Abstract
Environmental technology innovation plays an important role in solving pollution control problems. Under the background of the green development of the polluting industry, environmental subsidies have become an important financial instrument to make up for the lack of capital market. To explore the motivation of environmental technology innovation supported by environmental subsidies, using the data of listed polluting enterprises in China from 2013 to 2019, the impact of environmental subsidies on environmental technology patents of polluting enterprises was discussed from the perspective of selective industrial policies. Results show that environmental subsidies stimulate the total number of environmental technology patents and non-invention patents to increase significantly, showing the behavior characteristics of enterprises pursuing innovation quantity while ignoring quality. When enterprises expected to get more environmental subsidies, they make environmental technology patents to seek support. The above phenomenon is only significant in the state-owned enterprise group and senior executives group with a technical background in the group analysis results. The number of environmental technology invention patents of private enterprises increased significantly. The selective environmental subsidies policy stimulates the strategic innovation of enterprises, while the environmental technology invention patents representing substantive innovation and high-quality innovation are not improved significantly. The managerial implication of the conclusions is that the government should not only consider increasing environmental subsidies to polluting enterprises in the future but also should support better regulatory policies to improve the level of pollution prevention and control through environmental technology innovation.
Highlights
Environmental pollution has become a common problem all over the world
The estimated value of Esub coefficient in column (1) is significant at the level of 10%, indicating that the number of environmental technology patent applications increases under the incentive of environmental subsidies
Environmental technology innovation is an important factor for polluting enterprises to achieve sustainable development and has an important impact on improving the quality of environmental protection
Summary
Environmental pollution has become a common problem all over the world. Polluting enterprises as the main emitters of pollutants in the process of economic and social development, should actively increase investment in environmental technology innovation, develop energy-saving and low-carbon advanced environmental protection technology and equipment, comprehensively improve the operation quality of pollution control facilities, and assume the important responsibility of environmental protection. It is generally believed that the externality, indivisibility, and uncertainty of innovation activities would inevitably lead to market failure, hindering enterprises from achieving the socially optimal level of spontaneous R&D activities. In this regard, selective innovation incentives are widely used in the world (Luo et al 2020). It is difficult for the government to effectively supervise the R&D activities of all applicants, so there is a possibility of adverse selection and moral hazard This means that in addition to substantial innovation aimed at technology upgrading and competitive advantage, enterprises may participate in strategic innovation. The Chinese government has arranged a large number of environmental subsidies to encourage environmental technology innovation (Wang et al 2020)
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