The Heterogeneous Effect Of Environmental Taxes And Fees

Due to the unbalanced spatial distribution of China's natural resources,population size and other factors,China's economic and environmental conditions present a great regional difference.The resources in the Northeast Economic Zone are gradually deficient,the environmental pollution is serious,and the economic level is gradually decreasing;The development of the economic zone in the middle reaches of the Yellow River mainly depends on natural resources;The coastal economic zone has obvious location advantages,strong economic strength and limited resource reserves;The Southwest Economic Zone,the Northwest Economic Zone,and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River Economic Zone are rich in natural resources and low in economic development,especially in the Southwest Economic Zone and the Northwest Economic Zone.In order to prevent the above environmental risks,the state needs to levy an environmental tax to control it.In 2012,the State Council issued the “National Environmental Protection “Twelfth Five-Year Plan”,pointing out that it is necessary to establish a sound environmental tax system as soon as possible,and propose “implementing different environmental policies in different regions and industries”.In this context,this paper studies the environmental effects of environmental taxes and fees in different regions of China.Hope that the research in this paper can provide guiding suggestions for the improvement of China's regional environmental tax system.Through research literature,it can be found that the environmental tax can have an impact on producers,consumers and the government and thus have an environmental effect.However,in China,the empirical research on the environmental protection effect of environmental taxes and fees is basically based on the national research unit.with less consideration of regional differences.The taxes and fees related to environmental protection mainly include sewage charges(discontinued on January 1,2018,environmental protection tax on the same day),resource tax,consumption tax,vehicle purchase tax,vehicle and vessel tax,urban land use tax,cultivated land occupation tax,Value-added tax,corporate income tax.Based on the EKC model,this paper takes resource tax,consumption tax revenue and sewage fee income as independent variables;per capita GDP,industrial structure,environmental governance investment,and economic openness are the control variables;The environmental pollution,industrial waste gas emissions,industrial wastewater discharge,industrial solid waste emissions,and energy consumption are the dependent variables.Using the national provincial panel data from 2004 to 2016,through the empirical analysis of the national and six different economic zones,we found that: To analyze the impact of environmental taxes and fees on the overall pollution of the environment,only the consumption tax has shown environmental protection effects in the hole country,the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and the southwestern economic zone;And from the impact on the four specific variables,The resource taxation in the Northeast Economic Zone can reduce energy consumption,The excise tax on the economic zone in the middle reaches of the Yellow River can reduce industrial emissions,The collection of resource tax and consumption tax in the middle economic zone of the Yangtze River can reduce the status of local industrial wastewater pollution;The taxation consumption tax of the Southwest Economic Zone helps to reduce emissions of industrial waste water,The environmental taxes and fees collected in the coastal economic zone and the northwest economic zone have no environmental protection.This paper thinks that this is mainly because China's current environmental taxation system has the following shortcomings: long-term lack of main tax types,narrow scope of collection,low tax rate,less consideration of environmental pollution and resource differences in various regions.In order to solve these problems,it is necessary to further promote the implementation of the environmental protection tax law,increase environmental tax revenues,increase environmental governance investment,and also consider the environmental pollution situation of each economic zone and implement differentiated environmental taxation policies.