Analysis of financial support efficiency and influencing factors of listed seed companies from the perspective of energy consumption and carbon emissions.

The seed industry has a prominent role in strengthening ecological stability and national food security as it provides the basic ground for agriculture sector. In the current research, the effectiveness of financial support provided to listed seed enterprises and its influencing factors from the perspectives of energy consumption and carbon emissions are examined using a three-stage DEA-Tobit model. The dataset for the underlined study variables mainly comes from the financial data published by 32 listed seed enterprises and the China Energy Statistical Yearbook from 2016 to 2021. In order to make the results more accurate, the influence of external environmental factors such as economic development level, total energy consumption, and total carbon emission on listed seed enterprises are excluded. The results revealed that the mean value of financial support efficiency of listed seed enterprises increased significantly after excluding the influence of external environmental and random factors. External environmental factors such as regional energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission played an important role in the process of the financial system supporting the development of listed seed enterprises. The development of some listed seed enterprises with high financial support efficiency came at the cost of high local carbon dioxide emission and high energy consumption. Internal factors such as operating profit, equity concentration, financial structure, and enterprise size are the key intra-firm factors that affect the efficiency of financial support for listed seed enterprises. Thus, it is suggested that enterprises must pay attention to the environmental performance to reach a win-win situation in reducing and improving the energy consumption and financial performance, respectively. Similarly, the improvement of energy use efficiency through endogenous and external innovation should be prioritized to achieve sustainable economic development.