The Impact Of Chinese Environmental Protection Tax On Green Development

The continuous innovation and development of industrial technology has provided a strong impetus for China’s economic growth in the past decades.However,the past development philosophy of "pollute first,treat later" has inevitably led to serious environmental pollution problems.The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18 th Party Central Committee proposed that green development should be the guiding concept for economic development in the new era.As environmental resources are a public good,the regulation of market mechanisms alone cannot regulate the negative externalities caused by pollution emissions,and government environmental regulation instruments provide the necessary direction to solve the environmental pollution problem,and tax policy is one of them.Based on this,China formally implemented the current environmental protection tax system on 1 January 2018.Faced with the current trend of industrial transformation in China,it is imperative to study how environmental protection tax affects the level of green development in China,and to design and optimise its system on this basis.By constructing a green development indicator system and measurement,this thesis forms a set of strong equilibrium panel data with environmental protection tax fees of 30 Chinese provinces,municipalities and autonomous regions from 2004 to2020,and studies the impact of environmental protection tax fees on the level of green development in China.Based on the existing literature and theories,the thesis defines the research concepts and contents,and integrates the relevant theories and transmission mechanisms of the impact of environmental protection tax on green development;then,it systematically analyses and compares the historical development of China’s sewage charge system,and analyses the differences between the current environmental protection tax system and the sewage charge system after the change from fees to taxes.Then,based on the established green development index system,the entropy method was used to measure and compare the status quo of green development in each province in China,and an empirical study was conducted on the impact of environmental protection tax on green development.An inverted U-shaped relationship was found between the impact of environmental protection tax on green development in China,which was verified by region,and the location of the current level of environmental protection tax intensity in each province was clarified.Finally,on the basis of the empirical study,policy recommendations for optimising China’s current environmental protection tax system are proposed,mainly in terms of improving the design of the environmental protection tax system and improving the efficiency of environmental protection tax collection and administration.