Export Trade， Technology Effect and Enterprises' Pollution Emission——Micro Evidence from China's Industrial Firm-Level Data
Wei Wei1 Xiao Qinglan2 Shen Renjun1
(1.School of Economics and Business Administration， Central China Normal University， Wuhan 430079；2.School of Economics， Zhejiang University， Hangzhou 310058)
Abstract：Exploring how export trade affects the environmental performance of firms from a micro perspective is helpful to uncover the mechanism “black box” of trade environmental effects， which is of great significance for China to coordinate the relationship between trade growth and environment conservation， promote the green development of enterprises. However， the literature on the relationship between export trade and enterprise pollution emissions using micro enterprise data is relatively infrequent. By using China’s unique industrial enterprise pollution database from 1998 to 2012， and matching with China’s industrial enterprises database and China Customs enterprise database， this paper adopts propensity score matching combined with multi-period difference-in-differences model (PSM-DID) to identify the impact of exporting behavior on manufacturing firms’ SO2 emission intensity， and further explores the underlying mechanism and heterogeneous effect. It finds that exporting significantly reduces firms’ SO2 emission intensity in general. This main founding is still robust after applying several robustness checks. Meanwhile， exporting has different effects on the environmental performance of firms in different regions and trade pattern， as well as firms with different ownership. In terms of mechanism， exporting can promote firm to reduce SO2 emission intensity and realize energy conservation through “technology effect”. And the reduction mainly stems from the emission source treatment rather than the end-of-pipe treatment. This study reveals that China’s trade opening policy can not only promote economic growth， but also has obvious environmental welfare effect.
2021, Vol. 60 
