Do environmental regulations promote low-carbon diffusion among different scales of enterprise? A complex network-based evolutionary game approach

To mitigate the detrimental effects of climate change exacerbated by excessive carbon emissions, China has introduced a series of environmental regulations designed to promote low-carbon technology diffusion among enterprises. The existing literature ignores the heterogeneity of the scales of enterprises, making it extremely difficult to put forward targeted policies for enterprises of different scales. In this study, we employ a complex network-based evolutionary game approach to analyze the effect of environmental regulations on the diffusion of low-carbon technology, and thereby determine the relationship between the degree of diffusion and the strength of regulations at different scales of enterprise. The results revealed that with respect to the degree of diffusion, there are significant differences in the sensitivity of enterprises in 20- and 100-scale networks to the imposition of three types of environmental regulation (innovation subsidy, carbon tax, and punishment). When the scale of the network is fixed, fluctuation in the change in degree becomes larger, and even irregular, with an increase in enterprise scale. With an increase in network scale for small, medium, and large enterprises, the range of variation in the degree of diffusion becomes smaller. In small, medium, and large enterprises, when the scale of the network increases from 20 to 100, the degree of diffusion will increase in response to the same strength of innovation subsidy, carbon tax, and punishment. With an increase in innovation subsidies, the diffusion degree of large enterprises will improve slightly. Moreover, for large enterprises, increasing the strength of punishment has no obvious effects with regards to improving the degree of diffusion. At all scales of enterprise, in both the 20- and 100-sacle networks, the degree of diffusion will increase with an increase in the strength of the carbon tax.