Does Government-Led Publicity Enhance Corporate Green Behavior? Empirical Evidence from Green Xuanguan in China

Abstract

Promoting green behavior among corporations is essential to the green transition of industrial sectors in China. There is a unique government-led green publicity institution, ‘Xuanguan‘, that expects to accelerate the green idea and policy spread top-down in the economic system in China. However, few studies discussed its role in formulating corporate green behavior. By constructing an integrated model of Government-led publicity-Internal and external perception-Corporate green behavior, this paper explored the effect of government-led green publicity on corporate green behavior, based on the survey data of 199 industrial manufacturing corporations in Henan Province, China. A structural equation model (SEM) was adopted to detect the influence and influential path. The results found that government-led green publicity could positively enhance green behavior via improving the corporate internal perception of risk and opportunity and improving the corporate perception of external environment actors. The heterogeneity tests showed that type of publicity channels, corporate ownership, and corporate scale made different effects on the results. Further analysis proved that government-led publicity could enhance the function of formal environmental regulation. It implies that government-led publicity can be a good compensation for formal regulations and stimulate green behavior. This paper demonstrates a new factor of enhancing corporate behavior and contributed new evidence of China’s green development story.