Abstract
From the perspective of ISO14001 certification, we explored the impact of environmental protection tax on enterprises’ long-term environmental practice decisions based on the differential-in-difference model. Our results show that environmental protection tax reform can promote enterprise ISO14001 certification behavior. This positive effect comes from increased enforcement intensity and compliance costs. When the external supervision and governance environment of enterprises is better (i.e., higher degree of marketization and media attention), the shock of environmental tax reform on enterprises’ ISO14001 certification behavior is more significant. Heterogeneity analysis found that the promotion of environmental protection fees-to-tax conversion to ISO14001 certification behavior of enterprises is mainly reflected in non-state-owned key enterprises, small-scale enterprises, and high financing constraints enterprises. Economic consequences test shows that environmental tax policy can improve the green innovation of enterprises in the current and subsequent years, but it does not improve the financial performance in the short term. Our study provides supporting evidence to identify whether environmental tax is a long-term mechanism to promote voluntary environmental management by enterprises.
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All data included in this study are available upon request by contact with the corresponding author.
Notes
Thanks for the reviewer’s suggestions. We compared the rate of change in pollutant emissions between obtained ISO14001 certification and non-obtained ISO14001 certification companies. We found that the pollution emission growth rate of enterprises obtained ISO14001 certification was significantly reduced, which means that ISO14001 certification can be used to reflect sustainable environmental protection.
The upper limit of environmental protection tax should not exceed 10 times of the minimum standard.
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Funding
We would like to thank workshop participants at Beijing Jiaotong University. This paper is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.2022YJS052; No.2020JBDZ009; No.2018JBZ005). All remaining errors are our own.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Xiaohong Ma and Yongmei Cui. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Xiaohong Ma and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Ma, X., Cui, Y. Can the China’s environmental tax reform improve the enterprises sustainable environmental protection practice?—from the perspective of ISO14001 certification. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 102604–102623 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29593-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29593-4