Abstract: Technological innovation has become a key factor in determining the balance of political and economic forces in the world and the future of a country. The role of optimizing the business environment to promote innovation-driven development has become increasingly prominent. Therefore, since February 2014, the State Administration of Taxation of China has launched the Spring Breeze Action for Tax Convenience, which aims to simplify tax administrative approval matters and maximize the convenience of taxpayers. The implementation of this policy optimizes the taxation business environment and stimulates the vitality of market players.In the past, most of the literature on taxation and enterprise innovation focused on the innovation incentive effect of tax incentives or tax cuts. As an important part of the tax system, the role of tax collection and management is often ignored. In addition, previous studies only used a certain indicator to measure the tax and business environment, and it is difficult to avoid endogenous problems such as measurement error, reverse causality and omitted variables. Spring Breeze Action for Tax Convenience is an important part of the government′s reform of "decentralization, regulation and service", an inevitable requirement for strengthening tax law enforcement and services in the new era, and an important reform practice to promote the modernization of the country′s governance system and governance capacity. It is very difficult for a single enterprise to influence the implementation of the action in the region due to the government′s behavior. Therefore, the implementation of the action is exogenous to the enterprise, which can avoid endogenous problems such as reverse causality in the study to a certain extent. It provides a good opportunity to identify the causal relationship between tax operating environment and enterprise innovation.With the help of the quasi-natural experiment of the Spring Breeze Action for Tax Convenience, this paper empirically analyzed the impact of the improvement of the taxation business environment on enterprise innovation by using the intensity double-difference method and data of Chinese listed companies from 2009 to 2019. The study found that the optimization of the taxation business environment has significantly improved the innovation investment of enterprises. This conclusion is still valid after considering a series of robustness tests such as parallel trend test, PSM-DID method, exclusion of policy interference in the same period, and subsample regression. Further analysis showed that the innovation incentive effect of the optimization of the tax and business environment is more significant for smaller enterprises and those with weaker vitality. The optimization of the taxation business environment has significantly increased the number of enterprise patent applications and the number of utility model and design patent applications, but the impact on the number of enterprise invention patent applications is not statistically significant. Therefore, although the optimization of the taxation business environment can reduce the institutional transaction cost of enterprises, and promote the increase of high-quality innovation output of enterprises, it is necessary to promote the change of the innovation incentive mechanism and reverse the pursuit of low-quality innovation by enterprises.The research of this paper has important policy implications: First, excessive taxation costs will increase the burden on enterprises and hinder enterprise innovation. Therefore, it is possible to shorten the tax processing time and optimize the tax processing process by consolidating tax returns so as to effectively reduce the tax payment cost of enterprises. Second, the government should establish a perfect system of tax collection and administration to ensure the full implementation of tax reduction and fee reduction policies. For example, the tax authority can speed up the construction of smart tax and make comprehensive use of big data and cloud computing in order to facilitate taxpayers to pay taxes and enjoy tax incentives. The tax authority can provide high quality tax payment services. To be specific, the tax authority should establish the concept of taking "taxpayer as the center" and provide personalized tax payment services to improve taxpayers′ sense of gain and stimulate enterprise vitality. In short, the optimization of the tax business environment can effectively promote the increase of enterprises′ innovation input and output. Therefore, it is necessary to unswervingly deepen the reform of tax "decentralization, regulation and service", and create a more transparent and predictable tax business environment.

Key words:  taxation business environment, reform of "decentralization, regulation and service", enterprise R&D, enterprise vitality