The Pollution Reduction Effect Of Environmental Protection Tax In China

Since the founding of New China,China has embarked on a great process of socialist industrialization and scored outstanding achievements.After the reform and opening up,the pace of socialist industrialization with Chinese characteristics accelerated,and the ensuing problem of contradiction between environment and economic development became increasingly serious.Under such conditions,sewage discharge fees came into being,providing a powerful administrative means for pollution control in China.After entering the 21st century,the original pollution discharge fee is no longer applicable to China’s national conditions,and on this basis,the Environmental Protection Tax Law was officially implemented on January 1,2018.This marks the establishment of China’s first tax law for the purpose of environmental protection,elevating environmental protection to the national legal level.Since the 18th anniversary of the Communist Party of China,General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed the importance of environmental protection and put forward the scientific thesis that "green water and green mountains are gold and silver mountains".The implementation of the environmental protection tax law is a concrete embodiment of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s political ideology and is in line with China’s basic national policy of protecting the environment.The environmental protection tax has been in effect for five years,but it is not clear whether it has a restraining effect on pollutant emissions.Therefore,this paper discusses the effect of the implementation of environmental protection tax on China’s environmental pollution emission reduction,the pollution reduction effect on national strategic regions,as well as the existing problems and improvement suggestions,which plays a certain role in further adjusting and optimizing the environmental protection tax system.This paper first sorts out the domestic and foreign literature from three aspects:environmental protection tax tax theory,policy effect,and collection and management.On this basis,based on the theory of externalities,public goods and double dividends,the emission reduction effect of environmental protection tax is analyzed.Then,this paper briefly describes the implementation status of environmental protection tax and the current situation of pollutant discharge.In order to verify the inhibitory effect of environmental protection tax on pollutants,this paper uses the difference-in-difference model to select the data of 288 prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2020,and establishes the estimation models of air pollutants,water pollutants and solid waste emissions for empirical research.The results show that the implementation of environmental protection tax significantly inhibits the emission of three types of pollutants,and the experimental results pass the robustness test.In view of the current situation of environmental protection tax,this paper provides some possible suggestions for improvement at the end of the paper,including expanding the scope of taxation,optimizing the tax rate structure,and enhancing the positive incentive effect,so as to provide new ideas for the improvement of environmental protection tax.