Does Environmental Information Disclosure Affect the Sustainable Development of Enterprises: The Role of Green Innovation

Dameng Hu,Changbiao Zhong,Yuanzhe Huang

doi:10.3390/su131911064

Dameng Hu, Changbiao Zhong + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su131911064

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Oct 7, 2021
Citations: 22	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Ningbo University

Abstract

Along with command-and-control and market-incentive environmental regulation policies, environmental information disclosure (EID) is an important measure used by the Chinese government to implement environmental governance. In the context of advocating for corporate sustainable development and green governance, this study uses data from China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies in heavily polluting industries spanning 2008–2019 to empirically explore the relationship between corporate EID and green innovation (GI). The results reveal the following: (1) high-quality EID significantly promotes the absolute GI level and the relative GI level of enterprises. (2) An intermediary model found that the internal mechanism of corporate EID used to promote GI mainly comes from the government’s energy-saving innovation subsidy effect and the social media attention effect. (3) Corporate EID has a more evident promotional effect on green patents for energy conservation and green patents for inventions. (4) The EID of state-owned enterprises is more conducive to GI than to the activities of private enterprises. (5) The EID of enterprises in high-level administrative cities has no significant impact on GI. However, it has a significant promoting effect in low-level administrative cities. The research not only provides an empirical basis for China to improve the environmental information disclosure system of listed companies but also to offer guidance for companies to pursue green and sustainable development.

Highlights

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up in China, the consumption of fossil fuel and pollution due to emissions have increased sharply with rapid economic development
As far as the regression results of the control variables are concerned, the scale of the enterprise and the capital intensity have played a positive role in the green innovation (GI) of the enterprise to a certain extent, which is consistent with the analysis when the control variables were selected in this article
To understand the concept of sustainable development more in depth, this paper focuses on the relationship between environmental information disclosure (EID) and GI and explores the mechanism of EID’s impact on corporate GI

Summary

Introduction

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up in China, the consumption of fossil fuel and pollution due to emissions have increased sharply with rapid economic development. Such a situation undoubtedly poses a serious threat to the ecological environment. The Chinese government has implemented a series of environmental regulatory measures to alleviate increasingly serious environmental problems, such as promoting the transformation of and upgrading the energy structure, controlling the intensity of energy consumption, and implementing carbon emissions trading [1,2,3]. Following the implementation of command-and-control and market-incentive environmental regulations, environmental information disclosure (EID)

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Results

Conclusion