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| The Impact of Environmental Governance Policy on Green Innovation: Evidence from China's Quasi-Natural Experiment |
| WANG Xin, WANG Ying
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| School of Finance, Shandong University of Finance and Economics |
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Abstract In response to environmental conditions and the need for environmental protection, the former Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection's Ambient Air Quality Standard (2012) establishes requirements for management of the whole environmental governance lifecycle to accelerate the treatment of air pollution, meet public needs, and improve the credibility of the government. Since the implementation of the new standard by all regions within the required schedule, local air quality monitoring realizes real-time, interference-free, and comprehensive coverage with direct reporting. The standard greatly increases the opportunity cost of local government inaction in environmental governance, facilitates environmental supervision by the public, and improves the probability that pollution emissions by firms will be punished. These pressures provide a strong motivation for enterprises, as the main source of Chinese innovation, to carry out whole-lifecycle green technology innovation. Environmental information disclosure creates an important force promoting green technology innovation and pollution and carbon reduction to achieve the double carbon target.
This paper is divided into three parts. First, we review the literature regarding the impact of environmental regulations on innovation by firms and combine it with the needs of policy promoting the development of green technology innovation. Given this context, we propose research hypotheses regarding the relationships between environmental protection policy and green technology innovation by firms. Since the implementation of the new standard, we find that green technology innovation by high environmental risk firms has become increasingly positive in response to stricter regional environmental protection law enforcement and more active media supervision. Second, taking all A-share listed firms in China from 2007 to 2017 as the research object and the staggered implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Standard in 2012 across cities as the quasi-natural experiment, we use a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method to analyze the differences between high and low environmental risk firms in green technology innovation before and after the implementation of the new standard. After the implementation of the new standard, we find that the green technology innovation of high environmental risk firms becomes more positive, as measured by both the quantity and quality of green innovation. The validity of this conclusion is confirmed by a series of robustness tests. The heterogeneity test finds that the new standard's effectiveness in promoting green technology innovation is more significant for state-owned firms and non-patent-intensive firms than for privately owned firms and patent-intensive firms. Further research shows that the effects of the new standard on green technology innovation are significantly enhanced by improvements in environmental law enforcement and the intensity of public and media supervision. Finally, the positive effects of the new standard lead to significant local air quality improvements. Our findings lead us to some policy suggestions. First, the authorities should strengthen and improve the environmental regulation system by classifying and improving the levels of environmental regulation. Second, the authorities should promote the positive advantages of using digital technology to assist environmental regulation in support of green innovation. Third, the authorities should establish a systematic approach to evaluate the effects of environmental regulation on enterprise green innovation. Lastly, a set of evaluation systems can be established to help firms and regulators recognize the content and complexity of green innovation and prudently manage the problems and uncertainties that may be encountered in the innovation process. Such evaluation systems can enable more prospective implementation of regulatory policies to encourage green innovation.
We contribute to the literature in several ways. First, from the perspective of institutional economics, we enrich the related theoretical research in the field of macro-environmental policy and micro-behaviors. The environmental regulation literature mainly studies the impacts of command-based and market-based regulation policies on pollution transfer, energy conservation, and emission reduction by firms and on environmental protection investment in general. We evaluate the effectiveness of macro-environmental policy from the perspective of green technology innovation by firms, thereby providing new evidence in the study of existing environmental regulations. Second, we creatively place the Ambient Air Quality Standard and green technology innovation into the same theoretical framework, thereby expanding and enriching the relevant literature on the factors that influence green technology innovation by firms. Finally, we analyze the regulatory and environmental effects of environmental law enforcement, public supervision, and media supervision. The results provide a useful reference to further motivate firms in their support for environmental governance and establish a sound system for the development of a green and low-carbon circular economy.
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Published: 02 November 2021
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