Green Tax System And Green Innovation Of Enterprises

With the transformation of China’s economy from high growth to high quality development,our government is paying more and more attention to ecological and environmental protection,and the environmental protection policy system is becoming more and more perfect.In the face of this transformation,how to achieve a balance between economic development and environmental protection,reduce environmental pollution,and promote the green transformation of enterprises has become an important issue.In 2018,China’s environmental “fee-to-tax” policy began to be formally implemented.As the only independent green tax in China’s green tax system,environmental protection tax alleviates the problems of lax enforcement,lack of rigidity,and insufficient influence and deterrence of sewage fee.Since the withdrawal of sewage fee from the historical stage,environmental protection tax has become a policy tool to guide enterprises to continuously adjust their production methods,increase research on green innovative technologies,and promote green production and green transformation and upgrading,with the intention of achieving green development of the enterprise economy through the implementation of the policy.The environmental protection tax requires enterprises to pursue their own development while taking into account ecological protection,assume their own social responsibility,and take the road of sustainable development.Whether the environmental “fee-to-tax” policy can achieve the policy objectives,whether it has achieved certain results,how the environmental“fee-to-tax” policy affects enterprises and how it will affect them,an in-depth analysis and discussion of these issues will help further improve China’s environmental protection system and achieve the purpose of improving the ecological environment.This paper selects the data of Chinese A-share listed companies from2006-2019 as the research sample,and examines the impact of environmental“fee-to-tax” policy on corporate green innovation and the mechanism of impact using the method of Difference-in-Difference(DID).The study finds that,first,environmental“fee-to-tax” policy does significantly promote green innovation among firms.Secondly,the baseline findings are robust after a series of robustness tests such as parallel trend tests,placebo tests for modifying the policy timing,and replacing the firm’s green innovation measure.Subsequently,ther heterogeneity analysis showed that(1)the environmental fee-to-tax policy can effectively promote the green innovation output of SOEs and increase the number of green innovation applications from SOEs.(2)The environmental “fee-to-tax” policy can effectively promote green innovation activities of large-scale enterprises,but has less impact on small-scale enterprises.(3)The implementation of the environmental “fee-to-tax” policy can effectively promote green innovation activities of enterprises in the eastern and central regions,while the impact on enterprises in the western region is less.Then,this paper tries to investigate the mechanism of the environmental “fee-to-tax” policy on enterprise innovation;the mechanism effect analysis shows that environmental fee tax change affects enterprise green innovation from two aspects: R&D investment mechanism and financing constraint mechanism.Combined with the research findings,this paper puts forward the following policy recommendations:(1)The government should promote the development of environmental protection tax policy and further improve the green tax reform.(2)The government should strengthen supervision and management to ensure that the policy is implemented.(3)The government should set up a corresponding green benefit system as an incentive for enterprises to green innovation.