An Empirical Analysis of the Effects on Firms’ Economic Performance of Implementing Environmental Management Systems

This paper investigates whether environmental management system (EMS) implementation influences a firm’s value added, one of the indices of economic performance. Because it is expected that EMS implementation increases a firm’s value added through an increase in demand and an improvement in productivity, a simple model to identify how these effects influence a firm’s value added is developed and is empirically investigated using panel data for Japanese manufacturing firms in the period 1996–2007. The main findings are as follows. For the full sample, EMS implementation increases a firm’s value added through an increase in demand and improvement in productivity. Among these firms, however, the positive effect of the implementation through an increase in demand mainly exists for export-oriented firms. At the industry level, the effects of EMS implementation vary among different industries. These results empirically prove that there are plural paths for EMS implementation to improve a firm’s economic performance.