政府补贴与企业环保投资选择:前端预防还是末端治理?

Environmental Subsidies and Corporate Environmental Investment: Cleaner Production or End-of-Pipe Treatment?

政府补贴是推动绿色低碳发展、经济转型和实现社会可持续目标的重要激励政策措施。不同于以往文献主要关注政府补贴对企业整体环保投资的影响,本文以2007—2020年中国A股上市公司为样本,基于手工整理的政府补贴和环保投资数据,从企业内外部视角划分前端预防和末端治理的环保投资类型,分析政府补贴政策对两种不同企业环保投资行为的影响差异。研究发现,政府对前端预防项目进行补贴可以缓解企业融资约束、增加投资项目的预期收益,进而促使企业加大投资力度;政府对末端治理项目进行补贴无法提高投资项目的预期收益,对企业自身的投资额具有挤出效应。上述结论为优化环保补贴结构以及加快企业清洁生产转型提供了科学依据。

Government subsidies are important incentive policy measures to promote green and low-carbon development,economic transformation and the achievement of social sustainability goals.Different from previous literature that mainly focuses on the impact of government subsidies on the overall environmental protection investment of enterprises,this paper based on manually-sorted data on the environmental subsidies and corporate environmental investment of China’s listed companies from 2007 to 2020,classifies two types of corporate environmental investment behaviors from internal and external perspectives:cleaner production(CP)and end-of-pipe treatment(ET),and analyzes the differences in the impacts of environmental subsidies on the two different types of investment behaviors.The results show that government subsidies for CP can alleviate the financing constraints and increase the expected returns of firms’investment,which in turn can lead to greater investment by firms;government subsidies for ET fail to increase the expected returns of firms’investment and have a crowding-out effect on the amount of investment made by enterprises themselves.The above findings provide scientific guideline for optimizing the structure of environmental subsidies and for accelerating the transition to cleaner production.