“可持续发展”还是“以污染换增长”——基于中国工业企业销售增长模式的分析

Sustainable Growth or Growth with Pollution——An Analysis on the Sales Growth Patterns of Chinese Industrial Companies

中国的环境污染问题引起了国内外学者的广泛关注,在发展经济的同时保护生态环境已成为社会各界的广泛诉求,但是学者对中国当前的工业经济增长方式仍存在较大争议。本文采用企业微观数据探析了中国工业企业的销售增长模式,分析企业的环境污染水平如何影响其销售增长率。本文采用工业企业被征收排污费的情况来衡量其环境污染水平,研究发现,"可持续发展"与"以污染换增长"两种模式并存。一方面,没有被征收排污费的工业企业表现出更高的销售增长率,说明环保工业企业能够获得更快的发展速度,从而证明了"可持续发展"模式的存在;另一方面,在被征收排污费的工业企业中,被征收排污费较多的工业企业反倒具有更高的销售增长率。这说明在部分污染企业中存在"以污染换增长"的现象,这些企业通过缴纳排污费来逃避其保护生态环境的责任,以污染环境为代价来换取企业的销售增长。本研究对进一步优化排污费征收机制设计、促进企业节能减排提供了参考。

The pollution problem in China has attracted lots of worldwide attentions, and it is widely agreed that China should protect environment when developing its economy, but prior studies still have debate on the development patterns of China economy. Using a firm level dataset of China, we analyze the growth patterns of Chinese firms, specifically we test whether and how firm＇s environmental performance influence its sales growth. We use the charged pollution fees as the proxy of firm＇s environmental performance. We find that both sustainable growth and growth with pollution exist in China. On the one hand, the firms that are not charged pollution fees show higher sales growth rate, which implies that market values firms＇ environment performance. On the other hand, for the firms that were charged pollution fees, the sales growth is positively associated with pollution fees, which indicates that high pollution firms may achieve growth by pollution. By paying pollution fees, these firms avoid their responsibilities to protect environment, and they get high sales growth at the expense of environment pollution. These findings provide references for refining the design of pollution fees collection and stimulating corporate adoption of clean production technologies.