From Capital Appreciation to Systemic Resilience: Theoretical Reconstruction and Micro-level Measurement of Corporate Sustainable Development Competitiveness

摘要

Conventional micro-enterprise theory has long been confined by the neoliberal tenet of "shareholder value maximization," being oriented toward such single financial indicators as return on equity and Tobin’s Q, thereby inducing structural defects including excessive leveraged arbitrage, the suppression of labor-factor compensation, and the socialization of negative environmental externalities. Because mainstream Western ESG ratings are deeply embedded in the system of financial-capital arbitrage and place excessive weight on textual disclosure and carbon-finance derivative compliance, they cannot effectively characterize the survival resilience of real-economy firms under extreme supply-chain disruptions and the shocks of geoeconomic decoupling. This paper breaks through the one-dimensional framework of neoclassical firm theory; integrates Marxist political economy’s "labor value and the all-round development of human beings," the transaction-cost theory of new institutional economics, and Justin Yifu Lin’s doctrine of "enterprise viability"; and constructs the "China Corporate Sustainable Competitiveness Index (CCSCI)," which comprises ten micro-level capability skeletons, three deep look-through accounts, and a non-convex non-compensable circuit-breaking corrector. Based on a large-sample, high-dimensional micro-level balanced panel (28,460 firm–year observations) constructed from 2015–2025 Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms, text mining of micro-level financial-statement footnotes, high-dimensional customs import/export data, and global patent-citation chains, this paper employs two-way fixed-effects panel models, the historical instrumental variable method (IV-2SLS), system GMM estimation, and a unilateral trade-sanctions quasi-natural experiment to conduct multi-level micro-level empirical tests of the core mechanisms. The findings are as follows:

First, the micro-level self-viability (SVI) measured after stripping out direct fiscal subsidies and various tax-expenditure distortions is the core micro-foundation for resisting external credit tightening and industry-clearing cycles: when hit by macro policy subsidy-withdrawal shocks, firms with higher SVI exhibit a steeper total factor productivity (TFP) rebound slope;

Second, as "anchor institutions" of regional innovation networks, the local value retention rate (LVR) of real-economy chain-leader enterprises, by stabilizing core process R&D artisan teams and smoothing local collaborative transaction frictions, exerts a robust and significant positive moderating effect on the transformation efficiency (ITE) from independent R&D investment to new-product revenue;

Third, Cox proportional-hazards models and probit extreme stress tests confirm that traditional linear weighting models suffer from a methodological bias, as they often "whitewash underlying rupture risks with book profits." Introducing nonlinear non-compensable circuit-breaking operators for environmental damage (E) and systemic debt rupture (R) effectively eliminates this bias. Consequently, this mechanism substantially raises the prediction accuracy of corporate default and distress under extreme supply-chain rupture shocks from 65.8% to 89.6%. This paper unblocks the transmission barriers between top-level macro narratives and the felt experience of micro-level factory workshops, and demonstrates at the micro-data level that "balancing justice and benefit, strategic resilience, and common prosperity with symbiosis" is not merely a moral-ethical initiative but an endogenous economic law through which real-economy micro-organizations achieve long-term antifragile survival, thereby providing a scientific basis for developing countries to construct autonomous, auditable micro-level measurement yardsticks of modern business civilization with the capacity for global dialogue.