Re-examining the governance effect of China’s environmental protection tax

China has long exercised environmental control through the imposition of sewage charges. The start of the environmental protection tax on January 1, 2018, means that China has entered a new phase of environmental control. Unlike many previous studies on the role of environmental taxes at the firm level, this paper examines whether environmental taxes affect pollution emissions by influencing the behavioral choices of micro-actors. This paper first reviews the Pyrrhic tax, the Porter hypothesis, and the “double dividend effect.” We then construct provincial panel data for 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2019 as a sample, use the environmental protection tax as a natural experiment to evaluate the policy of this environmental protection tax using propensity score matching and difference-in-differences model, investigate the intermediate transmission mechanism of the policy implementation, and then analyze the differences in policy effects between provinces with different levels of economic development. The increased tax burden in 2018 led to a general reduction in provincial pollution emissions in which technological innovation by various groups, including firms and universities, had a mediating role.