Zhang Xiaoqi, He Yu
School of Finance, Chongqing Technology and Business University, Nan'an District, Chongqing, China.
PLoS One. 2025 May 30;20(5):e0323668. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323668. eCollection 2025.
Promoting utilization efficiency and sustainable energy development is crucial for achieving sustainable social development in China, the largest energy producer and consumer worldwide. Accordingly, the Chinese authorities enacted the Resource Tax Law (RTL) on August 26, 2019. Whether such a policy can achieve its desired goals has not been verified. Thus, our study applies a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effect of RTL on a firm's energy efficiency (EE) with panel data of A-shares from 2017 to 2022. Benchmark analysis and robustness tests demonstrate RTL's significant effect on resource-based firm's EE. Additional tests deeply explore the policy effect under different situations. First, RTL boosts more for firms with higher initial EE levels than those with lower levels. Second, RTL enhances EE by promoting firms' research and development investments, confirming the existence of the Porter hypothesis in China. Third, this policy shows a stronger positive effect on firms with political connections than those without. Finally, we detect that RTL has no significant impact in the western region, while its effect is significantly stronger in the middle region compared to the eastern region. Our empirical findings suggest that corporate firms and the government should adopt appropriate actions to enhance RTL's policy effect.
提高利用效率和促进可持续能源发展对于中国这个全球最大的能源生产国和消费国实现可持续社会发展至关重要。因此，中国政府于2019年8月26日颁布了《资源税法》（RTL）。该政策是否能实现预期目标尚未得到验证。因此，我们的研究采用双重差分法，利用2017年至2022年A股的面板数据来检验资源税法对企业能源效率（EE）的影响。基准分析和稳健性检验证明了资源税法对资源型企业能源效率有显著影响。进一步的检验深入探讨了不同情况下的政策效果。首先，与初始能源效率水平较低的企业相比，资源税法对初始能源效率水平较高的企业的促进作用更大。其次，资源税法通过促进企业的研发投入来提高能源效率，证实了波特假说在中国的存在。第三，该政策对有政治关联的企业的积极影响比对无政治关联的企业更强。最后，我们发现资源税法在西部地区没有显著影响，而与东部地区相比，其在中部地区的影响显著更强。我们的实证结果表明，企业和政府应采取适当行动来增强资源税法的政策效果。
