Can environmental information disclosure improve total-factor energy efficiency?

Abstract

Environmental information disclosure (EID) actively causes enterprises to bear responsibility for both respecting the ecology and preserving a clean environment. It not only acts as an essential way for the public to be involved in controlling environmental pollution and supervising the performance of enterprises with respect to the environment, but is also a significant method to promote the modernization of ecological and environmental governance systems as well as capacity to govern. Panel data for 285 municipalities at the prefecture level in China from 2003 to 2019 are taken for the study. By adopting the difference-in-differences (DID) method and the mediation effect model, we discuss the influence and transmission mechanisms of environmental information disclosure on total-factor energy efficiency. The performance of total factor energy efficiency is greatly facilitated by environmental information disclosure, as indicated by the results. The conclusion remains valid after being tested. The mechanism analysis shows that its conduction path mainly comes from an innovation effect, while the structural effect, marketization effect and supervision effect play relatively weak intermediary roles. Heterogeneity analyses show that the promoting effect appears to be more pronounced in non-resource-based cities, large cities and those cities that are under strong environmental regulation.

Keywords:

• Environmental information disclosure
• total-factor energy efficiency
• difference-in-differences method
• mediation effect model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

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Notes

1 The 2007 National Eleventh Five-Year Plan for Environmental Protection divided 113 cities including Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai into key cities for environmental protection, mainly including four municipalities directly under the Central Government: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing; 27 provincial capitals including Taiyuan, Kunming and Hohhot; Dalian, Qingdao, Ningbo, Xiamen and Shenzhen are five cities with separate plans, and the remaining 77 other cities such as Handan, Changzhi and Linfen.

2 In 2013, IPE and NRDC revised the previously used PITI standard according to the requirement of comprehensive disclosure of pollution source information, and the number of cities was increased from 113 to 120. However, for the convenience of empirical research, this paper does not consider newly added cities.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Jiangsu Major Project of University Philosophy and Social Science Research (grant no. 2022SJZD054).