Government Regulation,Public Concern And Corporate Environmental Responsibility

In the late 1970s,China’s economic reform created a miracle of economic growth with continuous and rapid development.But it has also brought about problems such as tightening resource constraints,serious environmental pollution,and ecosystem degradation,which have seriously threatened the living environment and natural environment.As the basic unit of social economy,enterprise is the most prominent subject of social production,and its production activities will have a great impact on the ecological environment.Therefore,whether enterprises can fulfill their environmental responsibilities while creating economic benefits is of great significance to the development of green economy.China’s environmental governance model has been dominated by administrative means,with the government issuing administrative orders to intervene in the environmental behavior of enterprises directly.Due to the rigid constraints of administrative resources in China,unilateral administrative supervision by the government is easy to cause uneconomic and low efficiency of regulatory policies.At the same time,public awareness of environmental protection is gradually awakening.More and more people are expressing their concerns about environmental pollution and their demands for environmental governance.The power of the public is beginning to be taken seriously.Therefore,it is important to explore the influence of government and the public on corporate environmental responsibility to promote the improvement of the modern environmental governance system.Although some scholars have discussed how to realize the multi-agent environmental governance model,they mainly focus on qualitative analysis and still lack quantitative research.Therefore,this paper attempts to bring the government,the public,and the enterprises into the same framework and explore the specific role of government environmental regulation and public environmental concern on corporate environmental responsibility.The discussion of this topic is an integral part of building an ecological civilization with Chinese characteristics.It helps provide practical policy recommendations and empirical evidence to support the construction of a pluralistic environmental governance system among the public,government,and enterprises.This study focuses on the relationship among government,public and corporate.The thesis consists of 6 chapters,as follows: Chapter 1 is the introduction,which presents the research questions based on the background of the study.Chapter 2 is the theoretical foundation and literature review,which mainly reviews the domestic and foreign literature related to this study.It includes the definition of corporate environmental responsibility,the impact of government environmental regulation and public environmental concern on enterprises,and the factors influencing public environmental awareness.Then we point out the shortcomings of the existing studies and clarifies the purpose and significance of this study.Chapter 3 is the measurement and status of corporate environmental responsibility.This chapter constructs corporate environmental responsibility indicators from three dimensions of environmental compliance,effective utilization of resources and environmental management,and analyzes the characteristics of environmental responsibility of listed companies in China.Chapter 4 is about the influence of government environmental regulation and public environmental concern on the fulfillment of corporate environmental responsibility.This chapter empirically analyzes the influence of government and public on corporate environmental responsibility,as well as the complementary effect of government and public influence,providing empirical evidence for the multi-subject environmental governance model.Chapter5 is government environmental protection work and public environmental consciousness,which mainly investigates the guiding effects of local governments on public environmental awareness,as well as the existence of heterogeneous effects and possible mechanisms of action.Chapter 6 presents the research conclusions,policy recommendations,and outlook.The findings of this paper can be summarized in the following three aspects.First,this paper constructs the environmental responsibility indicators of China’s listed enterprises through three dimensions of environmental compliance responsibility,responsibility for effective utilization of environmental resources,and environmental management responsibility.The results show that:(1)There is still much room for improving the environmental responsibility of China’s listed enterprises.(2)The more environmental violations an enterprise commits,the better it performs the responsibility of effective utilization of environmental resources and environmental management.(3)In terms of enterprise characteristics,we find that state-owned enterprises,large-scale enterprises and heavily polluting enterprises performed poorly in environmental compliance responsibilities,and in terms of regional characteristics,there are large differences in the corporate environmental responsibility between different provinces.Secondly,we examine the impact of government environmental regulations and public environmental concern on corporate environmental responsibility.It is found that both local government environmental regulation and public environmental concern significantly promote the fulfillment of environmental responsibility by enterprises.The results of sub-dimensions indicate that the strengthening of government environmental regulation does not reduce the environmental violations of enterprises,while public environmental concern significantly promotes the fulfillment of environmental compliance responsibility.As an informal system,public environmental concern plays an important supplementary role to the government.Further analysis reveals that there is also a significant complementary relationship between public and government.The stronger the government’s environmental regulation is,the stronger the public’s environmental concern will be in promoting enterprises.In turn,the public environmental concern will also strengthen the impact of the government’s environmental regulation on enterprises.In addition,the new Environmental Protection Law of 2015 further strengthens the complementary effects of public and government influence on corporate environmental responsibility.The results of the mechanism analysis show that both public environmental concern and government environmental regulation promote the fulfillment of environmental responsibility through the channel of influencing enterprises to increase environmental investment.Last,the heterogeneity analysis reveals that government environmental regulation has a more significant impact on non-state enterprises,heavily polluting enterprises,enterprises located in areas with low marketization levels,and enterprises in eastern provinces.In comparison,the public environmental concern has a greater impact on state-owned enterprises and enterprises located in areas with high marketization levels.Finally,we further discuss the role of government in guiding public environmental awareness by using data of the Chinese Social Survey(CSS)in 2013.The empirical analysis reveals that the government has an important guiding effect on public environmental awareness.At the same time,the government’s emphasis on environmental protection can also lead to a change in the public’s attitude toward environmental protection from ‘government dependence’ to ‘self-reliance’.Heterogeneity analysis reveals that governments have a stronger influence on the environmental awareness of high-income groups,young people,and rural residents.Heterogeneity analysis of regional characteristics shows that government have a stronger impact on public environmental awareness in cities where environmental information disclosure is weak.In the mechanism analysis,we found that the government have an impact on public environmental awareness mainly through reducing the public’s environmental optimism bias and enhancing the public’s attention to environmental issues.This paper puts the government,the public and enterprises into the same analytical framework,which provides new empirical evidence for understanding the multi-agent environmental governance model.It enriches the research perspective of related fields.Important exploration has been made for the government to innovate the mode of environmental governance and deepen the reform in the field of environmental protection,which has far-reaching enlightenment and significance.