| The report of the 20th Party Congress clearly points out that "nature is the basic condition for human survival and development,and respecting,responding to and protecting nature is an inherent requirement for the comprehensive construction of a socialist modern state." This shows the importance that the State attaches to environmental protection and ecological improvement.For the long-term development strategy of our economy and society to be better realised,it is necessary to follow a green and sustainable development path.Green and sustainable development is also the core objective of the environmental governance policy system formulated and implemented in China.The report of the 20th Party Congress clearly points out that the concept of green water and green mountains is the silver mountain of gold must be established and practised,with "protection,greening,improving quality and increasing efficiency" as the main line.As a result,China is establishing and improving a market-based macroeconomic governance system to achieve faster and better green and high-quality economic and social development by giving full play to the main role of the market.As a market-based environmental regulation,the Act marks the formal retirement of China’s longest-standing and most extensive environmental regulation policy,i.e.sewage charges,and the formal replacement of sewage charges by the Environmental Protection Tax Law on the historical stage.The environmental tax reform is based on the principle of "tax burden shifting",and the smooth transition from sewage charges to environmental protection tax has been achieved,and China’s environmental protection has entered a new stage of development.Starting from the differences between emission fees and environmental taxes,this paper explores the correlation and mechanism of action between environmental tax reform and enterprises green technological innovation by constructing a double-difference-in-differences(DID)model and a two-way fixed-effects model using data of listed companies in the heavy pollution industry in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2015-2019.Subsequently,to ensure the robustness of the findings of this paper,the number of green invention patents in period t+1 is used as the explanatory variable to re-run the regression,propensity score matching PSM-DID method,change the econometric model,placebo test and balanced sample interval for robustness testing.The paper also analyses the heterogeneity of firms according to their different internal and external characteristics,one by one,for firms with different property rights,firms of different sizes,firms in different geographical regions,firms in different intensity legal system environments,and firms with different degrees of financing constraints.Finally,this paper introduces the dummy variable corporate political connectedness to further explore the impact mechanism of environmental tax reform on corporate green technological innovation.Based on the empirical research of this paper,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)the reform of environmental taxes and fees has a positive role in promoting the green technology innovation of heavy polluting enterprises.(2)in the enterprise internal characteristics,compared with the non-state-owned heavy pollution enterprises green technology innovation and small heavy pollution enterprises green technology innovation,environmental tax reform positive promote heavy pollution enterprises green technology innovation in the state-owned heavy pollution enterprises and large-scale heavy pollution enterprises is more obvious.(3)in the enterprise external characteristics,the reform of environmental taxes and fees with different external characteristics of heavy pollution enterprise green technology innovation has obvious differences,specific,the effect of environmental tax reform in the eastern region of heavy pollution enterprises green technology innovation,regional legal environment good heavy pollution enterprise green technology innovation and financing constraints smaller heavy pollution enterprise green technology innovation is more obvious.(4)The reform of environmental taxes and fees promotes green technology innovation of heavy polluting enterprises by breaking government protection and reducing the connection between government and enterprises.The above conclusion proves that the reform of environmental taxes and fees has played a positive role,but the reform still needs to be further improved.At the same time,attention should be paid to improving the coordination of environmental taxes and other environmental protection policies to better promote the green and high-quality development of enterprises. |
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