Research On The Impact Of Levying Environmental Protection Tax On The Environmental Costs Of Industrial Enterprises

Since the 1970 s,with the rapid progress of industrialization in China,the contradiction between economic development and environmental pollution has become more and more prominent.As a pillar industry,industrial enterprises in the early stage of development mostly consumed huge resources and environmental damage in exchange for economic benefits,and this rough production characteristic was accompanied by increased environmental pollution and ecological damage.Due to the demand of environmental management,the state has adopted administrative measures such as sewage charges and environmental compensation fees,but due to the limitations of the system itself and the drawbacks of implementation,the sewage charges have not achieved the expected effect."The 13 th Five-Year Plan included green development in the national five-year development plan for the first time,and the finance and taxation departments responded positively by successively improving the tax regulations and systems such as resource tax,vehicle tax and arable land occupation tax,gradually building up China’s green taxation system.2018 onwards,the government began to curb environmental pollution through tax legal means,using taxation of environmental protection tax to replace the original sewage charges.Compared to the sewage charges,the environmental protection tax,as a tax with compulsory effect,is more standardised in terms of levy standards,scope of levy and collection and administration methods.On the one hand,the environmental protection tax imposes stricter and more detailed environmental requirements on production operators,including technological innovation,transformation and upgrading,and environmental cost control.On the other hand,as an important part of China’s construction of a green taxation system,the environmental protection age plays a role in promoting green economic development.This paper focuses on the impact of the environmental protection tax on the environmental costs of industrial enterprises,choosing XH Technology,a representative non-ferrous metal industrial enterprise in L city,as a sample to conduct a micro-case analysis.This paper first briefly describes the basic provisions and implementation status of the domestic environmental protection tax law,further extends to the impact mechanism of the environmental protection tax on environmental costs,and introduces the corporate profile and environmental cost structure of XH Technology;then,based on the financial data from 2014-2021,the changes in capitalised and expensed environmental costs of XH Technology before and after the implementation of the environmental protection tax are comprehensively analysed;finally,using Finally,the impact of environmental protection tax on the environmental costs of industrial enterprises was examined cross-sectionally using data on the changes in environmental costs of other industrial enterprises of similar size in comparison with the case enterprise.The results of the study can be summarised as follows: in the short term,the environmental protection tax causes an increase in environmental costs by affecting industrial enterprises’ investment in environmental protection equipment and technology research and development costs.From the perspective of sustainable development,the environmental protection tax restrains the emission behaviour of industrial enterprises to a certain extent and guides them to reduce their environment-related costs and expenses through green production.Finally,in the context of imposing environmental protection tax,summarize the problems in environmental cost control of industrial enterprises and provide targeted opinions and suggestions.The innovation of this paper lies in the fact that it has only been six years since China formally levied environmental protection tax on a large scale,so the study of the impact of environmental protection tax on environmental costs is timely and advanced;secondly,representative enterprises are selected as case studies,enriching the case studies on environmental cost control of enterprises from the micro level.