中国的金融机构应当承担环境责任吗?——基本事实、理论模型与实证检验

Should Financial Institutions be Environmentally Responsible in China? Facts, Theory and Evidence

中国发展迈入了新时代,绿色发展深入人心、绿色金融广受关注,党的十九大明确将防治环境污染列为"三大攻坚战"之一。如何处理好环境与发展的关系、提升经济增长质量,是未来中国经济发展的核心问题。本文从当今中国的环境污染问题出发,结合可持续增长理论、绿色金融和企业社会责任理论,提出金融机构是否应当承担环境责任的问题。本文创新性地以经济增长理论框架探讨金融机构的环境责任问题,将企业社会责任与绿色增长理论联系起来,为绿色金融的理论基础探索提供了新的思路。本文证明了金融机构信贷决策能够显著影响经济增长质量,并给出了实证证据,进而指出:发展绿色金融、合理承担环境责任是支持经济增长质量提升的重要手段,也是中国金融机构未来发展的重要方向。除了把握金融资源的行业流向外,支持清洁技术改造、实施积极的贷后管理、根据污染物类型开发针对性的绿色金融产品等,都有助于提高金融机构承担环境责任的效率。

China's growth is slowing down and its structural and environmental problems are worsening.The traditional growth model is not sustainable as it comes at too high a cost of natural resources and the environment;economic structural adjustments and industry upgrading is urgently needed.Achieving long-term sustainable and high-quality growth is the new task.Financial institutions have a large impact on the real economy through the allocation of financial resources,so green finance is important for sustainable growth.However,the current situation in China is that banks care little about the environment and a large amount of financial resources are allocated to heavy industries.The basic issue in green finance is the environmental responsibility of financial institutions.Should China's financial institutions be environmentally responsible?Our research answers these questions.Studies of green finance,environmental responsibility and sustainable growth are many,but few researchers have considered the issue of the environmental responsibility of financial institutions using sustainable growth theory.As we show,many studies of the relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth show that industrial development and technological progress are the two most important factors.Pollution in China is related to its unsound industrial structure and the misallocation of financial resources,which promotes excess capacity and hinders the adjustment of China's industrial structure.From the perspective of sustainable finance,financial institutions,because of their resource allocation role,should be responsible for the environment and sustainable growth.How can one prove that financial institutions influence sustainable growth?There is barely any research on this question.As growth quality becomes even more important than speed in China,the answer lies in the relationship between China's financial allocation of resources and the environmental cost of growth.In this study,we argue that because financial institutions have the power to influence the environmental cost of growth,they must be environmentally responsible.First,the financial resource allocation between polluting and non-polluting industries in China is investigated using listed company data following the work of Dong et al.(2019)and Wen&Liu(2019).We construct the marginal contribution using a more convincing industry classification based on industrial level waste discharge data.This allows us to analyze the causes of the allocation of financial resources.Based on the facts of financial resource allocation,we build an endogenous growth model with finance and an environment sector.This model differs from current models in that it explains how credit preferences can change the environmental cost of economic growth(pollution per GDP).When markets are perfect and information is symmetric,competition leads the financial resource allocation to the optimal level where long-term sustainable growth is possible thanks to technological progress.However,credit preferences for heavy sectors,which are caused by collateral preferences,harm the growth path and force people to choose between consumption and the environment.Although the pollution level in steady state is not necessarily higher due to environmental preferences in the utility function,the environmental cost of growth is always larger.To give empirical evidence,panel data analysis is performed on data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2005 to 2015.The empirical results support our theory and lead us to the conclusion that financial institutions should bear environmental responsibility due to their influence on the environmental cost of growth.By using a sustainable growth model to study the environmental responsibility of financial institutions,we contribute to the literatures on green finance and the environmental responsibility of companies.We argue that accounting for environmental responsibility and environmental risks is not only good for growth but also good for the long-term development of banks.Making better environment risk management decisions and paying more attention to long-term sustainability is more important now than ever before for financial institutions in China.