绿色信贷政策与中国企业出口产品绿色重构

Green Credit Policy and Green Reconfiguration of Export Products of Chinese Enterprises

贸易绿色化转型是推进高水平对外开放、培育国际竞争新优势的重要内容。本文基于多产品企业框架,研究绿色信贷政策对企业出口产品绿色重构的影响。研究发现,绿色信贷政策显著促进了企业出口产品绿色重构。机制检验表明,一方面,绿色信贷政策通过棕色产品信贷规模降低与信贷成本提升,绿色产品信贷规模增加与信贷成本降低,驱动了企业出口产品绿色重构;另一方面,绿色信贷政策通过促使边缘棕色产品高价低质、降低规模,促使边缘绿色产品提价扩利、扩张新增,引发了企业出口产品绿色重构。拓展研究发现,出口产品绿色重构在资本技术密集型与异质性产品中更为明显;加强绿色信贷政策与命令型环境规制和政府绿色补助协同,是全面推进中国企业出口产品绿色重构的重要路径。本文为加快构建绿色贸易体系和加快建设贸易强国提供了有益借鉴。

How to promote the green development of export products is not only an important aspect of China’s implementation of the“dual carbon”commitment and breakthrough of trade growth bottlenecks,but also an important issue that China needs to consider in accelerating the cultivation of new competitive advantages in foreign trade and leading the high-quality development of its trade.The existing literature has confirmed the green adjustment and optimization effect of environmental regulations on the product structure of enterprises.As a market-oriented means of both environmental regulation and financial constraints,green credit policy(GCP)will provide different financial support for project products with different pollution levels based on the principle of green allocation of funds.Therefore,GCP is likely to encourage enterprises to engage in green reconfiguration of export products by adjusting product share to alleviate their environmental and financial constraints.Based on the Chinese context,this study empirically analyzes the impact of GCP on the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products.This study uses the“Opinions on Implementing Environmental Protection Policies and Regulations to Prevent Credit Risks”issued in 2007 to construct a difference-in-differences model.Based on the merging samples of the Chinese Listed Company Database and the Chinese Customs Database from 2002 to 2012,it evaluates the impact of GCP on the green reconfiguration of the export products of Chinese enterprises.Through theoretical analysis and empirical tests,this study demonstrates that(1)GCP has significantly promoted the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products.Specifically,GCP significantly suppresses the entry and scale growth of brown products and facilitates their exit.Moreover,it significantly promotes the entry of green products and suppresses their exit.The conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests.(2)The mechanism analysis reveals that,on the one hand,GCP drives the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products by reducing the credit scale and increasing the credit cost of brown products,as well as increasing the credit scale and reducing the credit cost of green products.On the other hand,GCP promotes the high price and low quality of marginal brown products and reduces their scale.It also increases the price and profit expansion of marginal green products and increases their entry,thus triggering the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products.(3)Further study reveals that the green reconfiguration effect of export products is more pronounced in capital technology-intensive and heterogeneous products,and strengthening the coordination between green credit policies,environmental regulations,and government green subsidies is an important path to comprehensively promote the green reconfiguration of Chinese enterprises’export products.The novelties of this study are as follows.First,existing literature has mostly explored the response strategies and economic impacts of GCP from the perspective of enterprises,ignoring the estimation bias problem caused by the possible simultaneous presence of green and brown projects within an enterprise.Therefore,this study first uses product-level data to analyze the impact of GCP on the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products from a dual perspective of dynamic adjustments of brown and green products.This not only conforms more to the credit approval criteria of Chinese commercial banks based on project operations but also alleviates the estimation bias problem under the assumption of a single-product enterprise.Second,the existing literature mostly focuses on the enterprise credit financing mechanism of GCP without considering the main project sources of their credit constraints or incentive effects,and even neglecting the possible mechanisms for enterprises to absorb and transfer costs through product quality and price strategies.This study not only clarifies the credit financing mechanism driven by GCP for the green reconfiguration of enterprise export products based on project credit scale and credit cost channels,but also reveals the market mechanism of how enterprises can adjust product quality and price based on the differentiated performance of product efficiency and market expansion,and then assists in promoting the green reconfiguration of export products.Third,the existing literature has focused more on the direct strategic responses of enterprises to GCP,neglecting the possibility of enterprises using product structure adjustments to adapt to external environmental changes.This study explores the dynamic changes in the export adjustment of products with different environmental attributes of enterprises,finding that GCP encourages enterprises to export more green products and move away from brown products,ultimately achieving the green reconfiguration of export products.Further analysis is conducted on the path and characteristics of the policy-induced green reconfiguration of enterprise export products,as well as the synergistic effects of environmental regulation and green subsidies.This study has reference value for the government to establish and improve macro constraint and incentive policies to accelerate the green transformation and high-quality development of foreign trade.