Abstract: This study identifies the impact of green supply chain management (GSCM) on clean technology innovation (CTI) by enterprises in China as well as compares the effects of forward and backward GSCM and the differences by industry and home country. The effect of CTI on GSCM is tested by 501 samples of mostly multinational enterprises in China from 2014 to 2016. The results indicate that CTI benefits from GSCM, which remains robust to a series of sensitivity test. And different management directions show great differences, where the backward GSCM has a stronger promotion effect on CTI than the forward GSCM. Moreover, light polluting industries and capital-intensive industries have stronger incentives to adopt GSCM than heavy-polluting industries and labor intensive industries. And domestic companies perform better than foreign companies.

Keywords: Green supply chain; Clean technology innovation; Supply chain management direction; Multinational enterprises