The effects of capital-biased tax incentives on firm energy intensity: Environmental dividend or consequence?

Capital and energy are essential input factors in the production and operation of firms, and they are closely interconnected. Nudging firms to improve energy performance during capital investment is crucial for attaining green competitiveness. Nonetheless, little is known about how capital-biased tax incentives affect firm energy performance in the process of encouraging firms to update or expand fixed assets. To fill this critical gap, this paper leverages the 2014 and 2015 accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets as quasi-natural experiments to investigate the impact of capital-biased tax incentives on firm energy intensity. This study uses information from a unique dataset of Chinese firms, and the staggered difference-in-difference strategy is constructed to address identification challenges. The findings of this paper are as follows: (1) The accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets significantly increases firm energy intensity by approximately 11.2%. A series of validations reinforce the robustness of this result. (2) Restructuring energy use and the factor substitution of energy for labour are the main channels through which the accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets increases firm energy intensity. (3) The accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets has a more remarkable effect on the energy intensity enhancement of small-scale firms, capital-intensive firms, and firms in energy-endowed regions. These conclusions support shaping policy options moderately by coordinating tax incentives and government regulation as key factors in promoting sustainable firm development. Overall, this research provides empirical evidence regarding the micro-environmental consequences of capital-biased tax incentives and offers valuable insights for enhancing corporate energy performance.

China's logistics green competitiveness promotion path: a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach

Increasingly serious environmental problems are forcing many industries to gradually turn to green development, and green competitiveness has become the vision of policymakers and industry practitioners. The impact of the development of the logistics industry on the environment cannot be ignored, but the promotion path of its green competitiveness has not been fully studied. Based on Porter's diamond model, this study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the condition configuration of the logistics industry in 30 provincial regions in mainland China to enhance green competitiveness and effectively combine theory with practice. Factors considered include logistics technology innovation ability, logistics market demand, proportion of tertiary industry, management level of logistics enterprises, environmental regulation, and the internet. The results show that the green competitiveness of the logistics industry is influenced by many factors and cannot be sufficiently explained by a single factor. The findings point to three paths with equal authenticity to improve the green competitiveness of the logistics industry. By comparing the same types of high configuration and low configuration, this study finds that environmental regulation is an important external driving force for regions with low added value of output products, and for regions with certain geographical advantages and numerous logistics enterprises, in addition to the management level of logistics enterprises, support from the internet is also particularly important in improving the green competitiveness of logistics. These findings can provide a practical reference for the promotion of green competitiveness in the logistics industry in different regions.

Obstacle diagnosis of green competition promotion: a case study of provinces in China based on catastrophe progression and fuzzy rough set methods

As "green" and "sustainable" become the new themes of regional economic development, green competitiveness will undoubtedly become a new engine for regions to solve environmental, resource use, and other global problems to fit the new development themes. Unfortunately, the performance of regional green competitiveness is not always satisfactory due to various shortcomings. In this study, we abandoned the conventional research approach that directly explores the factors that promote regional green competitiveness and analyzed, instead, the obstacles to green competitiveness among provinces in China. The barrier degree was calculated for each obstacle using a catastrophe progression method and fuzzy rough set. Results showed that (a) resource and environmental problems have become increasingly prominent and have been the most common obstacles to promoting green competitiveness of provinces in China and (b) the obstacles to improving regional green competitiveness showed spatial differences and peculiarity according to the barrier degree. The outcome of the study can help policy makers to better understand and prioritize implementation strategies to develop effective action and policy interventions toward more successful construction of regional green competitiveness.