The Impact Of Green Low-carbon Transition On The Competitive Advantage Of Enterprises Under The "Carbon Peaking And Carbon Neutrality Goals"

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has grown at a rapid pace and has achieved remarkable results.Nowadays,China has become the world’s largest emerging economy and has earned the title of"World Factory".However,regardless of these remarkable achievements,the path of dependence on the crude economic growth model and serious environmental pollution have also emerged as serious problem for China.Besides,the excessive investment of production resources and huge energy consumption as well as greenhouse gas over-emissions are becoming serious challenges which will prevent China becoming a socialist ecological civilization and an industrial manufacturing power country.In September 2020,President Xi Jinping proposed the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals at the75th General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly.He said that China should achieve the goal of carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.To achieve these goals,green low-carbon transition has become the necessary path for China to carry out the profound economic and social transformation.Green low-carbon transition is an important deployment of government guidance,enterprise decision-making and public participation.Enterprises,as the main actors of green and low-carbon cycle development,realize the transition from high carbon to low carbon,or even zero carbon or negative carbon through source control and end-of-pipe management.Therefore,the success of the green low-carbon transition of enterprises is highly related to the success of China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.Recently,the research on green development and low-carbon transition of enterprises has become hot topics for scholars all around the world.However,Some scholars do not consider pollution reduction and carbon reduction in the same dimension,and only focus on the impact of environmental regulation as an exogenous impact on the green transformation of enterprises,as well as lack of thinking about how enterprises can achieve carbon reduction and emission reduction through low-carbon transition.Specifically,in terms of environmental regulation,domestic and foreign scholars often base their research on government regulation.which mainly dominated by"top-down"command controlled environmental regulation and ignored the role of enterprises’spontaneous behavior in green low-carbon transition under market incentives.Moreover,few studies have been conducted on the low-carbon transition of enterprises due to lack of data.The green low-carbon transition of enterprises needs to realize the transformation from end-of-pipe management of pollutants to green and low-carbon covering the whole link and cycle from production input to product sales,which means the change of enterprises’original production mode and competition concept,and affects the adjustment of market competition rules and requires enterprises to reshape new competitive advantages.According to the cost theory,transitioning enterprises face the choice of rising marginal costs,while Porter’s hypothesis suggests that moderate environmental regulation can effectively squeeze out the rising costs through the compensating effect of innovation.In view of this,this paper will focus on exploring three aspects:What are the intrinsic motivations for firms’green and low-carbon transition?What are the impacts of green and low-carbon transition on firms’competitive advantage?How the paths influence on green and low-carbon transition and firms’competitive advantage?In order to demonstrate the above questions,this paper expands the existing theoretical research and explores the impact of green low-carbon transition on the competitive advantage of enterprises under the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals through theoretical derivation and empirical test,which can be classified into five aspects as follow.Firstly,this paper identify the factual characteristics of green low-carbon transition based on big data mining technology.With 38,774 annual reports of listed companies from 2003 to 2019,this paper use the Python open source Jieba word separation module for word separation processing.After carefully reading the text information,1216 phrases related to"green"and"low carbon"were screened out.Through manual review and matching,phrases that obviously do not conform to the concept of"green"and"low carbon"were deleted,and a vocabulary of green and low-carbon transition was built based on"green""low carbon"and the collocation of the words before and after them.Finally,these words were reviewed by three experts in the field of"green"and"low carbon"research,and 231 key words were determined as the basis for defining enterprises green low-carbon transition.Secondly,this paper analyzes the internal mechanism and transmission mechanism of the green low-carbon transition of enterprises,and builds a theoretical model to prove the impact of green low-carbon transition on the competitive advantage of enterprises.Based on the choice behavior of green low-carbon transition of enterprises,combining the choice with the three internal driving forces of innovation motivation,material motivation and reputation motivation,this paper finally constructs a theoretical model to demonstrate the relationship between green low-carbon transition and the competitive advantage of enterprises,as well as explores the internal mechanism of green low-carbon transition of enterprises based on the research perspective of enterprise profit maximization.In terms of specific transmission mechanism,for green low-carbon transition enterprises,when reputation motivation rises,strengthening external motivation can improve their marginal revenue;When facing the decline of reputation motivation,the enhancement of internal incentive will significantly increase its marginal revenue.Thirdly,due to the lack of attention to the drivers of green low-carbon transition in existing studies,this paper focuses on the impact of environmental regulation on the green low-carbon transition of enterprises.From a group perspective,this paper uses the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis（fs QCA）method to analyze a total of 1,552 cases from 194 sample cities from 2011-2018,and selects CO₂emission efficiency,regulatory pressure,environmental pressure,and public opinion pressure as the main external pressures,besides policy response and public attention are added and fomulate six key factors which influence the green low-carbon transition of enterprises,and the group configuration is based on these six factors to explore the effect of different group paths on the green low-carbon transition of enterprises.At the same time,based on the perspective of dynamic changes brought by time trends and spatial differences caused by regional differences,the impact of different grouping paths on the green low-carbon transition of enterprises is clearly demonstrated.Fourthly,based on the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and the logical relationship of"antecedent-behavior-consequence",this paper applies the data of listed companies in China’s manufacturing industry from 2012 to 2019 and adopts the difference-in-difference method.The results of the study show that under the effect of national green low-carbon transition policies,green low-carbon transition enterprises have a significant advantage over non-green low-carbon transition enterprises in terms of profitability,i.e.,compared with non-green low-carbon transition enterprises,green low-carbon transition enterprises have a short-term competitive advantage.Furthermore,this paper induces green innovation,financing constraints and financial support as the key mediating explanatory mechanisms,which will be used as the mediating effect model to find the influence path of green low-carbon transition on the short-term competitive advantage.Fifthly,the impact of green low-carbon transition on the long-term competitive advantage of manufacturing firms is empirically examined by using data from listed manufacturing companies from 2012-2019.The results show that green low-carbon transition can significantly enhance the long-term competitive advantage of enterprises.Furthermore,green innovation,market position and financial variables are introduced to empirically test the moderating effect of green low-carbon transition on the long-term competitive advantage of enterprises.The academic innovations and contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in three aspects:first of all,this paper complements and enriches the existing theoretical researches on green low-carbon transition,namely,the definition of green low-carbon transition firms and the perspective of firms’choice behavior,respectively.Specifically,first,this paper adopts the textual analysis method to define the green low-carbon transition of enterprises,which constitutes the core and focus of the whole study and provides a valuable research method for studying the green low-carbon transition of enterprises;Second,this paper constructs a theoretical framework between the green low-carbon transition and the competitive advantage of enterprises based on the perspective of enterprises’choice behavior,combines the influence of innovation motivation,material motivation and reputation motivation on the competitive advantage of enterprises,and explores the driving mechanism and influence of the green low-carbon transition of enterprises.The second is to construct a theoretical framework between green low-carbon transition and corporate competitive advantage based on the perspective of corporate choice behavior,combine the influence of innovation motivation,material motivation and reputation motivation on corporate competitive advantage,and explore the driving mechanism and consequences of corporate green low-carbon transition,which enriches the theoretical results of green low-carbon transition,extends as well as deepens the theory of green low-carbon transition affecting corporate competitive advantage.Secondly,on the basis of clarifying the connotation and characteristics of the green low-carbon transition,on the one hand,from the combined perspective of emission reduction efficiency,environmental pressure,regulatory pressure,public opinion pressure,environmental respond and public concern,this paper explore the antecedent groupings that push the green low-carbon transition,as well as the changes of groupings in different time trends and different regions,which enriches and complements the relevant theories on the factors that drive the green low-carbon transition of enterprises.On the other hand,through the impact of green low-carbon transition on short-term competitive advantage and long-term competitive advantage,this paper enrich the literature on corporate competitive advantage,and construct a theoretical framework between green low-carbon transition and corporate short-term competitive advantage based on the perspective of power-change theory and dynamic capability;meanwhile,based on corporate behavior and competitive advantage hypothesis,this paper explore and verify the impact of green low-carbon transition on long-term competitive advantage,and expand and enrich the theory.At the same time,based on the hypothesis of corporate behavior and competitive advantage,this paper explore and verify the impact of green low-carbon transition on long-term competitive advantage,and expand and enrich the theory of corporate behavior.This paper further combines the cost theory,Porter’s environmental hypothesis,resource advantage theory,and financial support to theoretically explain and analyze the mechanisms and paths through which the green low-carbon transition affects the competitive advantage of enterprises,as well as provides important theoretical support for driving the high-level green low-carbon transition of enterprises to achieve the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.In addition,this paper has some practical guidance significance for the green low-carbon transition of enterprises.On the one hand,the study of green low-carbon transition,government environmental regulation policies and short-term competitive advantage of enterprises proves the applicability of the theoretical model and enriches the research on the economic effects of green low-carbon transition of enterprises.The green low-carbon transition brings about an increase in the short-term competitive advantage of enterprises.Specifically,the green low-carbon transition achieves an increase in the short-term competitive advantage of enterprises by increasing green innovation,alleviating financing constraints and giving financial support.Thus,it provides an important realistic reference value for enterprises to reverse their competitive disadvantages and achieve green low-carbon transition.On the other hand,based on the improvement of short-term competitive advantage,this paper apply various methods to measure the positive impact of green low-carbon transition on long-term competitive advantage of enterprises,and further clarify the path of green low-carbon transition affecting long-term competitive advantage of enterprises from three levels:increasing the number of green innovation,improving market position and government financial support.This provides an important practical reference value for the government to further promote green transformation policies,develop transformation strategies,and achieve long-term competitive advantage and eventually achieve the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.