China Industrial Economics is supervised by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and sponsored by Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It aims to report researches on industrial economics and business management, and to reflect outstanding research results on Chinese industrial economy and enterprise development. The scope covers national economy, industrial economy and business management. The journal is included in CSSCI, and is the top journal in the field of industrial economics in China.
This paper uses first large-scale market-based environmental regulation in China (the 2007 pilot SO
2 emissions trading policy) as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of the emissions trading system on TFP of enterprises, and to test whether the Porter hypothesis is established in China. In light of the pre-assessment on provincial and prefecture-level city data, this paper finds that SO
2 emission reduction and economic growth in the pilot areas are significantly higher than those in non-pilot areas, and the emissions trading system achieves a win-win situation in both environmental and economic performance. On this basis, this paper employs difference in differences (DID), triple difference, instrumental variable method and a series of robustness tests. The results show that the emissions trading system significantly improves the TFP of Chinese listed companies in the pilot area, and the annual effect that lags two years is increasing year by year. Further analysis shows that the emissions trading system mainly affects TFP by promoting corporate technological innovation and improving resource allocation efficiency. From the perspective of firm’s ownership type, non-state-owned enterprises are more sensitive to emissions trading system than state-owned enterprises. From the perspective of environmental enforcement intensity, in the region with higher environmental enforcement intensity, the emissions trading system plays a more prominent role in facilitating TFP. This paper provides important policy implications for China to promote market-based environmental regulation in the field of environment treatment.
With the acceleration of technological and industrial revolution, investment in advanced equipment with advanced technology has increased substantially, and then “machine replacement of labors” has become the main mode of technological transformation in many China's regions. Starting from the fact that China's regional development is unbalanced, this paper constructs a demand analysis framework of three skilled labor forces under the intellectual material capital input and the difference of regional living cost, to describe the mechanism of the influence of industrial intelligence on the employment structure of China's labor force in the new period. This paper proves from both theory and experience aspects that industrial intelligence will promote the replacement of junior high school and senior high school graduate labor by advanced equipment, increase the demand for high and low education level labor, which will lead to employment “polarization” in China on the whole. In southeastern coastal areas, the employment structure shows a trend of “unipolar polarization”, with the high cost of living squeezing out primary and lower education level labor, industrial intelligence intensifying the substitution of advanced equipment for this part of the labor force, but the rapid development of tertiary industry weakens the substitution effect to some extent. In all regions, the higher the education level of the labor force, the less the negative impact of the cost of living on the employment of the labor force. The conclusions of this study have profound policy implications: The government should continue to increase the expenditure on higher education,adjust the structure of higher education, and accelerate the development of the subject system of intelligent manufacturing. The government should support the on-the-job and job transfer training activities and improve the vocational skills training system, especially strengthening the training of labor skills matching with intelligence. The government should pay attention to narrowing the regional development gap, restraining the excessive rising of living cost, avoiding the phenomenon of premature large-scale “machine replacement of labors”, and then achieve the goal of stable employment.
This paper set the verbal communication index and action index of the People’s Bank of China (PBC) and adopted the Chinese listed companies’ data to study the impacts of those two expectation management tools on corporate investment behavior. The results show the following. Throughout the sample period, both action and verbal communication significantly influenced corporate investment. Further regression by period shows that the impact of actual actions was weakened and the impact of verbal communication improved significantly, when the PBC attached more importance to verbal communication. Increasing frequency of verbal communication does not necessarily lead to better results, and too much verbal communication biased towards easing may even have opposite effects. In the case of consistency, the effect of verbal communication is significantly improved. Moreover, the smaller the deviation between words and actions (the higher the consistency) is, the more effective communication is. Therefore, consistence between words and deeds is conducive to the role of communication. Verbal communications in different directions have asymmetric impacts on corporate investment. Strongly tightened verbal communication has similar effects on the SOEs and the non-SOEs, while weakly tightened verbal communication only has significant impacts on non-SOEs. Verbal communication in the loose direction mainly increases SOEs’ investment but has no significant impacts on non-SOEs. The central bank should establish a system of regular verbal communication as soon as possible and pay enough attention to its reliability and consistency. Meanwhile, we should recognize the limitations of the expectation management policies during the economic contraction period and seek the coordinated use of other stimulus policies.
Combining with China’s current tax-for-fee reform in sewage and the enforcement of environmental protection tax with differentiated tax standards, this paper constructs a micro-economic model, considering the imperfectly competitive market, cost heterogeneity, and differentiated environmental protection taxes. It demonstrates the sufficient and necessary conditions for reducing pollution emissions with differentiated environmental protection taxes in the imperfectly competitive market, as well as the effects of raising tax standards on outputs, pollution emissions, consumer utilities, and the adoption of a cleaner production mode. Further, this paper carries out a model test and a forecast analysis by using the data of China’s industrial economic output and pollution emission. The theoretical results show that raising environmental protection tax standards might not necessarily be able to achieve the environmental bonus; when there is a larger environmental technology gap between regions, a higher number of enterprises in backward areas, or a stronger spillover of pollutants, it will affect the emission function of environmental protection taxes to carry out the environmental protection tax with a low standard; both reducing the costs of adopting a cleaner production model and increasing the emission reduction potential of the cleaner production model can help to reduce the standard for environmental protection tax; and in theory, the environmental protection tax revenue can be used to subsidize enterprises adopting cleaner production models, thereby reducing the negative impact of environmental protection tax on the economy. The empirical simulation results show that China’s differentiated environmental protection taxes mainly affect pollution through the capacity transfer effect. It is predicted that the differentiated environmental protection taxes can reduce pollution emissions to a small extent, and the negative impact on economic output is very small. In addition, the local government’s environmental protection tax revenue will increase significantly.
The spatial expansion and competition of trading activities are important topics for geography, economics and other disciplines. The rational distribution of retail enterprise plays an important role in the development of urban and rural economy, the allocation of circulation resources, and the satisfaction of consumer demand. For a long time, as a modern circulation mode, franchise management has received sustained attention from both of the industry and the government. However, in recent years, such traditional spatial expansion mode based on store expansion has fallen into a “growth dilemma.” It is subject to the dual constraints of internal mechanism and external environment, and hard to provide continuous driving force for enterprise growth. The reason is that although this kind of extensive growth reduces the spatial resistance in a simple and direct way, it cannot avoid the “Cannibalization Effect.” In the era of digital economy, reconciling this contradiction becomes feasible at the technical level, profoundly affecting the spatial distribution characteristics and evolutionary dynamic mechanism of commercial activities. Nowadays, the Internet-based “e-commerce” has been able to avoid the constraints of physical space by directly blurring the store, and some more cutting-edge retail models which combine online and offline are showing a more prominent advantage in reducing consumer space resistance. Therefore, this paper combines the methods of model deduction and case study to explore the innovative mechanism of space expansion and competition, in order to provide useful suggestions for the transformation of traditional enterprises and the high-quality development of circulation industry.
Continuous strategic change is crucial to the survival and development of firms, but success trap and failure trap have become serious constraints on effective change. How to overcome this dilemma through forward-looking change decision-making and adaptive change actions is a central topic in both the post-Lewinian organizational development theory and organizational ambidexterity theory. However, due to the neglect of the temporal dimension, disputes and deficiencies still exist in theoretical research. Therefore, it is significant to put the research under the temporal horizon and build a theoretical model for continuous interpretation. From the perspectives of Drucker’s theory of change and the policy of organized abandonment, this paper built an integrated theoretical model of strategic change based on both time and mechanism. The time portrayal, starting from the point of abandoning at the glorious moment of firms, outlines the cyclically optimal-action-time framework of strategic change. The mechanism portrayal, starting from institutionalizing entrepreneurship, reveals how the routine-driven proactive abandonment mechanism promotes continuous strategic change. Then, a paradigm of cyclical ambidexterity equilibrium is proposed, and its equilibrium effect is analyzed. Based on this, this paper constructs a post-Lewinian strategic change model of pre-abandonment, abandonment, and re-abandonment, which is guided by a value of positive change. It provides clear guidance about the rhythm of strategic change and mechanism design for the organizations that want to achieve sustainable growth through initiating change in good times.
