关键词: 低碳供应链, 减排主动性, 碳税, 演化博弈, 双层规划

Abstract: For the past years, with population growth and economic development, the ecological environment has become a hot issue around the world. Many countries have issued regulations to control environmental pollution, and have also proposed dates for achieving “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality”. On September 22, 2020, at the 75th General Assembly of the United Nations the Chinese government proposed the goal of reaching carbon peak by 2030 and achieving “carbon neutrality” by 2060. Energy conservation and emission reduction are not only pressures faced by enterprises, but also opportunities for transformation. Enterprises should not only reduce their own carbon emissions, but also promote the joint participation of upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain to reduce emissions. The synergy of various entities in the supply chain participating in carbon emission reduction management has become more important.
Based on the above background, this article applies the evolutionary game theory to study the emission reduction motivation of supply chain enterprises from the perspective of stimulating enterprises’ emission reduction initiative. On this basis, using the theory of bilevel programming, we study the decision-making content of enterprises under the situation of proactive emission reduction.
In theory, by comparing costs and benefits, studying the investment of enterprises in low-carbon supply chain construction enriches the research content of supply chain emission reduction. In reality, it helps to promote the construction of low-carbon supply chains. The low-carbon supply chain driving mechanism studied in this article provides suggestions for the government to reasonably formulate carbon tax policies and enterprises to establish emission reduction decisions, making contributions to achieving the goal of “carbon neutrality”.
In order to study the driving force of supply chain enterprises to actively invest in emission reduction, a two-level supply chain composed of one manufacturer and one retailer under carbon tax policy is constructed. Based on the evolutionary game theory, the low-carbon dynamic model of enterprises is constructed, and the evolutionary stability strategies of the manufacturer and the retailer are obtained. The results show that only when the investment income of emission reduction is higher than its cost, the manufacturer will take the initiative to reduce carbon emissions, and only when the revenue of low-carbon publicity is higher than its cost, the retailer will actively promote low-carbon products. Further, taking the low-carbon initiative of the manufacturer and retailer as constraints and their respective profit maximization as an objective function, a bilevel programming model with the manufacturer as an upper decision maker and the retailer as a lower decision maker is constructed. Through the extended Kuhn-Tucker method, it is concluded that carbon tax regulation will increase the emission reduction rate of the manufacturer, but will not change the low-carbon publicity level of the retailer. When the carbon tax rate increases, the tax-including price and market demand of low-carbon products will change first and then tend to be stable.
This article focuses on the impact of carbon tax policies on the emission reduction motivation of supply chain enterprises, so it does not consider other emission reduction policies. In addition, to simplify the research problem, this article only considers a two-level supply chain composed of one manufacturer and one retailer. Future research can consider multi-level supply chains or supply chain systems composed of multiple manufacturers and multiple retailers.

Key words: low carbon supply chain; emission reduction initiative; carbon tax; evolutionary game; bilevel programming