A Study On The Impact Of The Deregulation Of Foreign Investment On Energy Efficiency Of Chinese Enterprises

In the context of the " Carbon peaking and carbon neutrality " target,controlling carbon emissions and improving energy efficiency have become important tasks in the process of high-quality development in China.Solving energy utilization problems is of great significance to protecting national energy security and achieving sustainable development.Meanwhile,along with the further deepening of China’s opening up to the outside world,foreign-invested enterprises have become an important engine to promote the high-quality development of China’s economy.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to study how the entry of foreign investment affects the energy use efficiency of Chinese enterprises,and thus realizes the healthy development of China’s economy and ecological environment.This paper starts from the study of foreign direct investment(FDI)and the environment,combines the theoretical hypotheses of "The Environmental Kuznets curve","Pollution Haven" and "Pollution Halo",and based on the perspective of spillover effects of FDI to analyze the mechanism path of FDI to improve the energy efficiency of enterprises,and takes the significant deregulation of foreign direct investment in some industries in China in2002 as the policy node,and uses the combined database of Annual Survey of Industrial Firms(ASIF)and China’s Industrial Enterprise Pollution Database from 1998 to 2007 to analyze the impact of FDI on the energy efficiency of enterprises in China by difference in difference(DID)method.The main conclusions of this paper are:(1)FDI improves the energy efficiency of enterprises in China;(2)The spillover effect generated by FDI improves the energy efficiency of enterprises mainly through improving their innovation capacity and market competition dynamics,but due to various institutional deficiencies in China during that period,the effect of personnel mobility generated by FDI is not sufficient and is unlikely to adjust their energy efficiency by improving the management efficiency of enterprises;(3)There is heterogeneity in the impact of FDI on the energy efficiency of enterprises in different ownership,industries and regions.State-owned and local enterprises gain greater energy efficiency under the influence of foreign capital entry.In pollution-intensive industries,the impact of foreign investment on firms’ energy efficiency is limited.And there is no heterogeneity in the adjustment process of firms’ energy efficiency for industry-specific environmental controls.At the regional level,regions with a higher share of tertiary industries have a stronger absorption of foreign capital spillover effects and a greater increase in energy efficiency.However,regions with higher resource endowments tend to be under the spell of the "resource curse";(4)The entry of foreign capital has increased the proportion of clean energy used by enterprises and reduced the intensity of pollution emissions;(5)The reduction in total energy demand in the process of improving energy efficiency by enterprises is offset by the substitution effect generated by capacity expansion and lower energy prices.