Taxation Business Environment Optimization and Enterprise Innovation Efficiency: Empirical Evidence from China’s Policy Tests

Optimizing the tax business environment is of crucial significance for enhancing enterprise innovation efficiency and fostering sustainable development. This study utilizes the dataset of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2022. By leveraging the quasi-natural experiment of the “Decentralization, Management and Service” reform pilot in the tax system, it adopts the multi-period difference-in-differences method to empirically investigate the impact of tax business environment optimization on enterprise innovation efficiency. The research reveals that the “Decentralization, Management, and Service” reform in the tax system exerts a significantly positive influence on enterprise innovation efficiency, and this result remains robust after a series of robustness tests. This optimization promotes enterprise innovation efficiency through three main channels: alleviating financing constraints, reducing transaction costs, and enhancing digitalization levels. The promoting effect is more pronounced for enterprises in mid-western regions, non-state-owned enterprises, large-scale enterprises, and those with high innovation endowments. Furthermore, it further contributes to the improvement of enterprise total factor productivity and the expansion of business scale, achieving the coordinated objectives of enhancing enterprise quality and efficiency and strengthening development momentum. These findings deepen our understanding of the economic implications of optimizing the tax business environment and offer empirical evidence for creating a conducive tax environment for the development of market entities.