A Comparative Study Of The Impact On The Enterprises Cost Caused By Carbon Tax And Emissions Trading Scheme

Global climate change has become one of the important issues of common concern in political, business and science. It turns to be a world consensus and the inevitable choice to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and develop the low-carbon economy. Having surpassed the U.S., China has become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and it’s inevitable for it to introduce corresponding carbon reduction policies in next few years. Standing on the position of enterprises, this paper researches on how carbon tax and emission rights trading impact enterprise costs, and puts forward the optimal policy.Adopting stratified sampling, this paper selects30listed companies in four industries of thermal power, steel, cement and electrolytic aluminum as samples. By setting a policy scenario of carbon tax and emission rights trading mechanism, building Cobb-Douglas cost function and using Lagrange extremum method, we can measure the influence of emission reduction to the enterprise cost, cost-reduction sensitivity coefficient, in various scenarios By empirically measuring the increasing degree of enterprise cost caused by carbon emission reduction and using mean comparison method, we can compare the cost-reduction sensitivity coefficients in various scenarios to find whether there are significant differences and than study the function mechanism of how carbon tax and emission rights trading influencing the enterprise costs.The results show that government adopting carbon tax policy leads to a higher degree of enterprise cost increasing rather an ideal reduction effect. Cooperatively using subsidy policy and carbon tax policy can not only reduce the impact of the carbon tax on the enterprise cost increasing, but also improve the overall emission reduction effect. Government using emissions trading system has a relatively smaller impact on enterprise cost increasing, while an ideal overall reduction effect.Emissions reductions will result in cost increasing, so when introducing emission reduction policy, a country need to consider the realization of the emission reduction goals as well as weigh how to reduce the impact to cost. Therefore, this paper put forward the following suggestions:On one hand, when carbon tax policy being introduced, appropriate subsidies need to be given to the enterprise, which helps to reduce the influence of carbon tax on enterprise cost and achieves better emission reduction effect. On the other, perfect the market-oriented tools supporting policies and measures and reduce carbon emissions quota enterprise can get free in the implementation of emissions trading system, which helps to stimulate these enterprises to upgrade emission reduction technology, innovate management method, etc, realizing the win-win situation of emission reduction as well as the development and progress.The originality of this dissertation is the comparative study of the impact on the enterprises cost caused by carbon tax and emissions trading scheme, which uses the method of scenario simulation. However, there are certain limitations in the research and conclusions inevitably as the data is difficult to be collected and the size of sample is small.