中国环境保护税与绿色创新:杠杆效应还是挤出效应?

China’s Environmental Protection Tax and Green Innovation:Incentive Effect or Crowding-out Effect?

中国环境保护税改革对企业绿色创新将发挥杠杆效应还是挤出效应?面对规制强度更高的环境保护税,企业将采取实质性还是策略性绿色创新活动应对?既有研究没有答案。本文以中国环境保护税改革实施为自然实验,基于微观企业绿色专利数据,运用三重差分方法,研究发现:首先,环境保护税改革有效促进了企业绿色创新活动,主要激发了企业提高化石能源使用效率和在末端降低污染物排放的绿色创新活动,从根本上减少污染排放的新能源方面的绿色创新并不显著。其次,该改革诱发的企业绿色技术创新并非是在企业既有创新活动基础上叠加的杠杆效应,而是对其他技术创新的挤出效应。再次,该改革主要诱发了非国有企业、大规模企业的实质绿色创新活动,但绿色创新路径依赖较为突出。本文为进一步推进中国环境保护税制度的完善提供了重要经验证据。

In China,the current structural and fundamental pressures on ecological environment protection have not yet been fundamentally alleviated.It is still a great challenge to change the situation of pollution emissions and ecological destruction fundamentally.Environmental regulations play an important role in promoting enterprises to take environmental protection actions.The Pigovian tax principle believes that environmental tax is an important tool for sustainable economic growth,and it can effectively promote enterprises to reduce pollution and protect the environment by internalizing the costs of the negative externalities.As a market-based environmental regulation,the environmental protection tax(EPT)is one of the most important environmental economic policies in China.Its predecessor is the pollutant discharge fee,which was transformed into the environmental protection tax in 2018.Some regions have maintained the original standard of pollutant discharge fee in this reform,while some other regions have adopted a higher standard than that of the original pollutant discharge fee,which means that the regulation intensity of these regions has been increased.The Porter hypothesis believes that stricter environmental regulations can promote the innovative activities of enterprises.Especially,market-based tools can achieve innovation offsets.Is the impact of China’s environmental protection tax reform on enterprises’green innovation an incentive effect or a crowding-out effect?Whether enterprises adopt strategic green innovation activities to cope with the pressure of environmental protection tax with higher regulatory intensity?There is no answer in the existing literature.Using the triple difference(DDD)framework,we estimate the effects of EPT reform on enterprises’green innovation by taking advantage of variations across regions(i.e.,regions with higher EPT tax rate versus regions with unchanged tax rates),across industries(i.e.,pollution-intensive sectors vs.non-pollution-intensive sectors),and across years(i.e.,before and after the EPT policy).Analyzing data of Chinese listed companies,we present three findings.First,the reform has effectively promoted the green innovation of industrial enterprises,mainly stimulating the efficiency of fossil energy and innovative activities in reducing pollutant emissions at the end.The green innovation in the field of new energy that fundamentally reduces pollution emissions do not respond significantly.Second,the R&D expenditures,human capital,and overall innovation activities of the industrial enterprises in regions with higher environmental tax rates have not increased significantly.This means that although green taxation induces green innovation activities of the industrial enterprises in the short term,it is not a real incentive effect for enterprise innovation but a crowding-out effect on existing production innovation.Third,the reform has mainly induced green innovation activities in non-state-owned enterprises and large enterprises,but they mainly focus on green innovation activities at the end to reduce emissions.It shows that the path dependence of green innovation is still serious.This paper makes the following contributions.First,it estimates the impact of environmental protection tax reform on enterprises’green innovation,which provides a new and reliable micro evidence for the Porter hypothesis in developing countries.Second,it examines the green innovation strategy of industrial enterprises under the pressure of environmental protection tax with higher tax rate.Also,it deepens the understanding about the impact of market-based environmental regulations,especially environmental tax policy,on green innovation activities of industrial enterprises.Third,it investigates the impact and mechanism of environmental protection tax on green innovation of industrial enterprises by using relatively new micro-data from the perspective of the co-opetition relationship between green technological innovation and other technological innovations.This provides a new perspective for evaluating environmental protection tax policy.Finally,it examines the direction and heterogeneous behavior of green innovation in industrial enterprises.This provides important empirical evidence for advancing the improvement of environmental protection tax system in developing countries.