The Impact Of R&D Policies On Green Innovation In Energy-intensive Firms

Energy-intensive industries,characterized by high pollution and energy consumption,are key areas for China to achieve low-carbon economic growth.In recent years,the Chinese government attaches great importance to ecological environment protection.The Chinese government has clearly put forward to enhance the independent innovation ability as a central part of achieving economic transformation and upgrading and sustainable development.They formulated a series of incentive enterprise innovation development policy to motivate enterprises run green research and development projects,to buy environmental protection equipment,the implementation of green technology reform and so on.Most of the existing literatures have studied the influence of R&D policies on the general innovation of high-tech enterprises or emerging enterprises,but few have focused on the research on high-energy consuming enterprises,and there is no specific analysis on the mechanism of R&D policies on green innovation.This research uses the research methods of domestic and foreign scholars to sort out the action mechanism of R&D policies on green innovation.Taking 527 energyintensive listed companies from 2011 to 2016 as samples,this research adopts the propensity score matching method to discuss the influence of R&D policies on the green innovation of high-energy-consuming enterprises.The empirical results show that(1)innovation input,business income,tax level,ownership structure,enterprise asset size and employee size are all the key factors affecting enterprises’ R&D policy.(2)Both government R&D subsidies and R&D tax incentives promote green innovation(propensity and performance)of energy-intensive firms.On the whole,compared with R&D tax incentives,government R&D subsidies have a better effect on promoting green innovation.They have increased 101.11% in green innovation tendency and 49.03% in green innovation performance.(3)In terms of ownership structure,government R&D subsidies have a better effect on the improvement of green innovation of state-owned enterprises,increasing 111.73% in green innovation tendency and 49.30% in green innovation performance.R&D tax incentives have a stronger incentive effect on non-state-owned enterprises,increasing 50.94% in green innovation tendency and 96.27% in green innovation performance.(4)In terms of enterprise size,both government R&D subsidies and R&D tax incentives are more conducive to SMEs’ green innovation(tendency and performance).Based on the above conclusions,this research puts forward specific suggestions on improving the efficiency of government R&D subsidies and promoting green innovation in energy-consuming enterprises.