Research On Environmental Management Mode Based On VEAs

With the rising attention of environmental problem, now environmental management of firm has become one research hotspot. It is a key of solving environmental problem how to manage environment from passive to active, and how to incorporate environmental concern with strategic management. VEAs (Voluntary environmental agreements) is a brand new mode of environmental management, it is based on consciousness and voluntariness, and an instrument of committing to improve environmental quality in form of contract. It is useful to create a more flexible environmental management, improve the environmental quality, and enhance the resource utilization efficiency. In this paper, we firstly compared VEAs with traditional 'command and control' means and means based on market, and the economic analysis and empirical research were used to discuss the driving factors and functional mechanism behind it. We hope the research in this paper could offer some theoretical and practical help to government environmental policy making and enterprises environmental management implementing. And the main content of this paper are as follows:1. Re-defining the concept of VEAs and VEAs environmental management mode,and explaining firstly economic and environmental reasons in the back of VEAs based on Pigo Solution and Cose Solution, analysis through institution economics indicates that VEAs environmental management mode is environmental management institutional innovation completely.Environmental pollution is the typical external problem, so environmental management instruments are related to the settlement of external problem closely. Pigouvian Solution and Coasean Solution are both focused on settling external problem. A. C. Pigo tried to resolve external problem by taxation and subsidy, so he supposed government was omnipotent, and actions of government were costless. R.H.Cose was apt to limit the intervention of government to define property right, and he thought external problem could be resolved by market agreements and law framework as long as property right were transparent, when transaction cost was positive, resource efficiency of one institution arrangement was different from that of another one, when cooperative effect is not different, means with lower transaction cost was more proper. Hence, we emphasize that Cose' property right theory and transaction cost theory can provide theoretical base for innovation of considering VEAs as one kind of environmental management institutions in this thesis. 2. Constructing pure-threat VEAs model and threat-subsidy VEAs model to analyze the game relationship and producing mechanism during the birth of VEAs between government and firm.Constructing pure-threat VEAs model and threat-subsidy VEAs model to study the machemism of birth of VEAs Based on social fare maxisum, and comparing their polluted abatement level attended, Through deep analysis of the Game relationship between government and enterprises when a VEAs is produced and its birth mechanism, it is found that the VEAs birth might depend on the allocation of bargaining power between government and firm, the magnitude of the background threat and the social cost of funds. And the unilateral VEAs, public VEAs and environmental tax were also analyzed. This part was mainly concentrated on the economic factors which influenced the VEAs birth, and the non-economic factors were neglected.3. Estabilishing a theoretical model of firms' participating VEAs based on utility maximization, general hypothesis was presented. According to the literatures and the practice in China, economic and non-economic factors which influenced the firms' participation of VEAs were identified and selected, Logistic model was applied to validate the motivation mechanism.It is found that:l)Whether or not knowing or participating VEAs by one firm is the common result of economic factors and non-economic factors; 2 ) The indicators , industrical property and R&D expenditure of economic factors is more insignificance to influence one firm to know and participate VEAs; 3 ) The indicators ,government pressure and environmental responsibility of non-economic factors is more insignificance to influence one firm to know and participate in VEAs。It concludes that the implementation of VEAs is one systematical engineering, besides the propagandizing and sparkpluging to firms, the publicizing to consumers, investors, communities, and even finance system is also important, only they can supervise and drive firms behaviors.