The direction of this study was engineered by the need to increase the innovation activity of high‐tech enterprises (primarily small enterprise) and to test the hypothesis that the innovation ...activity of such enterprises depends on the stage of their life cycle. At the first stage, we formulated the assumptions and prerequisites for the formation of a sample for the study: 106 small enterprises of the electric power industry of the Chelyabinsk region of Russia Federation. At the second stage, we developed a method to determine an enterprise's life cycle stage, taking into account the specifics of small industrial enterprises. Our method involves the sequential implementation of two steps. In the first, we use the traditional indicator of age of the enterprise, and in the second, we assess the degree of stability of key financial indicators of enterprise activities. At the third stage, based on the proposed method, the sample was divided into three groups: growing, mature, and long‐lived enterprises, for each of which an assessment of innovation activity was carried out. As a result, we determined that small Russian enterprises in the high‐tech industry demonstrate an increase in innovation activity at the stage of maturity, as a rule. However, even at this stage, only one in three enterprises shows such activity. This can be explained by the low demand for small businesses in the Russian national innovation system, as well as the lack of highly qualified personnel and the prevailing stereotypes of attitudes toward small businesses. As captured in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), the proposed approach can be applied in the development of regional support programs and strategies for the development of small high‐tech enterprises.
The research paper is devoted to the development of methodological foundations of bank lending to industrial enterprises in accordance with the formation of new economic relations based on the ...priority of knowledge, deepening of digitalization and dissemination of ideas of social ecology in its broad sense. In particular, the article is clarified the economic essence of the concept of «bank lending to industrial enterprises» through the prism of a set of scientific approaches. The modern principles of implementation of bank lending to industrial enterprises are also formulated in this article. A comprehensive refinement of the economic content of the concept under study was carried out using the institutional, functional and reproductive approaches of scientific cognition. Each of the scientific approaches has contributed to a comprehensive disclosure of the characteristics of bank lending to industry. As a result of using an institutional scientific approach to disclose the economic essence of bank lending to industrial enterprises, a species structure of its institutional environment was formulated. It was reasoned that the institutional environment of bank lending to industrial enterprises should be structured in terms of the following components: financial institution (in which banks, especially industrial banks, play a special role); production and technology institution (in which innovative industrial enterprises and smart industry enterprises play a special role); legal institution; industrial lending infrastructure institution; sustainable finance institution; institutional arrangements and its social relations. Through the functional approach, a number of functions of the financial and economic nature of bank credit and the activities of industrial enterprises were traced in a cause-and-effect relationship. The reproductive approach of scientific cognition has helped to reveal the economic essence of bank lending to industrial enterprises, emphasizing its role in reproductive processes and its importance for the development of the whole economy. The formulated principles of bank lending to industrial enterprises are in line with current trends in financial and credit relations between banks and industry, and also take into account the basic principles of the transition to a knowledge-based economy.
Keywords: industry, industrial enterprises, lending, bank lending to industrial enterprises, institutional approach, functional approach, reproductive approach, principles of bank lending to industrial enterprises.
JEL Classification G21
Formulas: 0; fig.: 5; tabl.: 1; bibl.: 19.
Given the rapid industrialization and urbanization of China, environmental problems have gradually become major constraints that hinder its sustainable economic development. Moreover, China's ...pollution abatement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have been severely affected by pressures coming from domestic environmental appeals and international environmental diplomacy. By using integrated data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise and the Chinese Enterprise Environmental Survey and Reporting databases, this study constructs comprehensive indicators of pollutant discharge intensity and carbon emissions index at the enterprise level and uses the panel fixed effect model, Kaya identity, and mediation effect model to assess the effects of environmental regulations on pollution abatement and collaborative emissions reduction from the micro-perspective. Results show that these regulations can abate the pollution emissions of Chinese industrial enterprises and verify the effectiveness of environmental policies. These regulations can also efficiently reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of enterprises through pollution abatement. In other words, environmental regulations facilitate a collaborative emissions reduction of pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions from enterprises. Such collaborative emissions reduction effect is also influenced by the energy structure and consumption of enterprises. This paper presents empirical evidence and policy basis for further improving China's environmental regulation policy system and achieving coordinated progress in China's economic development and environmental governance.
•Pollution abatement effect of environmental regulation is investigated.•Collaborative emissions reduction effect of environmental regulation is explored.•Pollution emissions reduce with the enhance of environmental regulation intensity.•Environmental regulation can reduce carbon dioxide emissions.•Collaborative effect is influenced by energy structure and energy consumption.
In this modern era, smart cities are an essential strategy for China to achieve high-quality development representing an essential issue at the stage of high-quality development to drive urban ...innovation and lead China to be among the innovative countries. In order to achieve this goal, this study employs a time-varying difference-in-difference (DID) model to test the above questions in a multidimensional manner based on micro-firm data from the China Tax Survey Database and the China Innovative Enterprise Database from 2010 to 2015. The estimated results explore that China's smart city pilot policies (SCPP) encourage green innovation at the firm level, a finding that still holds after a sequence of robustness tests. Furthermore, the empirical evidence indicates that the influence of green innovations on the SCPP was more important for firms in non-state-owned enterprises, heavily polluting industries and non-resource-based cities relative to state-owned firms, firms in lightly-polluting industries and firms in non-resource-based cities. In addition, this study finds that the smart city pilot policy can provide a new incentive for the green innovation behaviour of enterprises via policy and agglomeration effects. Overall, the estimated findings suggest that the government should continue to play a positive role in constructing smart cities for enterprises' green innovation and implement smart city construction programmes following local conditions to help China's high-quality economic development.
•The impact of Smart City pilot policies on the enterprises green innovations of micro-industrial enterprises is investigated•The method of time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) is applied•Firm, industry, and regional heterogeneity exist of the positive effect•We conducted a mechanism analysis from the perspective of the Policy effect and agglomeration effect
Using the unique micro-data of industrial enterprises' Nitrogen oxides (NOx) and Sulfur oxides (SOx) emissions covering 58,725 enterprise-year observations, this paper investigates how digitalization ...affect energy efficiency. The empirical results show that regional digitalization can significantly promote the improvement of energy efficiency of industrial enterprises. Specifically, the result of PSM-DID method indicates that the impact of digitalization on energy efficiency is significantly enhanced by the “National innovative pilot cities” policy, while the dynamic result validates the continuity of industrial enterprises' energy efficiency. Moreover, regional digitalization has superior impact on enterprises within eastern region enterprises, the manufacturing sector, and with elevated liquidity and profitability levels. Finally, moderating effect suggests that technological innovation expand the positive impact of digitalization on enterprises’ energy efficiency. This study confirms regional digitalization can promote the energy efficiency of Chinese industrial enterprises, providing the policy suggestions to the energy transition in China.
•Measure the regional digitalization level of Prefecture-level city and the energy efficiency at Industrial enterprise-level.•Findings demonstrated that digitalization increases energy efficiency.•The impact of digitalization on energy efficiency can be enhanced by the “National innovative pilot cities” policy.•Technological innovation expands the positive impact of digitalization on enterprises' energy efficiency.
The problems of mining waste management at industrial enterprises and increasing the economy of production are among the most urgent ones, especially for the Arctic ecosystems, characterized by high ...sensitivity to external factors and the complexity of recovery. The research was conducted on the example of large industrial corporations directly operating in the Arctic, including PJSC PhosAgro, PJSC MMC Norilsk Nickel, Severstal Resource division of PJSC Severstal and PJSC NOVATEK. The key indicators related to waste management for 20182022 were analyzed. The trend of increasing volumes of mining waste in the Arctic was revealed, while the level of its utilization remained practically unchanged. It is proposed to intensify scientific research in the field of rational use of mining waste and to develop technologies for their processing, taking into account the impact on the Arctic ecosystems. It is suggested to create research and production centers for each industrial enterprise using the experience of the balanced “triple helix” model. It is recommended to actively participate in the Interdepartmental Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the development of the mineral resource base and its rational use, created in 2023, to develop the scientific foundations for the extraction and processing of minerals and accelerate import substitution.
An accurate and inexpensive preliminary risk assessment of industrial enterprise sites at a regional scale is critical for environmental management. In this study, we propose a novel framework for ...the preliminary risk assessment of industrial enterprise sites in the Yangtze River Delta, which is one of the fastest economic development and most prominent contaminated regions in China. Based on source–pathway–receptors, this framework integrated text and spatial analyses and machine learning, and its feasibility was validated with 8848 positive and negative samples with a calibration and validation set ratio of 8:2. The results indicated that the random forest performed well for risk assessment; and its accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores in the calibration set were all 1.0, and the four indicators for the validation set ranged from 0.97 to 0.98, which was better than that for the other models (e.g., logistic regression, support vector machine, and convolutional neural network). The preliminary risk ranking of industrial enterprise sites by the random forest showed that high risks (probabilities) were mainly distributed in Shanghai, southern Jiangsu, and northeastern Zhejiang from 2000 to 2015. The relative importance of the site industrial, production, and geographical features in the random forest was 69%, 22%, and 9%, respectively. Our study highlights that we could quickly and effectively establish a priority (or ranking) list of industrial enterprise sites that require further investigations, using the proposed framework, and identify potentially contaminated sites.
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•A novel framework for preliminary risk assessment of regional industrial enterprise sites.•The framework performed well and relative importance of the site industrial feature was 69%.•The framework established a priority list of the sites that require further investigations.•The framework is especially useful for areas where dense field sampling is not possible.
Environmental regulation has been confirmed to have an important impact on enterprise productivity, which is regarded as a crucial factor of enterprise duration. However, existing studies have paid ...little attention to how environmental regulation affects enterprise duration. Using firm‐level data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database (2003–2007) and the stochastic frontier analysis method, we estimate enterprise total factor productivity (TFP) and its four decomposed components (scale efficiency change, technological change, factor allocation efficiency change, and technical efficiency change). Meanwhile, we adopt a comprehensive index to measure the environmental regulation intensity. Furthermore, we use the linear probability model and the proportional hazards model to investigate the effect of environmental regulation on enterprise duration through the mediating role of enterprise TFP. The results show that although environmental regulation per se negatively impacts on enterprise duration, environmental regulation can present a synthetic positive effect on enterprise duration due to its positive effect on enterprise TFP. Specifically, environmental regulation significantly mitigates the scale efficiency and technical efficiency of regulated enterprises. It also stimulates regulated enterprises' technological innovation and improves their factor allocation efficiency. In addition, state‐owned and large‐scale enterprises are more malleable when facing environmental regulations. We propose that the government should encourage enterprises to innovate and improve the allocation efficiency of production factors, so as to achieve the purpose of controlling environmental pollution in stages while extending enterprise duration.
The concept of sustainability was developed in response to stakeholder demands. One of the key mechanisms for engaging stakeholders is sustainability disclosure, often in the form of a report. Yet, ...how reporting is used to engage stakeholders is understudied. Using resource dependence and stakeholder theories, we investigate how companies within the same industry address different dependencies on stakeholders for economic, natural environment, and social resources and thus engage stakeholders accordingly. To achieve this objective, we conducted our research using qualitative research methods. Our findings suggest that the resource dependencies on different stakeholders lead to development of different stakeholder relationships and thus appropriate resources within the company to execute engagement strategies that are informing, responding, or involving. Our research explains why diversity exists in sustainability disclosure by studying how it is used to engage stakeholders. We find that five sustainability reporting characteristics are associated with the company's stakeholder engagement strategy: directness of communication, clarity of stakeholder identity, deliberateness of collecting feedback, broadness of stakeholder inclusiveness, and utilization of stakeholder engagement for learning. Our study develops the literature by providing insight into companies' choices of stakeholder engagement strategy thus explaining diversity in sustainability reporting based on the characteristics and relationships with specific stakeholders.
