IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v54y2022i2p170-188.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do pollutant discharge fees affect labor demand? evidence from china’s industrial enterprises

Author

Listed:
  • Jiaman Li
  • Xiucheng Dong
  • Kangyin Dong

Abstract

The tradeoff between employment and the environment has become an increasingly important topic. By employing two enterprise-level datasets and a city-level dataset in China for the period 1999–2012, this study investigates the influence of pollutant discharge fees on the labour demand in manufacturing enterprises. Besides, considering the significant differences among cities, industries, and individuals in China, we perform a series of heterogeneity analysis. The study also explores the mediation impact mechanism from the manufacturing cost perspective, i.e. labour cost effect, energy cost effect, and equipment cost effect. The estimated results show that: (1) The more stringent pollutant discharge fees can significantly reduce the labour demand of Chinese manufacturing enterprises; for each 1% increase in the price of pollutant discharge fees, labour demand decreases by approximately 0.264%; (2) labour demand for cities with a low proportion of secondary industries, industries with low pollution intensity, and domestic private-owned enterprises tend to be influenced more by pollutant discharge fees; and (3) the labour cost effect and energy cost effect are both significant mediators, while the equipment cost effect is not significant. The above findings can provide feasible policy implications for improving environmental protection taxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Jiaman Li & Xiucheng Dong & Kangyin Dong, 2022. "Do pollutant discharge fees affect labor demand? evidence from china’s industrial enterprises," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(2), pages 170-188, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:54:y:2022:i:2:p:170-188
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2021.1963662
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2021.1963662
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036846.2021.1963662?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Liu, Guixian & Sun, Wei & Kong, Zhaoyang & Dong, Xiucheng & Jiang, Qingzhe, 2023. "Did the pollution charge system promote or inhibit innovation? Evidence from Chinese micro-enterprises," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    2. Yang, Zhiqing & Liang, Jing, 2023. "The environmental and economic impacts of phasing out cross-subsidy in electricity prices: Evidence from China," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 284(C).
    3. Dong, Kangyin & Li, Jiaman & Zhang, Haoran, 2023. "LNG point supply of villages and towns in China: Challenges and countermeasures," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 334(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:54:y:2022:i:2:p:170-188. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.