Abstract
The establishment of pilot free trade zones (FTZs) is a key strategic measure taken by China to promote high-quality economic development, but there are still gaps in the research on how the establishment of FTZs affects the environmental performance of enterprises from a micro perspective. Using data from China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share resource-based listed enterprises from 2010 to 2020, this paper uses the difference-in-difference model to examine the impact of the establishment of FTZs on the environmental performance of enterprises. The study finds that after the city that the enterprise located is set up as a free trade zone (FTZ), enterprises’ environmental performance has been significantly improved, and this effect has a continuous positive impact. As far as the influence mechanism is concerned, the main driving forces for the establishment of FTZs are technology effect, competition effect, and resource allocation effect, which are embodied in the significant improvement of enterprises’ green technology innovation, total factor productivity, and environmental protection investment. The environmental performance of non-state-owned and large-scale resource-based enterprises is more prominently affected by the establishment of FTZs. In capital-intensive industries and the eastern region, the environmental performance improvement effect of the establishment of FTZs is more obvious. This study provides targeted suggestions for resource-based enterprises to effectively implement the environmental green development strategy.
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Data availability
Data supporting the research results were obtained from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China and the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database (CSMAR).
Notes
The reason why we use 2015 as the representative period is that the number of listed enterprises in the cities approved to establish FTZ in 2015 is the largest, so that more matching samples and more robust regression results can be obtained. In fact, we also tried to use 2017 as a representative period, and the results of the regression still support the conclusions of this paper.
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The authors are very grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped us sufficiently improve the quality of this paper.
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The authors received financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.72072048).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Xin Li, Qiong Xu, and Hecheng Wang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Xin Li, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Li, X., Xu, Q. & Wang, H. Environmental effects of the establishment of pilot free trade zones: evidence from Chinese resource-based enterprises. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 21384–21403 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23722-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23722-1