Which Is the Best Supply Chain Policy: Carbon Tax, or a Low-Carbon Subsidy?

Abstract

The low-carbon supply chain is key to promoting sustainable development and solving environmental pollution. Government policies related to lowering carbon emissions deeply affect supply chains. This paper builds a supply chain decision-making model under three different regulatory policies: a pure carbon tax, a pure low-carbon subsidy, and a mixed policy with both a carbon tax and a low-carbon subsidy, then compares and analyzes the impacts of these three different regulatory policies on carbon emissions, manufacturer and retailer income, and marginal profit in order to determine the best course of action with respect to supply chain decision-making. Our results indicate that the supply chain decision-making model under the mixed carbon tax and low-carbon subsidy policy results in a unique Nash equilibrium solution between the retailer subsidy rate and the manufacturing carbon reduction rate in a non-cooperative game. Although a carbon tax is beneficial to the ecological environment, retailer income increases slightly as the carbon tax coefficient increases before declining rapidly. Manufacturer income has a negative linear relationship with carbon tax, and an excessive amount of carbon tax increases the burden on companies. Therefore, the government must establish reasonable standards for carbon tax collection while offering moderate low-carbon subsidies at the same time as a means of optimizing social welfare.