogeneity across two cities is explored through comparative analysis. A series of robustness tests are conducted to validate the empirical results. The findings demonstrate that financial agglomeration significantly enhances local industrial green development and generates positive spillover effects on neighboring areas. Technological innovation and corporate supervision partially mediate this relationship, indicating that financial agglomeration promotes industrial greening by strengthening innovation capacity and governance effectiveness. Moreover, spatial spillover effects are found to be more pronounced in the Chongqing metropolitan area, reflecting distinct regional development dynamics within the economic circle. These findings proves that the Chengdu–Chongqing region should seize the opportunity presented by the development of the western financial center, strengthen top-level design and the construction of a differentiated financial system, increase financial support for green technological innovation, improve the green finance industry system, promote resource sharing and industrial synergy by leveraging the leading role of the two core cities, and guide capital flows toward environmentally friendly industrial enterprises through targeted regulation and incentive-based policies, thereby achieving a win–win outcome for regional integration and industrial green transformation.