Impact of environmental subsidies on environmental technology innovation of polluting enterprises

Environmental technology innovation plays an important role in solving pollution control problems. Under the background of the green development of the polluting industry, environmental subsidies have become an important financial instrument to make up for the lack of capital market. To explore the motivation of environmental technology innovation supported by environmental subsidies, using the data of listed polluting enterprises in China from 2013 to 2019, the impact of environmental subsidies on environmental technology patents of polluting enterprises was discussed from the perspective of selective industrial policies. Results show that environmental subsidies stimulate the total number of environmental technology patents and non-invention patents to increase significantly, showing the behavior characteristics of enterprises pursuing innovation quantity while ignoring quality. When enterprises expected to get more environmental subsidies, they make environmental technology patents to seek support. The above phenomenon is only significant in the state-owned enterprise group and senior executives group with a technical background in the group analysis results. The number of environmental technology invention patents of private enterprises increased significantly. The selective environmental subsidies policy stimulates the strategic innovation of enterprises, while the environmental technology invention patents representing substantive innovation and high-quality innovation are not improved significantly. The managerial implication of the conclusions is that the government should not only consider increasing environmental subsidies to polluting enterprises in the future but also should support better regulatory policies to improve the level of pollution prevention and control through environmental technology innovation. © 2021 Technoscience Publications. All rights reserved.