The Impact of Fiscal and Tax New Media on the Sustainable Spirit of Green Entrepreneurs: Evidence from China

Fiscal and tax new media has emerged as a new channel for government-enterprise engagement, linking policy communication with firms’ sustainability-oriented decisions. This study hand-collects the launch status of official microblog accounts for finance and taxation departments in China’s prefecture-level cities. This paper combines these data with firm-level observations on China’s green enterprises from 2008 to 2022, and clearly defines the sample of green enterprises. Defining the sustainable spirit among green entrepreneurs from the perspective of entrepreneurship and innovation. This is to estimate how government communication and policy signaling shape firms’ sustainability-oriented behavior. Treating the introduction of official fiscal and tax new media as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply a staggered difference-in-differences design to identify its effect on green entrepreneurs’ sustainable spirit. The study finds that launching official fiscal and tax new media significantly stimulates the sustainable spirit of green entrepreneurs. Mechanism tests suggest that the effect operates through improvements in information infrastructure and governance capacity, including higher internet penetration, reduced fiscal and tax irregularities, and stronger digital governance. Particularly in regions with weaker government–business relations, more integrated administrative systems, lower fiscal pressure, and higher government subsidies, the promoting effect is more significant. Overall, the findings offer policy implications for strengthening the effectiveness of public digital communication and for fostering green entrepreneurs’ sustainable spirit.