As an energy- and carbon-intensive sector, the textile industry has been the subject of many environmental policies. It has been under rigid regulation to promote energy conservation and emissions reduction in China, and a few scholars have carried out longitudinal and comprehensive studies of environmental policies aimed at the industry. This paper tries to fill in this gap by systematically analyzing the major environmental policies in this industry in China – the world’s largest exporter of textile products. For the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and reliability of this research, 118 textile environmental policies from 1989 to 2016 at the central government level have been studied by employing content analysis, including command and control instruments, market-based instruments, and voluntary instruments. The following conclusions were derived: 1) The textile environmental policy system is stabilizing in China, and water pollution is the key treatment objective. 2) Most policies regulate textile manufacturing, but environmental issues are not effectively regulated at the consumer stage. 3) The imbalanced structure of policy instruments reflects the government serving as the main driver of textile environmental protection, and efficiency and flexibility need to be improved to form an integrated textile environmental policy system.

The textile industry is a traditional pillar industry of the national economy in China. The strategic goal of Chinese innovation is to upgrade and transform traditional industries and make them develop in coordination with high-tech industries, so as to realize sustainable industrial development. At the core of industrial sustainable development, the innovation of the textile industry in China has become an important issue worthy of attention. Based on resource-based theory and signal transfer theory, the relationship between government funding, R&D models and the innovation performance of the Chinese textile industry is studied. The results show that government funding has a significant, direct promoting effect on the internal R&D and science-based cooperation of enterprises. Government funding indirectly promotes market-based cooperation through internal R&D. The promoting effect of internal R&D on innovation performance is greater than that of cooperative R&D. Internal R&D and cooperative R&D have more promoting effects on R&D reserve performance than those on market performance. Government funding indirectly promotes innovation performance through the mediation of internal R&D and science-based cooperation. The threshold effect of cooperative R&D indicates that only when the cooperative R&D intensity exceeds the threshold can government funding foster innovation performance more effectively. The conclusions can provide theoretical guidance for the formulation of innovation policy.

Dual embeddedness of inventors’ cooperative networks influences firm innovation. This paper explores the mechanism of synergy between network structural embeddedness (network centrality and structural hole) and relational embeddedness (relational strength) on firm innovation using data from Chinese listed automobile companies. This paper further explores the mediating role of exploitative learning and exploratory learning between the synergy of cooperative network dual embeddedness and innovation. The results show that the synergy of network centrality and relational strength hinders innovation, while the synergy of the structural hole and relational strength promotes innovation. The synergy of centrality and relational strength hinders exploitative learning, while the synergy of the structural hole and relational strength promotes exploitative learning. Exploitative learning plays a mediating role between synergy of structure and relational embeddedness and innovation.

Climate change and environmental conditions call for more attention to be paid to eco-friendly economic behavior. As a market-oriented environmental regulation, environmental tax can stimulate and guide enterprises’ environmental innovation in a neutral way. However, what elements connect the environmental tax and enterprise innovation activity together? Are all the enterprises’ innovation activities affected by the environmental tax in the same way? To answer the questions, the study uses the data of Chinese textile listed companies between 2004 and 2018 to explore the intermediary role of manpower and capital investment in the innovation chain and further analyze the influence of the heterogeneous factors such as property right, segmented industry, and region. The results show that the environmental tax can effectively promote the innovation capital input of Chinese textile enterprises, and the innovation manpower input plays a partial mediation role. At the same time, environmental tax can effectively promote the innovation performance output of Chinese textile enterprises, and innovation capital input plays a complete mediation role. In addition, heterogeneous factors such as property right, segmented industry and region will affect the relation of environmental tax to innovation input and output quality and greenness to varying degrees. The study makes a profound analysis of the relation of environmental tax on Chinese textile enterprises innovation by using the microdata at the enterprise level, providing a more targeted reference for making policies in the future.

University–industry R&D collaboration is an important means to improve innovation efficiency; many governments have issued policies to promote it. The most frequent policy instruments implemented by policy-makers to foster firms’ innovation are subsidies and tax incentives. The article elaborated on how subsidies and tax incentives influence the R&D collaboration efficiency through a panel dataset from 2009 to 2015 in China. The result showed that subsidies and tax incentives have a positive effect on collaboration efficiency, and the effect of subsidies on output is bigger than that of tax incentives. Taking the intensity of subsidy as a threshold variable, there is a significant single threshold effect on collaboration efficiency. However, there is no threshold effect when the intensity of the tax incentive used as the threshold variable.