Research On The Impact Of Tax Contribution On Corporate Environmental Governance

With the continuous growth of China's economy,the contradiction between ecological environment and economic development has become increasingly prominent,and environmental pollution has become a hot topic of concern to all sectors of society.The rapid progress of urbanization and the advancement of industrialization have caused China's environmental pollution problems to become more serious.The Global Environmental Performance Index(2018)pointed out that in terms of air quality issues,China ranked fourth in the bottom due to multiple aspects such as PM2.5 comprehensive evaluation.Air is listed as the third most dangerous factor in China.Building an ecological civilization is a long-term plan for people's livelihood and is imminent.President Xi Jinping repeatedly advocated at the meeting: “ Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets”,and calls for public ecological and environmental protection.In this context,based on the fact that corporate tax contribution has an impact on environmental protection behavior of corporates,it explains the impact of government-corporate relationship on government law enforcement efficiency from the perspective of corporate tax contribution,and studies how it affects environmental regulation of governments.And then analyzes the specific mechanism of corporate taxation to environmental protection behavior of corporates and governance behavior.First of all,this paper finds that under the background of “guarantee growth” of China's economy at this stage,local governments pay more attention to the contribution of local pillar enterprises,pursuing GDP unilaterally,and cause different attitudes towards different enterprises,which in turn distorts environmental protection behavior of corporates.These behaviors have led to more serious environmental pollution problems.Secondly,based on the perspective of tax contribution,this paper constructs a fixed effect model of the specific impact of corporate tax contribution on corporate environmental governance.Taking the 2006-2017 Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share non-financial listed corporates as a sample,this paper analyzes the corporate tax contribution how to influence the environmental protection behavior of corporates.The research in this paper finds that the tax contribution of corporates has an inhibitory effect on the environmental behavior of corporates.That is to say,when the contribution of corporate taxation is high,the local government will “protect” the enterprise,and the enterprise will invest less in environmental capital.Further research found that the individual traits of the enterprise(property,executives' political experience),industry nature and regional characteristics(economic development,public environmental awareness and legal environment)have a regulatory effect on the above relationship.The results show that:(1)Non-state-owned enterprises,general managers or the chairman of the board of directors who have no political experience,the contribution of tax payment to corporate environmental governance is more significant;(2)Tax-contributing and corporate environmental governance behavior among enterprises in heavily polluting industries significant negative correlation,rather than heavy polluting enterprises,there is no significant relationship between the two;(3)In economically underdeveloped areas,areas with poor public environmental awareness and poor legal environment,the more tax contributions contributed by enterprises,the less environmental capital expenditures.At the same time,this paper uses new indicators such as the ranking percentile of the total taxation of enterprises in the province,and the lagging period of total taxation of enterprises(L1.TC),and other new indicators;further uses the above new variables to solve the endogenous problem and confirms the model with Two Stage Least Square and Generalized Method of Moments.The pollutant discharge fee is used as the surrogate index of the explanatory variable to avoid the measurement error;The sample selection scope is narrowed to avoid the policy influence,all of these aim to prove that the benchmark regression of this paper is robust.The results show that whether it is to replace the explanatory variables,narrow the scope of sample selection,or consider the influence of environmental capital expenditure on the direction of taxation,the conclusions are the same as the initial conclusions of this paper,that is to say,corporate tax contribution have an inhibitory effect on its environmental behavior.Finally,based on the conclusions of research in this paper and the current status of ecological environment governance in China,some policy implications can be proposed: The central government should accelerate the implementation of the relevant legal system for central environmental protection supervision.It also should think about how to curb the environmental pollution caused by "government-corporate relationship" effectively,and guide the government to improve the efficiency of environmental law enforcement,raise awareness of green development,finally guide enterprises to enhance environmental governance behaviors to improve regional environmental quality.Previous scholars' research paid more attention to the influence of political incentives,economic incentives(corruption of officials,etc.)on corporate environmental behavior,and less attention and identification of financial incentives.This paper provides "government-corporate relationship " from the micro level of enterprises,which affects the internal influence of government environmental regulation and environmental protection behavior of corporates.The empirical evidence of the factors affecting the mechanism of environmental protection behavior of corporates,which breaks through the previous single perspective,enriches the theoretical content and field of environmental governance research.