The Impact Of Tax Incentives On Enterprises’ Green Technology Innovation

To prevent further deterioration of the ecological environment,General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized in the report of the 20 th National Congress that "the inherent requirement of building a modern socialist country is to respect nature,follow nature and protect nature.We must firmly believe in the concept that green water and green mountains are the silver mountain of gold,and plan development from the perspective of the harmonious coexistence of man and nature.Ecological environmental protection has become an important part of the national strategy.Heavy polluting enterprises will release a large amount of pollutants in the production and operation process,which poses a great threat to the environment,so how to reduce emissions and improve environmental quality has become an urgent priority for the development of heavy polluting enterprises.Green technology innovation not only has the advantages of traditional technology innovation,but also can effectively reduce the negative impact on the environment and make the cost of environmental management into the intrinsic cost of technological innovation.However,the disadvantage of long R&D cycle and high cost of green technology innovation is a common problem,which leads to insufficient incentive for enterprises to innovate and makes it difficult for environmental protection measures to achieve the desired effect.Therefore,it is increasingly important for the government to encourage and promote enterprises’ green transformation and green innovation activities through tax incentives.Based on this,this paper collects and collates the data on tax relief and tax rebates for the year 2010-2020 for heavily polluting A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen,and defines the explanatory variables as whether they enjoy tax benefits dummy variables.Meanwhile,as an innovation indicator to measure the green technology of enterprises,this paper draws on the research results of Zhang Yafeng et al.(2018)to collect and compile data on the total number of green patents granted to listed companies.The main variables in this paper were empirically analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression methods to investigate the interdependence between tax incentives and corporate green technology innovation in China.In addition,the impact of R&D investment on green technology innovation is explored by implementing R&D investment as an intermediate variable,and the heterogeneous effects of corporate ownership and regional differences on the relationship are further explored.The results of this paper show that the green technology innovation of heavy polluting enterprises is one of the incentive targets of tax incentives,and its effect is significant;in addition,the implementation of tax incentives can prompt enterprises to increase R&D investment;further research also finds that there are heterogeneous differences in the effect of enterprise tax incentives in terms of enterprise ownership and region,the incentive effect of tax incentives is more significant in state-owned enterprises,and the incentive effect of tax incentives in central and western regions is more significant than that in eastern regions.The effect of tax incentives is more significant in the central and western regions than in the eastern regions.Finally,the paper further verifies the robustness of the findings by redefining the explanatory variables and lagging the explanatory variables.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward the following suggestions: first,increase tax incentives and accelerate the design and implementation of green tax policies;second,promote the green transformation process of heavy polluting SOEs and improve the efficiency of green technological innovation in SOEs;third,coordinate regional development and give full play to the resource advantages of central and western regions;finally,corresponding tax incentives should be adopted in different segments.