Environmental Policy and Exports in China: An Analysis Based on the Top 10,000 Energy-Consuming Enterprises Program

This study builds a model to theoretically analyze the impact of China’s Top 10,000 Energy-Consuming Enterprises Program on the country’s manufacturing exports. The results show that the implementation of this Program has not only a cost-increasing effect but also an innovation-promoting effect on manufacturing enterprises’ exports. In particular, the actual effect depends on the superimposition of these two effects, which change as the intensity of the Program changes. Using data on industrial enterprises in Sichuan Province, the study applies the sharp regression discontinuity design (SRDD) to identify the causal relationship between the Program’s intensity and the export scale of manufacturing enterprises, which turns out to be an inverted U-shaped relationship. Moreover, with a moderate intensity of the Program, the innovation-promoting effect is proved greater than the cost-increasing effect, which leads to an expansion of the enterprises’ export scale. The study concludes that the implementation of appropriate environmental control policies does not undermine the export competitiveness of Chinese enterprises, but instead promotes a win-win solution by improving both environmental quality and export performance.