税收激励能否提升企业能源效率?——来自增值税结构性改革的经验证据

Can Tax Incentives Improve Enterprise Energy Efficiency? Empirical Evidence Based on a Quasi-natural Experiment of VAT Structural Reform

如何协调好以减税降费为代表的经济刺激政策与“碳达峰、碳中和”的历史使命是当今中国面临的重大挑战。鉴于提升能源效率是减少碳排放和控制能源消费的关键,文章通过构建结构性减税与企业能源效率的理论模型,以2004年开始在东北三省八大行业实施的增值税由生产型转向消费型的结构性减税政策这一“准自然实验”为例,使用三重差分方法和企业能源消费数据,从理论逻辑和经验分析两个方面考察了税收激励对企业能源效率的影响及其内在机制。研究发现,税收激励显著提升了企业的能源效率,这一结论在一系列稳健性检验中均成立;弹性估计结果表明,增值税税率每降低1%,能源效率将提升0.58%;机制分析表明,税收激励主要通过要素投入结构效应和技术效应实现了生产效率的改善,从而提升了企业能源效率;异质性分析表明,税收激励更多地提升了东部地区以及非资源型城市、高污染行业以及资本密集型行业、国有和集体以及中小规模企业的能源效率。文章将减税降费的效应分析拓展到碳污染治理上,丰富了税收激励与能源效率的相关文献,为在严峻的国际国内经济形势下实现稳增长与碳减排的高质量协同发展提供了有益借鉴,也为如何用好减税政策实现社会经济的高质量发展提供了学理支持和决策参考。

Under the realistic background of increasing downward pressure on domestic economy and tightening constraints on the “dual carbon” goal, taking effective measures to boost social and economic development and promote the transformation of the tax system is of great significance for realizing the Chinese path to modernization. Then, it has become an important practical issue whether to develop a sustainable development path that considers both economic growth and pollution reduction through a well-designed system of tax reduction.This paper focuses on the structural tax reduction policy of VAT reform from production to consumption since 2004. Using the data of pollution, innovation and finance at the micro-enterprise level from 1998 to 2008, this paper examines the impact and mechanism of structural tax reduction on the energy efficiency of micro-enterprises by using the DDD method. The result shows that structural tax reduction and the reduction of VAT rate improve enterprise energy efficiency, which holds across a series of robustness tests. The elastic estimation shows that enterprise energy efficiency will increase by 0.58% when the effective VAT rate decreases by 1%. The mechanism analysis shows that VAT reform achieves the structural effect of factor inputs and the technical effect by promoting investment transformation, thereby improving enterprise production efficiency and then improving enterprise energy efficiency. The heterogeneity analysis shows that VAT reform improves the enterprise energy efficiency of eastern regions, non-resource-based cities, highly-polluting industries, state-owned and collective enterprises, and small and medium-sized enterprises.The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it is an earlier document focusing on the relationship between tax incentives and carbon emissions, which makes up for the lack of scientific evaluation of the relationship between tax and fee reduction and carbon emission reduction in the existing literature. Second,it constructs a theoretical model of the impact of structural tax reduction policies on enterprise energy efficiency from a new perspective of the impact of tax incentives on intermediate investment structure, which enriches the theoretical research on tax reform and environmental governance. Third, it uses enterprise pollution data and the DDD method of the frontier of environmental economics to more accurately identify the impact of tax reform on enterprise energy efficiency and its mechanism, so as to provide academic interpretation and policy recommendations for realizing China’s environmental governance through non-environmental tax reform.