Environmental performance and the role of government support: Evidence from the recent COVID-19 pandemic

This paper investigates whether good firm environmental performance attracted government support. Furthermore, we explore the effect of different government measures such as access to new credit, cash transfers, fiscal exemptions or reductions, and wage subsidies. The COVID-19 data were collected from the COVID-19 follow-up survey, while environmental data are from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. Our results show that 21% of the firms received wage subsidies, 10% received cash and exemption support and only 6% of firms received credit support. The results indicate that the probability of receiving government support increases if firms have a good environmental performance score.