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Introduction
As the starting point of reducing environmental pollution, green procurement is a critical process for management over green supply chain (Chin et al., 2015). Green procurement is defined as a series of activities with environmental concerns to ensure that the products or raw materials purchased would not have a negative effect on the environment; such as resource waste reduction, cyclical utilization of resources, recycling of resources, replacement of raw materials and so on (Carter and Carter, 1998; Min and Galle, 2001; Zsidisin and Siferd, 2001). By reducing the cost of energy input, controlling the pollution and avoiding remedy, green procurement could enhance the efficiency of resource utilization and operation, which in turn, would improve firms’ financial performance. Many companies have integrated environmental standards into their purchasing policies and processes to implement green procurement; however, most of them have neither adopted a systematic method to deal with the performance outcomes of green procurement nor connected green procurement with their general strategy.
More literatures on green procurement focus on the definition of green procurement (e.g. Carter and Carter, 1998), the motivation and pressures to engage in green procurement (e.g. Bloemhof-Ruwaard et al., 1995), the effect of firms’ resources and capabilities on green procurement (e.g. Bowen et al., 2006; Green et al., 1996; Green et al., 2012), and the relationship between green procurement and firm performance, where there are many inconsistencies. Most studies indicate that green procurement could improve the firm’s performance (e.g. Zsidisin and Hendrick, 1998; Carter et al., 2000), but only a few suggest that the effect is negative or insignificant. For example, Zhu and Sarkis (2004) classify that management practices on green supply chain produce both positive economic performance (e.g. decreasing of cost for materials purchasing) and negative economic performance (e.g. increasing of costs for purchasing environment-friendly materials). Similarly, Liu and Zhao (2008) investigate the effect of green procurement in Chinese manufacturing industry and find that the practices of green procurement have positive effects on almost all of the performance outcomes and only two factors are excluded.
The reasons for the inconsistent results could be summarized as follows. First, there are several dimensions of green procurement, so their effects on firm performance may be different (e.g. Liu and...