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| Dual Control System of Total Energy Consumption and Energy Intensity and Green Innovation of Enterprises |
| Li Yukun,Zhang Yingqin |
| (International Business School, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi′an 710119, China) |
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Abstract Climate change is among the most intensely debated socioeconomic issues today. To address the potential catastrophe risks posed by climate change, governments around the world are pushing for various forms of regulation to curb greenhouse gas emissions. As the world's largest carbon emitter, China faces severe environmental governance pressures. In order to solve the prominent problem of resource and environmental constraints, China has implemented an environmental constraint index system from the “11 Five-Year” plan, and gradually increased the weight of environmental performance in the performance evaluation of local government leaders, resulting in a significant decrease in the energy consumption intensity per unit of GDP. In order to achieve carbon peaking and carbon neutrality as soon as possible, China has innovatively proposed the dual control system of total energy consumption and energy intensity system (DCS hereafter) in the “13 Five-Year” Plan. The main difference between DCS and the previous policy is the addition of total energy consumption control which is one of the main reasons for power outages in many places in China in 2021. But there is little literature on the economic consequences of DCS, and this is what this paper focuses on.
Institutional theory emphasizes that the government's attention to environmental issues makes environmental governance an important indicator for evaluating the legitimacy of enterprises, thereby creating pressure on the legality of environmental supervision on enterprises. This environmental legality pressure will prompt enterprises to change their environmental strategies. However, there is no consistent conclusion about the relationship between institutional pressure and corporate environmental governance, and it is difficult to explain why companies show heterogeneity when they are subjected to the same institutional pressure. This may be because institutional pressure is not only manifested in the role of explicit environmental regulations, standards and other regulatory designs, but also subject to the impact of the actual implementation of the system. Especially for a country like China with a vast territory and great regional economic differences, the trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection will inevitably lead to heterogeneous results in environmental regulation. Combined with the institutional theory and the political championship theory, this paper centers around the implementation of DCS to explore the heterogeneous impact of institutional pressure on the green innovation of enterprises.
This paper selects the data of listed companies in China's A-share heavy polluting industries from 2017 to 2019 to study the impact of DCS started in the "13th Five-Year Plan" on the green innovation of enterprises. The results show that the DCS can significantly promote the green innovation of enterprises, in which the effect of target control of total energy consumption is more significant, and the effect of target control of energy consumption intensity is less significant. The results remain unchanged after a series of robustness checks. The mechanism test finds that DCS is mainly to encourage green innovation of enterprises by increasing the environmental supervision of local governments, raising the cost of environmental protection compliance of enterprises, and issuing more government subsidies related to environmental protection to the listed companies and easing corporate financing constraints. In the further analysis, the results show that the pressure of economic growth will weaken the effect of DCS on promoting green innovation, and relationship between DCS and green innovation is more pronounced when the firm's financial flexibility is high.
The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, this paper is the first to empirically analyze the economic consequences of the DCS, and it is helpful to scientifically evaluate and understand DCS. This provides an empirical basis for improving DCS under the background of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. Second, the institutional pressure and the degree of regulatory enforcement caused by the DCS also vary from place to place, which makes corporate green innovation show heterogeneity, thus this study enriches the literature on institutional pressure and corporate green innovation. Third, it also enriches the related research on political tournament theory. In areas where local governments set higher economic growth goals, the “dual control of energy consumption” system is found to have a weaker incentive for green innovation, indicating that the political championship theory has a significant impact on the relationship between institutional pressure and corporate environmental governance.
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Received: 15 June 2022
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