Unintended consequences: market integration and enterprise carbon emissions ——based on the analytical perspective of county-to-district reform

Jun Liu, Shengjun Zhu, Canfei He, Yan Xu and Haoxiang Shen

Post-Communist Economies, 2025, vol. 37, issue 1-2, 106-132

Abstract: The county-to-district reform, as an important measure to break down administrative barriers between cities and counties and promote market integration, raises the question of whether it influences enterprise carbon emissions behaviour. By utilising data from 1992 to 2019 and matching it with patent data for Chinese listed companies, this paper examines the impact of the county-to-district reform on enterprise carbon emissions. The findings show that the reform accelerates market integration, facilitates the free flow of production factors, thus expanding the scale of enterprise production and increasing total carbon dioxide emissions from enterprises. Meanwhile, this process alleviates financing constraints for enterprises and increases the proportion of research and development investment on one hand; on the other hand, the reform intensifies market competition, thereby improving enterprise productivity. Ultimately, this leads to a reduction in overall carbon emission intensity. This phenomenon is particularly evident in non-state-owned enterprises, non-carbon trading pilot regions, northern regions, and small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper explores the impact of changes in China’s government power structure on enterprise carbon emissions behaviour, adding to the research on the role of micro-level enterprises in carbon reduction during the county-to-district reform process.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14631377.2024.2437730 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:pocoec:v:37:y:2025:i:1-2:p:106-132

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CPCE20

DOI: 10.1080/14631377.2024.2437730

Access Statistics for this article

Post-Communist Economies is currently edited by Roger Clarke

More articles in Post-Communist Economies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().