Environmental Regulation,Pollution Emissions And Green Performance

Green development is a major strategy for China’s economic and social development in the new era.How to promote environmental protection,green transformation and green performance while maintaining economic growth and improving production efficiency has become a major problem of environmental governance in China.The sulfur dioxide emission fee standard reform,which began to be implemented gradually in 2007,aims to alleviate the imbalance between the environment and economic development by increasing the intensity of regional levy standard,and plays an important role in China’s environmental governance.this article take the levy standard reform as an example,based on the 2004-2014 industrial companies listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market data and regional economic environment,using multiple phase double difference(DID)and triple difference model(DDD)to discuss the impact of the levy standard reform on regional pollution reduction and green development which measured by green total factor productivity and micro enterprise performance.We find that:(1)In general,the levy standard reform has not achieved the desired reduction in emissions.However,for the areas that have implemented the reform of levy standard,with the increase of environmental law enforcement intensity,the levy standard reform has significantly improved the regional emission reduction effect of sulfur dioxide.(2)In terms of green total factor productivity,after various robustness tests,it is found that the levy standard reform has significantly reduced the growth of green total factor productivity mainly by inhibiting technological progress,and has a greater impact on the green total factor productivity of eastern regions,key environment-friendly cities and big cities.(3)The levy standard reform reduces enterprise performance,and assets of the affected enterprises decreased by 0.9%on average,three channels of cost increase,investment crowding out and innovation compensation are discussed respectively,among which the investment crowding out effect accounted for about 4.5%of the total effect,while the innovation compensation in porter’s hypothesis was not found.In addition,there is heterogeneity in the impact of higher levy standard on the performance of different enterprises,which has the greatest impact on the part of enterprises supervised by the intermediate level government,and has a certain protective effect on large enterprises and enterprises with high tax burden and other interests.It is of great significance to evaluate the actual effect of the levy standard reform on Chinese continuous improvement and the realization of high-quality development of "win-win" between the environment and the economy.The policy enlightenment of this paper is that stricter law enforcement and supervision is an important prerequisite to ensure that environmental taxes and fees can effectively control pollution and achieve green development.And in the actual implementation process of environmental policy,it is necessary to set different tax rates according to the actual situation of each region,so as to establish a reasonable environmental tax rate that does not affect the development trend of local economy and also can gradually reduce pollution.In addition,the government should actively take relevant measures to support enterprise innovation,vigorously promote innovative development,improve the resource allocation and production efficiency of polluting enterprises,and thereby enhance the growth of green total factor productivity.