Enhancing Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance through New Quality Productivity and Green Innovation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Quality Productivity and Green Innovation

Quality Productivity

The so-called key focus in this paper is ‘new quality productivity’ expression that has been used in a few references quoted by the authors.  However, the expression of ‘quality productivity’ is composed of two terms, quality and productivity, which represent two distinct concepts in management science, together with fairly strict and classical definitions, as well as a large number of indicators to quantify them and analyse various perspectives of both of them (quality and productivity respectively’. And neither measurements of quality and-or productivity are used anywhere in this paper: therefore, this paper is neither about quality nor about productivity, nor about a combination of these.

And in Table 1 about the ‘indicators’ of this so-called ‘quality productivity’ are all about some ratios used in classical analyses of Innovation, none of which are directly related to either quality and productivity.

Note 1 about Table 1: the so-called ‘soft technology’ indicator consist uniquely of financial asset-revenues-equity – and nothing at all related to ‘technology’

Note 2 about Table 1: the so-called weights come out of the blue sky, and the assertion that the addition of these unit-less weight to 100 as ‘new quality productivity’ is strictly subjective and without a sound foundation.

In summary: the usage of the ‘quality productivity’ expression is misleading for the readers (and reviewers).

Recommendation: delete such an expression from everywhere in this text.

What the topic of this paper is about, is ‘innovation’, and some ways at ‘quantifying’ innovation and attempting to analyze some candidate variables that may impact positively or negatively innovation (and more specifically ‘green innovation’).

 

 Green Innovation

The only indicator of ‘green innovation’ in this paper is the GI variable, defined in terms of the number of green patents a company it holds – section 3.2.3, while in the previous sentence the authors refer to ‘patents submitted’ and a ‘logarithmically multiplied by one’(?). And without any information on how many of the so-called ‘11,701 valid samples’ has ‘green patents’ and what was their distribution across such organizations, from very small to very large.

Data sample

While the full data set consists of ‘11,701 valid samples’, there is in this paper almost no other information on the distribution of the data for each of the analyzed independent variables: considering that data sets may have a large number of missing values, poor values, and be plagued by extreme values, if such information is not analyzed in depth by the authors and concerns duely reported to the reviewers and readers, this leaves little confidence in subsequent analyses reported by the authors and authors’ claims of ‘conclusions’.

Equations of the Model design for ESB – section 3.3

The equation presented ‘look’  and ‘intuitive’, but:

-           mathematically it is a non-sense to add together values that have different units of measurements (only numbers on a ratio scale can be added together)

-          And if none of the variables have a measurement unit (that is when each is unit-less), then the addition of all of these is still without a measurement unit.

Therefore :

-          such an addition in the ESF equations (1), (2) and (3) end up unit-less and meaningless

-          and at best it would be an ‘ordinal number’ and if so, you could not use such numbers for statistical analyses, including for descriptive analysis such in Table 3 (and subsequent ones) where a mean and a standard deviation for ESP, NPRO do no make sense when considering their scale type.

 

Impact: unless these above issues are duely addressed, I do not have confidence that the subsequent analysis findings presented are based on solid foundations.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

none

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.

I apologize for the lack of clarity in my article on the concept of “new quality productivity,” which led to some misunderstandings. Based on all your comments, I have made significant corrections.

In the introduction and in the hypothesis development, I have reinterpreted the new quality productivity.

In the methodology, I have described in more detail the methodology for measuring new quality productivity. However, I have not been able to update the methodology since, from the current literature, I have only inquired about this one method to measure the new quality productivity of firms. To address this one limitation, I elaborate in the conclusion section.

Thank you again for your willingness to review my manuscript.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I congratulate the authors for this article. The topic is interesting. The results contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between management, innovation and ESG performance. This is a matter on which research is lacking.

Below I report my evaluation of the article. My observations and suggestions were made with the purpose of contributing to improving the quality of the article. I hope they are useful to the authors.

Title: correctly indicates the content of the article.

Abstract: Includes a synthetic description of the topic and the results. At the end of the abstract, a brief reflection on the practical contribution of the research results is included. Regarding the methodology, the information is very diffuse. The author only says that: 1) “data from listed companies in China from 2011-2022” was used and 2) “empirical tests” were carried out. It is suggested that the authors specify these aspects of the methodology a little more.

Keywords: are sufficient for database searches

Introduction: This section focuses on a reflection on the three variables considered (ESG, new quality productivity, green innovation). This reflection can be considered a foundation for the topic of the article. But this section does not include matters that should be part of the introduction in a scientific article. Missing is a description of: the topic, the objective of the work, the methodology and the main results. I suggest the authors specify these aspects of the methodology a little more.

Literature review and hypothesis development. This section is well formulated. The concepts are correctly defined. The hypotheses are adequately founded. Despite these positive aspects, it is observed that the literature on the three variables (ESG, new quality productivity, green innovation) is strongly biased towards authors from China. In the case of the bibliography on ESG and green innovation, there is important literature by authors outside China. It is suggested that the authors incorporate some of the authors outside of China who have contributed the most to these topics.

Methodology. This section is very well developed. In particular, the use of a second ESG indicator (Sino-Securities) is highlighted, in order to evaluate the robustness of the results. No suggestions are made for this section.

Analysis of the results. This section is considered to be well developed. Statistical techniques are appropriate to study the hypotheses. The statistical analysis is correct. The use of various statistical tests stands out in order to validate the results. No suggestions are made for this section.

Discussion. The authors carry out a correct discussion of the results. It is important to reflect on the impacts of research results for various stakeholders, including policymakers and investors.

Conclusion. The content does not correspond to what the conclusions section should include in a scientific article. In particular, there is a lack of mention of the methodological limitations of the work.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.

I have made corrections based on your comments.

Please see the attachment.

Thank you again for your willingness to review my manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I like this paper very much becuase the topic is quite new. The authors talked about  New Quality Productivity, which is qutie important in China now.

In the introduction, you should talk about what you did and what you found, you also need to have contributions. Now you only have background.

In the literature review, please delete the first part concept definition,.

Please delete 4.2 correlation test.

The research design is a little bit simple.  You did not do any text about endogeneity, please do one test about that.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is ok.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.

I have made corrections based on your comments.

Please see the attachment.

Thank you again for your willingness to review my manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx