Environmental Regulation,Technological Innovation And Total Factor Productivity Of Enterprises

After 40 years of reform and opening up,China has achieved greater economic growth.At the same time,it also bears the cost of resource consumption and environmental pollution.In the balance between environment and development,the government,the public,and the company should have different roles.As the maker of environmental policy,the government should have an appropriate guiding function for the enterprise;the public will actively supervise the enterprise in pursuit of environmental quality;if the enterprise wants to maintain lasting competitiveness,it will tend to improve the current technology of the enterprise.Based on this background,this paper will try to study the influence of the formal environmental regulation implemented by the government,the informal environmental regulation represented by the public environmental awareness,the enterprise's own technological innovation on the total factor productivity of the company from the micro perspective.This paper uses the sanple of A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2007 to 2014 to test the impact of formal environmental regulation,informal environmental regulation and technological innovation on total factor productivity of enterprises in different regions of the East,Central and West through qualitative and quantitative analysis methods,and verifies the mediating role,the "strong" and "weak" Porter hypotheses.In terms of theory,this article elaborates on the connotations of environmental regulation,technological innovation,and total factor productivity.In the process of reviewing domestic and foreign documents,this paper finds that when scholars study the effect of formal environmental regulation on total factor productivity of enterprises,there are two important points:the "repression theory" of neo-classical economics and the "promotion theory" of Porter's hypothesis;At the same time,it has also been found that no one has studied non-linear effects of informal environmental regulation in previous literature.On the empirical side,this article is based on the mediation model proposed by Baron and Keney(1986)and the mediating test procedures and methods proposed by Wen Zhonglin,Zhang Lei,and Hou Jietai(2004)to study the impact of formal environmental regulations,informal environmental regulations,and technological innovations on total factor productivity.This paper shows:First,the effect of formal environmental regulation on the total factor productivity of enterprises is inverted "N".This shows that when the formal environmental regulation is at a low level,the corporate environmental burden is too small,and there is no incentive to carry out technological innovation so the total factor productivity of enterprises reduces;when the formal environmental regulation level is raised to a reasonable extent,it will prompt enterprises to carry out technological innovation,leading to an increase in the total factor productivity of enterprises;but when the level of formal environmental regulations is raised again,it will significantly increase the environmental costs of enterprises,resulting in reducing the total factor productivity.Second,the impact of informal environmental regulations on total factor productivity of enterprises is "U".This indicates that when informal environmental regulations are at a low level,enterprises' production costs and opportunity costs are low,and there is no incentive to carry out technological innovation so the total factor productivity declines;but when informal environmental regulations are raised to a certain level,public environmental awareness will exert more pressure on companies,and encourage companies to try new technologies,and eventually increase the total factor productivity of enterprises.Third,in the eastern sample,technological innovation plays a partial intermediary role in the formal and informal environmental regulation,technological innovation,and the role of corporate total factor productivity growth.The possible innovations in this paper include the following three points:First,this paper considers the impact of formal environmental regulation,informal environmental regulation,and technological innovation on the total factor productivity of enterprises for the first time;secondly,this paper first tests the mediating role of technological innovation;thirdly,for the first time,the assumption that non-formal regulation has a non-linear effect was proposed and verified in the empirical study.Based on the empirical research,the following four policy recommendations are given:First,when formulating policies,the government should pay attention to the appropriate distinction between regions and regions,and cannot implement a one-size-fits-all policy.Second,the government should appropriately increase its policy strength so that environmental regulation can exert its positive effect on the total factor productivity of enterprises.Third,the public should work hard to raise awareness of environmental protection and actively participate in the supervision of corporate environmental treatment decisions.Fourth,companies should increase investment in R&D and improve their technological innovation capabilities.