Coupling Perspective on the Coordinated Development Level, Restricting Factors and Optimization Countermeasures of Sci-Tech Finance and Sustainable Manufacturing in the Yangtze River Delta

Abstract

Amid slowing global economic growth, sustainable manufacturing is vital for economic recovery, with sci-tech finance acting as a key driving force, and their synergistic development is essential. Using coupling coordination and obstacle models, this study examines the synergy and barriers between sustainable manufacturing and sci-tech finance, with the Yangtze River Delta (2013–2022) as a case. The results show that both systems developed steadily with remarkable provincial heterogeneity, and factor efficiency acts as the long-term core driving force of manufacturing industry. Green development has become a new key bottleneck for manufacturing transformation and upgrading in 2022. Fund utilization and institutional resources are the common obstacles restricting the development of sci-tech finance. An asymmetric predictive relationship exists between the two systems: the manufacturing sustainable development level exhibits significant temporal precedence over the sci-tech finance development level, whereas the reverse predictive information is not statistically significant. while the transmission mechanism for finance to empower industrial upgrading is blocked. Nevertheless, the coupling coordination degree keeps increasing. Accordingly, this paper puts forward suggestions including regional differentiated governance, smoothing transmission channels, advancing green transformation, optimizing the financial system and strengthening cross-regional coordination.