Search Results (419)

Among developed-market stock exchanges, the NZX is distinctive. Its imputation credit system and capital-gains-tax exemption create financial incentives for firms to distribute earnings that have no close parallel elsewhere, yet what actually drives payout decisions at the firm level has never been tested in a multivariate panel framework. We analyzed 116 NZX-listed companies from 2017 to 2023. The results show that revenue and net profit prove to be the dominant positive predictors of dividend payout; cash flow and shareholders’ equity are negatively associated with the payout, suggesting that the firms prioritize capital retention in a manner consistent with the pecking order theory. Market capitalization adds nothing once earnings quality is accounted for in the model. Firms in which women occupied more than half of board seats paid, on average, seventeen times more in dividends than those with minimal female representation, a gap sustained without exception across all seven years. Domestic firms outpaid multinational firms throughout and, by 2023, had exceeded their own pre-period baseline, while multinationals had not. Our findings have implications for income-focused investors, for boards weighing payout strategies, and for policymakers assessing the case for diversity requirements. Full article

Tax incentives are central to environmental policy, yet the innovation effects of liquidity-based fiscal instruments remain underexplored. This study asks whether China’s value-added tax (VAT) credit refund promotes corporate green innovation, and how firm governance and the policy environment condition that effect. Exploiting the 2018 industry-targeted pilot as a quasi-natural experiment, we estimate two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences models on 25,259 firm-year observations for 4044 Chinese A-share listed firms over 2014–2021, measuring green innovation by invention-patent applications and defining treatment by industry eligibility. The refund raises green invention-patent applications by 17.0 percent, significant at the 1 percent level. A sequential decomposition is consistent with transmission through eased financing constraints and higher R&D investment. The effect is stronger where internal control quality is higher and pre-treatment financial slack is greater, and is absent where climate policy uncertainty (CPU) is high. Results survive removing control firms drawn in by the 2019 policy expansion, sector-by-year and province-by-year fixed effects, heterogeneity-robust estimators, and a triple difference on the innovation-quality margin. Fiscal liquidity complements governance quality and regulatory predictability rather than substituting for them. Full article

Rare earths are a strategically vital mineral resource on a global scale; the security of their supply chain and their recycling face severe challenges amid dual pressures of resource scarcity and environmental protection. This study focuses on the reverse supply chain for rare earth permanent magnet materials—specifically those based on praseodymium and neodymium—constructing a two-level game model comprising a rare earth oligopoly (Stackelberg leader) and two recyclers (Cournot followers). It systematically analyzes the dual decision-making behavior of recyclers between “recycling and selling” and “in-house remanufacturing”, and examines the impact of two policy instruments—government subsidies and environmental taxes—on the supply chain equilibrium. The study employs reverse induction to solve the game equilibrium and combines this with numerical simulation methods to compare the differing effects of the two policies on key indicators such as product output, market share, profit distribution, waste recovery volume, and recycling rates. The results indicate that there is strategic coordination and resource competition in recyclers’ decisions regarding recycling and remanufacturing, causing them to assume dual roles as both “suppliers” and “competitors” within the supply chain. Subsidy policies significantly incentivize recycling and remanufacturing activities, thereby increasing the recycling rate, but exert a slight squeeze on the profits of rare earth conglomerates. Environmental tax policies effectively curb primary mining and promote resource circulation, but may have a negative impact on the remanufacturing industry. Currently, value within the closed-loop rare earth supply chain is highly concentrated among upstream oligopolistic enterprises, whilst the recycling segment suffers from insufficient economic incentives and significant policy dependency. This study provides theoretical support and decision-making references for the government to optimize policy combinations and promote the high-quality development of the rare earth recycling industry. Full article

The deployment of grid-side independent energy storage stations (IESSs) is critical for managing the volatility introduced by high renewable energy penetration. However, investment in IESSs faces significant uncertainties, including fluctuating spot prices, policy changes, and equipment degradation, which traditional static valuation methods fail to address adequately. To bridge the gap between operational optimization and investment decision-making, this study proposes a novel framework integrating a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) operational optimization model with the Black-Scholes-Merton Model (BSM). The MILP model explicitly incorporates capacity degradation, multi-market revenue structures and comprehensive cost expenditures. The BSM, with volatility estimated via Monte Carlo simulation, quantifies the value of delaying investment under different policy scenarios. Results indicate that capacity price subsidies provide superior early-stage cash flow relief compared to tax incentives, and their combination yields a synergistic effect, increasing the maximum tolerable electricity price decline rate from 4.08% to 8.88%. Furthermore, in pessimistic scenarios, the real options approach identifies positive returns (up to 8.02 million CNY) from delayed investment, whereas the net present value method would suggest immediate rejection. Sensitivity analysis reveals that construction cost and frequency control mileage are the most influential factors. This framework offers a robust quantitative tool for IESS investment timing and regional policy design. Full article

Corporate greenwashing has become a growing concern because it may weaken policy incentives for real emissions reductions and environmental investment. However, it remains unclear whether firms’ financial strategies influence their environmental communication strategies. This paper shows that corporate tax avoidance significantly increases corporate greenwashing, with the effect primarily reflecting symbolic environmental communication rather than improvements in substantive environmental practices. Mechanism tests indicate that tax avoidance facilitates greenwashing by increasing information asymmetry and appointing managers with environmental backgrounds. Further analyses reveal that this effect is more pronounced among firms with higher pre-event levels of greenwashing. Moreover, tax avoidance does not improve substantive environmental performance, providing no evidence for the alternative explanation that tax avoidance reduces greenwashing by increasing internal resources available for environmental investment. These findings provide implications for environmental governance, ESG disclosure regulation, and corporate sustainability management. Full article

This study examines the effect of institutional quality on tax revenue mobilization in 10 selected Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries spanning from 2002 to 2023. The period was chosen because it captures a significant era of fiscal and institutional reforms across Sub-Saharan Africa. The data explored in this study originate from the World Development Indicators (WDI) dataset. The data includes tax revenue mobilization, institutional quality components such as regulatory quality (REQ), voice and accountability (VOA), control of corruption (COC), rule of law (ROL) and government effectiveness (GOE) and political stability (POS). The study also explored some other control variables such as GDP Growth, macroeconomic stability (Inflation) and international economic integration (FDI Inflows and Trade Openness). The study explored total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP to proxy tax revenue mobilization. Utilizing a Pooled Mean Group (PMG) Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation technique, the study analyzes the distinct short-run and long-run dynamics of fiscal capacity. The empirical results reveal a robust long-run cointegrating relationship, evidenced by a statistically significant and negative Error Correction Term (ECT) of −0.1858, which suggests that an 18.6% annual deviation from equilibrium is corrected within the following year. The long-run estimates indicate that institutional quality is a pivotal catalyst for tax. Additionally, inflation and trade openness exhibit significant and positive long-run effects, while Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) exerts a significant damping effect on tax revenue, likely due to aggressive tax incentives. Conversely, the short-run results revealed a significant effect of institutional quality, which suggests that stricter regulations and administrative overhauls may cause immediate transition costs and compliance shocks. Robustness checks using disaggregated institutional quality indicators, which include control of corruption, rule of law and government effectiveness, consistently validate the primary findings. The study concludes that while institutional reforms may disrupt revenue collection in the short term, they are indispensable for building a sustainable long-term social contract and expanding the formal base. Policymakers should prioritize institutional transparency and trade integration while rationalizing FDI-related tax holidays. Full article

Ukraine’s parliament is considering a monthly ownership levy on battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) of up to UAH 4000 as a road-fund replacement following the reinstatement of 20% value-added tax on BEV imports from January 2026, a fiscal reversal of the sustained incentive framework (zero customs duty since 2015; full VAT and excise relief from 2018) that has underpinned a fleet of approximately 246,000 registered BEVs in a wartime economy with acute petroleum import dependence. A five-year total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) model calibrated to Ukrainian market data (April 2026) computes the breakeven monthly levy across three charging scenarios and two energy-price assumptions; a structured comparative policy analysis maps the instrument against cross-jurisdictional adoption-suppression evidence; and a legal doctrinal analysis applies the fair-balance test under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights. The breakeven levy (L*) ranges from UAH 931 to UAH 1626 per month under baseline conditions and from UAH 63 to UAH 862 under adverse energy-price assumptions, placing the proposed UAH 4000 rate at 2.5 to 4.3 times the threshold. Cross-jurisdictional evidence positions Ukraine in the high adoption-suppression zone for flat ownership charges. The legal analysis indicates that the incentive programme satisfies ECHR legitimate-expectation criteria and that the proposed levy is likely to fail both the proportionality and transitional adequacy limbs of the fair-balance test. The preferred alternative combines a kWh surcharge on public charging with a phased per-kilometre road-user charge and three-year grandfathering for existing owners. Full article

Persistent inter-provincial market segmentation restrains China’s long-term sustainable domestic circulation and balanced regional development, which conflicts with the country’s SDG-aligned coordinated growth goals. Digital transformation cuts cross-border transaction frictions, while targeted fiscal and tax tools adjust local development incentives to realize sustained, inclusive market integration. Drawing on balanced panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2009 to 2024, this paper constructs two multi-dimensional composite indices via entropy weighting. We build a trade-flow theoretical framework embedded with fiscal incentive parameters, then design benchmark, dual mediation, and interaction-moderating panel models. System GMM and lagged variable regressions mitigate endogeneity risks, and a full suite of robustness tests validates the reliability of empirical outputs. The results show digital expansion significantly alleviates market fragmentation and fuels sustainable unified market construction. Information transparency improvement and transportation cost reduction serve as two parallel sustainable transmission paths. Obvious regional differentiation exists in inland provinces with underdeveloped market systems, which harvest larger balanced development dividends from digital upgrades. Fiscal and tax policies exert significant positive moderating effects; standardized fiscal allocation can amplify digitalization’s capacity to deliver long-term coordinated regional circulation. This study supplements institutional sustainability logic for digital-market linkage research and delivers differentiated fiscal and digital policy portfolios to narrow inter-regional development gaps and advance sustainable economic balance. Full article

This study evaluates the techno-economic viability of bifacial photovoltaic (PV) systems in Uribia, La Guajira—the department that holds Colombia’s strongest solar resource, with a mean global horizontal irradiance near 5.6 kWh/m²/day and seasonal peaks above 6.0. Despite this endowment, the country’s installed solar capacity remains far below its potential, largely because developers lack the site-specific financial risk analyses that investment decisions require. To address this, we pair stochastic Monte Carlo simulation with a set of machine learning surrogate models and quantify how Colombia’s Law 1715 fiscal incentives—VAT exclusion and accelerated depreciation—reshape the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) of bifacial PV systems under realistic climatic variability. Drawing on six years of daily meteorological data, we model bifacial PERC performance under two ground-albedo conditions: the natural site value ($\alpha =0.125$) and an optimized surface ($\alpha =0.30$). The results are consistent and encouraging. Under the Law 1715 tax shields, the mean LCOE settles at 0.0588 USD/kWh, and even the 95% Value-at-Risk (VaR) of 0.0638 USD/kWh stays below the prevailing Colombian industrial tariff across every climatic realization evaluated—evidence that the fiscal framework does as much to compress downside risk as it does to lower the average cost. Ground-albedo optimization proved to be the decisive lever: raising $\alpha$ from 0.125 to 0.30 through low-cost surface preparation shortens the payback period to roughly four years and lets the bifacial configuration overtake the cumulative net present value of the monofacial baseline before year seven. The surrogate models tell a complementary story about the structure of the problem. The non-linear algorithms—Support Vector Regression, Gradient Boosting, a Multi-Layer Perceptron and Gaussian Process Regression—reproduce the Monte Carlo response surface almost exactly ($R^2\ge 0.99$, 0.994–0.997), whereas linear models trail at $R^2\approx 0.90$–$0.94$, a gap that quantifies just how strongly the techno-economic drivers of LCOE interact. Full article

As a form of economic incentive, tax incentives can theoretically have a profound impact on corporate ESG performance by reducing the costs associated with fulfilling corporate social responsibilities and stimulating firms’ intrinsic motivation for sustainable development. This study examines the impact of tax incentives on corporate ESG performance and its potential underlying mechanisms using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2023. The empirical results indicate that tax incentives significantly enhance corporate ESG performance—firms receiving higher levels of tax incentives exhibit better ESG performance. This conclusion remains robust after a series of robustness tests. Further analysis reveals that the positive effect of tax incentives is more pronounced in the environmental and governance dimensions of ESG. Additionally, we find substantial heterogeneity in the impact of tax incentives on ESG performance. Specifically, the beneficial effects of tax incentives are more significant for state-owned enterprises, firms with weaker financial performance, and older (more mature) firms. More importantly, our findings demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between the level of tax incentives and their impact on ESG performance, with the optimal tax incentive level estimated at approximately 85%. Furthermore, we unveil the mechanisms through which tax incentives influence corporate ESG performance. The results suggest that tax incentives improve ESG performance through multiple channels, including promoting green innovation, strengthening internal controls, facilitating the adoption of financial technology, and enhancing the quality of environmental information disclosure. This study contributes to and expands upon recent research within the resource-based view, offering valuable insights for corporate tax practices in developing countries and tax authorities’ regulatory strategies. Full article

To examine the mechanisms through which supply-side policy instruments influence the early diffusion of high-quality technologies in technology markets, this study constructs a bilateral evolutionary model incorporating finitely rational technology suppliers and demanders based on evolutionary game theory and a bipartite small-world network. Through multi-agent simulations, the study analyzes the effects of government R&D funding, tax relief and technology transaction subsidies on the diffusion of high-quality technologies and the process of supply-demand strategy adaptation, with the aim of characterizing the role of public fiscal funds in screening for effective technology supply. The study reached the following main conclusions: First, under the baseline scenario, high-quality technologies exhibit a strong tendency toward endogenous diffusion, and supply-side policies primarily serve to accelerate marginal growth in the early stages rather than fundamentally altering the long-term convergence trend. Among these policies, R&D funding, as an ex ante incentive tool, has the most direct impact on early-stage diffusion; however, high-intensity funding leads to a decline in fiscal efficiency; Second, the independent effects of ex post incentive tools like tax relief and technology transaction subsidies are relatively moderate, with the former exhibiting high fiscal efficiency at low to medium intensities, and the latter exerting a moderate incentive effect by increasing the returns on successful transactions, though both suffer from diminishing marginal returns; Third, the supply-demand strategy fit index can be used to help characterize the supply-demand coordination process, but it cannot be directly interpreted as an indicator of technology quality or diffusion quality; Finally, robustness tests indicate that the main conclusions remain stable under perturbations to network topology, initial conditions, and Fermi noise parameters. Overall, the design of supply-side policies should simultaneously consider the timing of policy implementation, market-matching mechanisms, and fiscal cost-effectiveness. Full article

This study examines the effectiveness of government support mechanisms in fostering venture capital (VC) ecosystems in emerging economies, with a particular focus on Kazakhstan. While venture capital is widely recognized as a key driver of innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic diversification, many developing countries face persistent structural barriers, including underdeveloped financial markets, limited private investment, and regulatory inefficiencies. To address these challenges, this research adopts a multi-source qualitative design, combining a systematic literature review with semi-structured interviews conducted with venture capital experts and practitioners. The analysis evaluates key policy instruments—such as co-investment schemes, tax incentives, startup accelerators, and regulatory reforms—and assesses their role in shaping VC activity. The findings indicate that although Kazakhstan has made significant progress in establishing institutional support for venture capital, critical constraints remain, including bureaucratic complexity, investor risk aversion, and limited exit opportunities. The study contributes to the literature by integrating global best practices with context-specific evidence, offering policy-relevant insights into how governments can more effectively design and implement interventions to strengthen venture capital ecosystems in developing economies. Full article

The construction industry in Jordan faces significant economic and environmental challenges due to high material costs, fluctuating market prices, and the continued reliance on a linear economy model that prioritizes material extraction, consumption, and disposal over reuse and recycling. These challenges contribute to substantial construction waste generation and hinder the transition toward a Circular Economy (CE). Therefore, this study aimed to develop a framework for managing construction waste during the construction phase of residential building projects in Jordan and to facilitate the adoption of circular practices within the construction sector. A questionnaire survey was administered to 31 experts, and the collected data were analyzed using the Relative Importance Index (RII) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Subsequently, the proposed framework was evaluated through a three-round Delphi study involving an independent panel of experts. The results identified the principal barriers to implementation as the low demand for reused or recycled materials, limited stakeholder awareness, and difficulties in material disassembly. The findings further revealed that applying visual management and 5S techniques to improve site efficiency, implementing Building Information Modeling (BIM) for material and component mapping throughout the building life cycle, and providing tax incentives and grants for recycled materials were among the highest-ranked sub-strategies for supporting circular practices and minimizing construction waste. The Delphi evaluation demonstrated strong expert consensus regarding the framework’s applicability and practicality, indicating that it provides a structured, expert-informed approach that may assist policymakers and construction practitioners in promoting circular practices and reducing construction waste in Jordan. In addition, the framework has the potential to support Jordan’s Vision 2025 and contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Full article

The transition of South Africa’s mining sector from a linear take–make–waste model to a circular economy is critical for environmental sustainability and resource security. While the existing literature heavily favors generic, theoretical solutions, this review paper bridges the gap by mapping validated circular technologies directly onto named local operations and specific regional waste profiles. By pairing engineering innovations such as automated sorting and geopolymer synthesis with site-level mineralogical realities and techno-economic limits, this work provides a realistic blueprint for sustainable resource management and holistic landscape restoration. However, widespread implementation is currently constrained by a lack of commercial-scale data, low data transparency regarding corporate waste inventories, static economic modeling, and ambiguous regulatory definitions that separate waste from by-products. To overcome these limitations, a phased, internationally benchmarked policy roadmap aligned with South Africa’s critical minerals strategies is proposed. Future research should focus on industrial field trials, blockchain-secured geospatial waste databases, dynamic life-cycle assessments, and cross-sector synergy mapping. Ultimately, aligning technological innovations with updated waste classification standards, specialized tax incentives, and carbon-credit structures will allow South Africa to mitigate its legacy environmental liabilities while safeguarding its position in the shifting global critical minerals market. Full article

In China, the environmental protection tax constrains and incentivizes firms to cut emissions and lift efficiency. To examine the effect and mechanism of environmental regulation as a driver of corporate green transformation, this study uses data on Chinese listed manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2022. It takes the 2018 environmental fee-to-tax reform as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a difference-in-differences model. The core DID coefficient is 0.0088 (p < 0.05). After the reform was implemented, manufacturers in higher-tax regions achieved better green transformation by increasing pollution costs, adjusting investment and improving executives’ green awareness. The policy effects were more pronounced for low-profit, non-state-owned, non-patent and labor-intensive firms in regions with higher tax burdens. Additionally, the policy effect exhibited a time lag. The incentive effect was stronger for heavily polluting enterprises, and the policy simultaneously boosted corporate economic performance. Accordingly, we propose broadening the taxable scope, tightening supervision, optimizing tax incentives and adopting targeted policies to support corporate green transformation. Full article