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.