Abstract
The target responsibility system of environmental protection is one of the vital channels to achieve a win–win situation for both economic development and environmental protection. Comprehensively investigating how local environmental target constraints drive enterprises to improve their green innovation quality is of enormous theoretical and practical significance for optimizing the implementation effect of environmental target constraints policies and boosting enterprises’ green and high-quality development. We empirically examine the mechanism of the impact of the intensity of different types of local environmental target constraints on the quality of corporate green innovation and the nonlinear relationship between them through innovatively constructing indicators of local environmental target constraint intensity and utilizing the knowledge width of green patents of listed companies as a proxy variable for enterprise green innovation quality. First, the strength of indirect environmental target constraints has a significant positive effect on the quality of green innovation, but further nonlinear characteristics reveal a significant inverse U-shaped relationship between them. Second, indirect environmental target constraint intensity has an inverted U-shaped trend in increasing the intensity of environmental regulation and influencing the digitalization of enterprises, which in turn forms an inverted U-shaped relationship with the quality of green innovation. Third, indirect environmental target constraint intensity works better in areas with policies prioritizing city over province, with mayors less than 57 years old, and for enterprises in technology-intensive industries.
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Notes
For example, the government work report of Yangquan City in 2012 has specific emission-cutting targets of “to reduce emission of COD, ammonia nitrogen, SO2, soot and dust by 1.3%, 1%, 2%, 3%, and 3%,” respectively. Its government work report of 2013 released the fulfillment of the emission-cutting targets: “emission of COD, ammonia nitrogen, SO2, soot and dust has been reduced by 4.18%, 0.78%, 7.12%, 5.96%, and 5.1%,” respectively. This example is typical of direct environmental target constraints.
For instance, the government work report of Benxi City in 2017 set the environmental target of “80% of days in a year will have good air quality”, and its government work report of 2018 (released in 2017) reports 318 days of good air quality and the environmental target is fulfilled. Therefore, we see an indirect environmental target constraint.
In calculation, we need to unify the units used in specific targets and their fulfillment values. For example, we need to unify the tons of emission reduction and percentage of emission reduction and unify the number of days with good air quality and the percentage of days with good air quality and so on. Additionally, if the government work report mentions that its specific environmental target is to fulfill the same provincial environmental target, then given the environmental accountability between the provincial and municipal governments, we set the environmental target constraint intensity to 1.
Abbreviations
- CNRDS :
-
China National Research Data Service Platform
- IPC:
-
International Patent Classification
- S&T:
-
Science and technology
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This work was supported by the Philosophy and Social Science Fund project of Hunan Province (21YBQ079), the Scientific research project of Hunan Education Department (19C0481), the Postgraduate Research Innovation Platform project of the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (202210309) and the Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project of Hunan Province (CX20210385).
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All authors contributed the conception and design of this study. The empirical work and the manuscript’s first draft were performed by Yuke Zhu; the conceptualization and funding acquisition were provided by Honggui Gao; the data collection were provided by Yanan Hu and Qinan Ding; and the project administration and funding acquisition were provided by Yiding Tang. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhu, Y., Gao, H., Hu, Y. et al. Can local environmental constraints improve enterprise’s green innovation quality? Evidence from Chinese-listed firms. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 389–406 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22161-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22161-2