Symbolic Compliance Along the Supply Chain: Customer Climate Pressure and Supplier Value-Chain Carbon Accountability in Chinese Listed Firms

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on the decoupling between disclosure and performance in supply-chain climate accountability, with implications for theory on symbolic vs substantive compliance.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights that customer climate pressure may affect supplier disclosure behavior but not necessarily environmental outcomes; caution in relying on disclosure as a proxy for action.

🏛政策担当者:Suggests that disclosure-based regulation alone may lead to symbolic compliance; complementary enforcement or substantive performance metrics may be needed.

Environmental supply-chain governance increasingly requires firms to trace climate accountability across buyer–supplier relationships. This study examines whether downstream customer climate pressure is associated with suppliers’ green supply-chain management and value-chain carbon accountability among Chinese listed firms. We construct an exposure-weighted customer pressure measure by combining disclosed top-customer relationships with customer climate-accountability signals, and we decompose this measure into disclosure-based and non-disclosure-based components so that symbolic and substantive accountability can be separated. We then link this measure to supplier green supply-chain indicators, value-chain carbon-disclosure components, Scope 3 disclosure, environmental investment, and reported environmental performance indicators, including air emissions, water pollutant discharge, resource consumption, and environmental tax. Using firm-year panel regressions with fixed effects, alternative pressure measures, selection corrections, and extended outcome tests, we find an association between customer climate pressure and supplier value-chain disclosure. The depth of the association is concentrated where customer carbon-disclosure visibility is observed and is not separately identified in the smaller climate-only subsample, while the value-chain interaction association is positive but imprecisely estimated there. The value-chain disclosure associations are robust to a year-stratified randomization-inference placebo test. We do not find evidence that customer pressure is associated with supplier emissions, resource use, environmental investment, or environmental tax in the available matched samples. The pattern is consistent with symbolic compliance in supply-chain carbon accountability: customer disclosure visibility maps into supplier disclosure visibility, while we do not observe parallel movement in substantive environmental outcomes. The central finding is therefore that downstream customer climate pressure is associated with what suppliers disclose rather than with what they emit, shaping supplier disclosure behavior rather than substantive emission reduction. The estimates apply to supplier-year observations with disclosed and mappable listed-customer links, which we treat as the scope condition of the study rather than as an incidental data limitation.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3390/su18126084first seen 2026-06-19 05:15:05