Free Trade Agreements And Environmental Performance Of Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises

Since its accession to the WTO in 2001,China has been accelerating the pace of bilateral and regional free trade agreement(FTA)negotiations.As the strategy of free trade area rises to become a national strategy,FTA plays an important role in promoting the construction of a new pattern of all-round opening up.At the same time of releasing huge trade dividends,regional trade liberalization has also produced a complex and profound impact on the ecological environment of our country.Exploring the relationship between FTA and enterprise pollution emission behavior is of great significance to promote the construction of ecological civilization and the development of high-quality trade.In view of this,this paper uses China Customs database,China Industrial enterprise database,China Environmental Statistics Database and HS8-coded product tariff data to construct enterprise-level panel data from 2000 to 2013.From the perspective of import intermediate goods trade liberalization,this paper makes an empirical study of the environmental benefits of FTA on Chinese manufacturing enterprises,and expounds the mechanism of action from three aspects: emission reduction or production increase,optimization of import product structure and technological progress effect.The results show that: first,there is a significant negative relationship between the level of FTA tariff preference enjoyed by enterprises and their pollution emission intensity,that is,the trade liberalization of imported intermediate goods brought by FTA tariff concession promotes the improvement of enterprises’ environmental performance.Secondly,the tariff preference level enjoyed by enterprises in FTA affects the emission intensity of enterprises mainly through emission reduction or increase,optimization of product import structure and technological progress effect.Moreover,in the face of industry pollution degree,industry factor intensity,firm geographical location,firm size and firm ownership differences,the impact of trade liberalization of imported intermediate goods brought by FTA tariff reduction on environmental performance of Chinese manufacturing enterprises is heterogeneous.The environmental benefits of FTA are more significant in pollution-intensive industries,technology-intensive and capital-intensive industries,enterprises in eastern regions,large enterprises and non-foreign-funded enterprises.Finally,there is an obvious lag in the environmental benefits of the FTA.The level of tariff preference enjoyed by enterprises in the FTA will have an impact on the emission intensity of enterprises in the next three years,and the impact will reach the maximum when the lag is two periods.In addition,this paper verifies the robustness of the benchmark regression results by adding environmental regulation variables,changing enterprise environmental performance measurement indicators,changing time span,controlling high-dimensional fixed effects,tail reduction treatment,and using instrumental variable method to solve the endogenous problem of the model.According to the main conclusion of the study,the paper holds that we should actively integrate into the process of liberalizing trade in the future,and expand the scale of import of high-quality intermediate goods.Explore new development models and promote the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure;We will strengthen international cooperation on the environment and improve the quality of free trade agreements.