Do Education Human Capital and Environmental Regulation Drive the Growth Efficiency of the Green Economy in China?

The question of how to gradually transform the economic growth mode from extensive growth to intensive economic growth, and steadily improve the efficiency of green economic growth (GEGE), has become the focus of society and scholars. The present study uses the SBM-DDF directional distance function to measure GEGE from 2008 to 2021 in China, and then selects the bootstrap regression method to test the influencing factors of China’s GEGE. The following conclusions are obtained: (1) the GEGE level is still low, and its average value in the fourteen-year period from 2008 to 2021 is 0.484; areas with low levels of GEGE account for approximately 66.7% of the country, and those with relatively high levels account for approximately 20% of the country; high-level green development areas account for 13.3% of the country; (2) environmental regulation’s impact on GEGE has a U-shaped relationship, which means that when the regulation intensity increases, GEGE will first decrease and then increase, and once it crosses the inflection point, the effect of improving GEGE becomes obvious; the elasticity coefficient of educational human capital is significantly negative, which has a hindering effect on GEGE; (3) FDI is significantly negatively correlated with GEGE; there is a U-shaped relationship between GEGE and urbanization, and the industrial structure has a negative effect on GEGE, while trade dependence has the same effect.