The Effects Of Reform From Discharge Fee To Environmental Tax From Both Emission Reduction And R&D View

Green production and emission reduction have always been the direction of the production mode reform.However,due to the negative externalities of environmental pollution,enterprises have little enthusiasm to participate in energy conservation and emission reduction,which requires macro intervention through environmental regulation activities.In 2018,China officially levied environmental protection taxes in replace of discharge fees.And by then,environmental taxes has become the main way to manage pollution discharge behavior.Moreover,different provinces adopted different actual tax rates within the national standard in this reform.The conversion of administrative fees to statutory taxes will have a series of impacts on the actual collection efficiency due to changes in the collection standards,collection subjects and compulsion.On the one hand,companies will reduce the environmental protection costs they should pay by reducing pollutant emissions.On the other hand,according to the "Porter effect",companies will invest in environmental protection to undertake social responsibilities and achieve green production.This article uses this "fee to tax" reform as the window period,and selects the listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share from heavy polluting industries in the period of 2015 to 2019.Based on the fixed effect model of panel data,this article tests companies’ pollution emission behavior and R&D investment behavior before and after the reform in groups divided by its levy standard.Through the analysis of the scale and intensity of pollutant emission and R&D investment,the effect of the policy is studied and analyzed from two aspects of both "quantity" and "rate".This study found that after the introduction of the environmental tax,the emission of companies in low-tax areas continued to increase,while the R&D investment decreased.In the high-tax areas,companies have significantly decreased the pollution emission and increased the scale of R&D investment,but the intensity of R&D investment did not increase significantly.However,companies in areas with both high tax rates and high discharge ratio have increased the intensity of R&D investment significantly.To sum up,the environmental taxes policy reform has shown totally different effects in areas with different levels of expropriation standards.In addition,the policy effect is more obvious for non-state-owned enterprises under the background of policy implementation than state-owned enterprises.