Synergistic Effect of Environmental Taxes on Enterprises’ Green Technology Progress: Analysis Based on Four-Sector DGE Model

This paper focuses on China’s double carbon goal and addresses the challenges of high carbon emissions from excessive fossil fuel consumption and low energy efficiency, aiming to explore the impact mechanisms of environmental regulation with carbon tax as the core and technological progress on China’s economy and environment. It constructs a dynamic general equilibrium model encompassing four sectors: household, government, polluting enterprises and non polluting enterprises as well as two systems: economic system and environmental system, with parameters calibrated based on China’s actual economic data and existing literature research methods, and dynamic market clearing analysis involving administrative and market behaviors adopted for in-depth research. The study finds that increasing environmental taxes leads to U-shaped growth in residents’ utility with short-term decline due to enterprises delayed technological adjustment and tax transfer while long-term improvement driven by technological progress, and environmental taxes also promote enterprises green technological innovation and output expansion; notably, the synergistic effect of environmental regulation and technological progress significantly boosts enterprise productivity, increases the production share of non polluting goods and strengthens the government’s environmental governance capacity, ultimately achieving a win-win for economic development and environmental improvement. To advance the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, China should prioritize tax-based environmental regulation, improve the national carbon emission monitoring and management platform, vigorously promote industrial structure upgrading, increase support for green technology research and development, expand government investment in pollution control and fully implement supporting policies to optimize the energy structure and ecological environment.