The Effects of Preferential Tax on Energy Saving and Emission Reduction According to Panel Data Modeling of Different Provinces
税收优惠的节能减排效应——基于省级面板数据的实证分析

Resource issues in China, especially energy consumption and pollution, are becoming more and more serious because of industrialization and urbanization. Tax as a method for government control of macroeconomics will play an important role in energy conservation and emission reduction. This paper used tax relief data from the State Administration of Taxation, and estimated the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction using factor analysis methods. Our panel model included the level of economic development, industrial structure, the input intensity of research and development, export dependence, and the rate of tax reliefs, and focused on the effect of the rate of tax reliefs for energy saving and emission reduction. We use the model to explore the relationship between the rate of tax reliefs and efficiency of energy saving, tax reliefs and the efficiency of emission reduction, the rate of tax reliefs and the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction. According to the VIF test, the model did not have serious multicollinearity. As a whole, the effects between the explanatory variables and the explained variables were consistent with other related articles, and matched the principles of resource and environmental economics. Results demonstrated that, for the overall analysis and regional analysis, there was a positive correlation between the rate of tax reliefs and the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction. But the degree of confidence of the positive correlation was only 90%, and some were not significant under 90%. In addition, the effect of tax relief on energy saving and emission reduction was not significant under a 95% or 99% degree of confidence. We conclude that preferential tax plays a positive role in the energy saving and emission reduction, but this is limited. This is probably because the preferential tax had some incentive effects but does not result in restriction effects. To give full scope to the preferential tax in energy saving and emission reduction, the government should combine incentive tax policy and binding tax policy.