Studies on Barriers for Promotion of Clean Technology in SMEs of China

1 INTRODUCTIONAccording to the definition of SMEs in the TemporaryRegulation of Small and Medium Enterprise in China(2003): SMEs are those enterprises that have either less than2000 employees or 300 million RMB/year sales revenue, or400 million RMB fixed assets. SMEs generally account for99.88% of the total number of manufacturingestablishments in China in 2002, and they contributesignificantly to the social, economic and industrialdevelopment (Su, 2003).However, the majority of t…

Studies on Barriers for Promotion of Clean Technology in SMEs of China

After more than 10 years efforts on awareness raising and promotion, the concept of cleaner production (CP) has been adopting as a strategic approach to balance economic benefits and environmental protection for China's industries. However, it is also found that clean technology is difficult to be adopted and implemented in Chinese Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) because of certain barriers. This paper investigates these barriers among three stakeholders--governments, enterprises and experts. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to prioritize the relative importance of the twenty fine-selected barriers, which were classified into four barrier categories. The findings reveal that the exterior barriers of policy and financial barriers should be stressed rather than the inner barriers of technical and managerial barriers, although they are also very important. Absence of incentives on economic policies, lax enforcement of environmental regulations and high initial capital cost were the most important barriers to adoption of Clean Technologies (CT) in China.