关键词: 绿色创新, 跨国企业, 关税政策, 竞争

Abstract: With the increasing severity of environmental problems, consumers will pay more attention to the greenness of products when purchasing products. Environmental protection and environmental sustainable development both put forward higher requirements for the green innovation of products. The green product tariff policy is an important factor influencing the green product innovation decision of multinational enterprises. The government allows foreign green products to enter the local market by reducing tariffs on green products, and promotes local enterprises to accelerate green product innovation through market competition. How the government can use tariff policy to regulate green innovation input and competition intensity in the local market to ensure both domestic environmental and economic benefits is an urgent issue to be studied. Specifically, the problem is divided into two levels.The first is the micro-decision-making behavior of enterprises under certain tariff policies, that is, how do multinational enterprises and local enterprises make green product innovation decisions and output decisions, and explore how market sensitivity and product substitution will affect corporate decision-making? On the basis of clarifying the decision-making behavior of enterprises and the role of tariff regulation, we will study how tariff policies differ when the government maximizes the overall greenness of the market and social welfare.
This paper considers a quantity-based competition model between local firms and multinationals. First of all, enterprises carry out green product innovation and research and development, produce and manufacture green products with a certain degree of greenness, and the products produced by the enterprise have a certain green substitutionability. This paper uses a three-stage game model to study the green product innovation and government tariff design of multinational and local enterprises in a competitive environment. Firstly, the impact of government tariff control on enterprises’ green product innovation and output decisions is analyzed, and then the government’s tariff decisions will be discussed.
First, we study the role of tariffs on corporate green product innovation input and market competition, It is found that when the market’s green sensitivity is low, the higher the tariff. Compared with multinational companies, domestic companies have stronger willingness to innovate green products and change with the changes in market sensitivity; When the market sensitivity is too high, high tariffs will simultaneously restrain the willingness of both types of companies to innovate green products. In terms of government tariff design, this article finds that when the government aims to maximize market greenness, implementing zero-tariff policy under high market sensitivity is the optimal decision; While the government aims to maximize social welfare, when market sensitivity is higher, the government will increase the tariff to inhibit competition among enterprises, and the tariff will increase with the increase of market sensitivity and green substitutability coefficient.
This paper focuses on the impact between government tariff controls and green innovation decisions by local and multinational enterprises. Future research directions can consider the impact of the government’s implementation of green subsidy policies on enterprises. The model in this paper does not consider market uncertainty, and an extended model with market uncertainty and information asymmetry can also be considered in the future. These need to be further studied and demonstrated.

Key words: green innovation, multinational firms, tariff policy, competition