How to Achieve Sustainable Development in the Industry? Influence of Listed Firms in Environmental Strategy

¹ School of Management, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan 430200, People’s Republic of China
² Faculty of Business, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

^* e-mail: wtu20221208@126.com

Abstract

The relevant literature on environmental strategy has carried out extensive research on the internal and external factors that affect the sustainable development of enterprises, but some important horizontal factors, such as the influence from peers, are ignored. Based on benchmarking theory and expectation theory, this paper makes an empirical analysis on the panel data of Listed Companies in 24 industries in China from 2001 to 2019. The results show that the number of Listed Companies in the industry has a positive impact on the passive and active environmental strategies of the whole industry. The outstanding performance of peers promotes the whole industry to actively implement the active environmental strategy and reduce the passive environmental strategy. At the same time, the longer the listing time of the listed companies, the more able the companies to strengthen the impact of the number of listed companies on the implementation of active or passive environmental strategy in the whole industry, and the smaller the relative scale, the more able the companies to strengthen the impact of performance on the implementation of active environmental strategy in the whole industry.