Can the National Green Industrial Policy Improve Production Efficiency of Enterprises?—Evidence from China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors of the paper Can the National Green Industrial Policy Improve Production Efficiency of Enterprises? --Evidence from China, propose a relevant topic, especially in the context of the development of the ecological industry at the local level, but also at the global level.

Concepts, bibliographic sources, and citations are appropriately mentioned in the paper. As a relevant example in this regard, the authors of the paper mentioned that “studies have shown that environmental policies can promote technological innovation in enterprises to achieve a win-win result of economic growth and environmental friendliness (Eriksson C, Persson J., 2003) ".

The research methodology is given by tools, methods, and mechanisms regarding the analyzed topic, respectively the mechanism of stimulating the effect of stimulating and compensating the innovation on the market. Moreover, based on the working assumptions under the proposed mechanism, the authors use the PO method to break down the TFP of enterprises into two parts: the arithmetic means of the productivity of the enterprise and the convergence between the productivity of the enterprises and the market share. At the same time, the authors of the research use from a methodological point of view the identification model of the basic DID model mechanism.

The results are presented by the authors of the research based on the methodology presented in the paper, the authors present the verification of robustness and counterfactual test, the presentation of Testing H1 and H2 by presented mechanisms, the presentation of additional analysis accounting the heterogeneity of the enterprise and the heterogeneity of the enterprise by pollution intensity. However, we suggest that the authors present personal scientific contributions to the results.

Moreover, the authors appreciate that they should complete a separate chapter of Conclusions and personal recommendations, conclusions that are correlated with the presented results, but also personal scientific contributions to the literature.

After reviewing the chapters Results and Conclusions d by the authors of the research, we propose for acceptance and publication of the paper.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review for

Can the National Green Industrial Policy Improve Production Efficiency of Enterprises? Evidence from China

 

Comments

The authors use a standard methodology (DID) to analyze the effects of a political measure, the 2002`s (the authors wrongly address its approbation to 2003, it was in January of 2003 when it was enacted) Cleaner Production Promotion Law to evaluate the effects of environmental policy in China. This legislation represents the first law on cleaner production in China and a significant (albeit too little, too late) step by the Chinese Government policies on environmental industrial productions[1]. The authors should address those issues.

The authors fail on the introduction to address the main issues involving the law: the international pressure on China on environmental issues, the shift on the approach, etc. The author focus on the effects over productivity at a national level. Several authors address the same law region by region, because the fact that its application is heavily dependent in regional applications[2]. It may be more interesting to follow the approach used by Abadie et al[3], as the methodology used in the paper, as it focus at the national level may not result too significant. I understand that represents a completely new paper, but never the less the author may consider it for future ideas-

The methodology used is fairly standard in both the estimation of TFP and the DID and the results, as expected, significant.

The conclusions should be reviewed, it misses to explain the main points of the paper and do not show the shortcomings of the paper and why the results are interesting now, more than 15 years of the date of the analysis.

 

[1] Mol, A. P., & Liu, Y. (2005). Institutionalising cleaner production in China: the cleaner production promotion law. International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development, 4(3), 227-245.

[2] Kostka, G., & Mol, A. P. (2013). Implementation and participation in China's local environmental politics: challenges and innovations. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 15(1), 3-16. Or Geng, Y., Zhu, Q., Doberstein, B., & Fujita, T. (2009). Implementing China’s circular economy concept at the regional level: A review of progress in Dalian, China. Waste Management, 29(2), 996-1002.

[3] Abadie, A., Diamond, A., & Hainmueller, J. (2010). Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: Estimating the effect of California’s tobacco control program. Journal of the American statistical Association, 105(490), 493-505.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe the paper has improved significantly.