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In the process of global urban development, there are urgent ecological security and environmental pollution problems, green development is the fundamental way for urban sustainable development, economic transformation and mitigation of ecological and environmental problems. Based on the panel data of 283 cities at prefecture level and above in China from 2003 to 2017, this paper analyzes spatial–temporal evolution characteristics of urban green development efficiency (UGDE) and the peer effects of UGDE between cities of different grades. It is found that during the study period, in terms of temporal evolution, the average UGDE in China increased from 0.47 in 2003 to 0.61 in 2017, with a cumulative growth rate of 29.79%, showing a rising trend in general. In terms of spatial evolution, the number of low-efficiency cities and medium-efficiency cities continued to decrease. The eastern region has always been the main distribution area of higher-efficiency cities and high-efficiency cities; in the central region, UGDE in most cities improved significantly; in the western region, UGDE has always lagged behind that in the eastern and central regions. In addition, the center of gravity of UGDE presented a trend of northwest migration in general, with a total displacement of 100.07 km, and UGDE showed a spatial dispersion trend. The empirical results indicate that the improvement of UGDE in large cities has a driving effect on that in neighboring medium cities and small cities through the positive peer effect, and the growth of UGDE in medium cities has a promoting effect on that in neighboring small cities through the positive peer effect; the increase of UGDE in medium cities has a positive peer effect on that in neighboring large cities, and the growth of UGDE in small cities has a positive peer effect on that in neighboring medium cities; UGDE promotes each other between large cities through the positive peer effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Baidu migration data to obtain the intercity trips between cities in China. Taking intercity travel as a functional connection between cities, taking into account the internal and external intercity travel connections of urban agglomerations, an improved rank scale distribution method was used to quantitatively measure the form and function of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, middle reaches of the Yangtze River, Chengdu-Chongqing, Central Plains, Guanzhong, and Harbin-Changchun urban agglomerations. It is found that, firstly, there are differences in the Functional Polycentricity presented by the internal and external connections of urban agglomerations, which are related to the economic development of urban agglomerations and central cities. Secondly, there are differences between Morphological Polycentricity and Functional Polycentricity of the eight urban agglomerations measured by the internal and external connections, indicating that the external connections have a significant impact. The internal and external connections of urban agglomerations are important functional connections of urban agglomerations. The study of urban agglomerations should not ignore the internal or external connections, and the overall consideration can more comprehensively reflect the polycentric characteristics of urban agglomerations. The internal and external connections of urban agglomerations are important functional connections, and the study of urban agglomerations should not ignore internal or external connections. Overall consideration can better reflect the polycentirccharacteristics of urban agglomerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega-urban agglomerations in developing countries have been main parts of economic development. But at the same time, they have become the most prominent and sensitive areas of resource and environment problems. It is important to clarify the mechanism and driving factors of green growth in mega-urban agglomerations. Based on the panel data of 28 major cities in China's Pan-Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration from 2006 to 2015, this paper evaluates the level of green development of urban agglomeration by green total factor productivity index (GTFP) based on Global Malmquist DEA model, and decomposes GTFP into technological progress, pure technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change and technological scale change. On this basis, this paper constructs a panel econometric model to analyze the influencing factors of GTFP and its decomposition factors. The results show that GTFP of Pan-Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration is growing, and the scale effect caused by technological progress is the main driving factor. Green development in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration takes into account efficiency and regional fairness, which causes differences in GTFP growth patterns of sub-urban agglomerations within mega-urban agglomerations. The technological progress and technical efficiency improvement are becoming the main driving force of GTFP growth in relatively backward areas. Furthermore, according to the influencing factors of GTFP and its decomposition factors, mega-urban agglomeration should eliminate internal administrative barriers to build an integrated market. It should also increase the proportion of technology industries in core cities, and give full play to the role of technology spillover effect on surrounding cities. In addition, improving the efficiency of resource and energy utilization is also helpful to promote the transformation of urban agglomeration development from factor-driven to efficiency-driven and innovation-driven. Our research results have implications for the coordinated development of economy and environment in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuing decline in the birth rate has led to a series of problems, such as the disproportion of population structure and severe aging population, which have restricted the country's economic development. To have a deeper understanding of the geographical differences and influencing factors of the birth rate, this paper collects and organizes the birth population data of 31 provinces in mainland China from 2011 to 2019. The national region is divided into seven natural geographical regions to obtain the spatial hierarchy, and a hierarchical Bayesian Spatio-temporal model is established. The INLA algorithm estimates the model parameters. The results show significant spatial and temporal differences in birth rates in mainland China, which are reflected mainly in the combination of spatial, temporal, and Spatio-temporal interaction effects. In the spatial dimension, the northeast is low, the northwest and southwest are high, and the birth rate has an upward trend from east to west. These trends are caused by unbalanced economic development, different fertility attitudes and differences in fertility security, reflecting regional differences in spatial effects. From 2011 to 2019, China's birth rate showed an overall downward trend in the time dimension. However, all regions except the northeast saw a significant but temporary increase in birth rates in 2016 and 2017, reflecting the temporal effect difference in birth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid economic development of China has intensified the country's many problems. Among them, energy shortage and environmental pollution are two main problems, which highly affects the economic growth and sustainable development. To achieve more rapid green growth, the innovative technology by reusing the environmental wastes has been widely used since doing so not only decreases the environment pollution, but also further brings more natural resource. The present paper establishes a two-stage structure for evaluating the regional green growth and sustainable development in China by calculating the efficiency of "energy saving" and "pollution treatment" separately. Specifically, a set of models based on slack-based measure approach are constructed in which non-discretionary inputs can be calculated in both resource utilization stage and pollution treatment stage. Comparing with the traditional models, the new proposed models can measure the performance of resources saving and pollution treatment with considering the influence of non-discretionary inputs. An empirical application on Chinese 30 regions during 2011–2015 have been done to illustrate the use of our framework and the performance of regional green growth and sustainable development. Based on the efficiency results, we find that the efficiency scores of the provinces in central and northeast area are lower, which is mostly caused by their poor performance on "pollution treatment". Both the environmental efficiency scores and target values for performance improvement are obtained in this paper to enlighten the corresponding decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the difference from traditional commodity trade, copyright trade not only transmits economic value with real products as carriers, but also transmits cultural value with subject consciousness as form, which often occupies an important position in trade friction. This paper summarizes the position of copyright trade in Sino–US trade friction from the perspective of Sino–US trade history, and considers it is not only one of the key incentives for Sino–US trade friction in the current stage, a game chip between the two sides in the upgrading stage, but also one of the key points of China's reform in the calming stage. Based on this, this paper analyzes the reason why copyright trade occupies an important position in Sino–US trade friction, and regards that China should draw lessons from history and continuously deepen the reform of copyright trade in the legal system, market cultivation, internationalization of enterprises, so as to promote the sound development of copyright trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid urbanization in China has been associated with a growing hunger for energy consumption and steadily-increasing CO2 emissions. In this paper, an integrated system dynamics model composed of four sub-models is developed to simulate the urbanization and energy consumption in China from 1998 to 2050. Three scenarios are provided: accelerated economic development, emission reduction constraint, and low-carbon oriented. The result reveals that rapid economic growth and sufficient energy supply will foster China's urbanization in all three scenarios. Under the low carbon transition scenario, China's urbanization rate is expected to reach 76.41% in 2050, both reducing carbon emissions and promoting eco-friendly development. All three scenarios witness a dramatic growth of residential energy consumption and a steady increase of industrial energy consumption. China still has a long way to achieve the low-carbon transition goal. China should promote renewable resources and energy, pursue a low-carbon lifestyle, and reduce energy intensity over the next few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing evidence shows that global warming has exerted important influence on the economies of societies in the past and will continue to have effects in the future. The provinces of China differ substantially in terms of their temperatures and their degrees of economic development. Therefore, discussion of the positive and negative effects of global warming on economic development at the provincial level is beneficial for determining the effects of global warming on economic development in different provinces, and this discussion also helps to answer the question of how to increase the resilience of economies to global warming. This paper studies the effects of annual average temperature changes on economic growth in the 31 provinces of China from 1978 to 2013 (here referred to as the historical period) and in the 5 typical provinces from 2010 to 2100 (here referred to as the future) under the RCP8.5 scenario. The results indicate that (a) from 1978 to 2013, economic growth exhibits a quadratic nonlinear response to local temperature in all provinces of China and that temperature has both positive and negative effects on the economic growth rates of different provinces. In addition, taking 23.37 °C as a threshold value, over 96% of the provinces display positive effects. (b) Under the RCP8.5 scenario, from 2010 to 2100, although the 5 typical provinces maintain trends reflecting economic growth, the average rate of growth is 80% lower than the value during the historical period. The purpose of this study is to draw the attention of the government to the implications of future global warming for the economic development of different provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, foreign direct investment (FDI) has not only promoted rapid economic growth in China, but also affected the country's environmental quality through technology spillover. This paper tests the variables that may affect the ability of green innovation by using the Granger causality test. It extracts the variables passed the test as input variables, selects the number of patents as output variable, and evaluates the efficiency of various provinces in mainland China by examining their yearly technological progress variables. At the same time, technological progress is defined and divided into capital and environmental factors, and then panel data using the variable coefficients model was used to fit influencing factors to obtain impact coefficients of capital and environment. On this basis, this paper makes the determination of membership to replace the general sense of 'threshold' value by using fuzzy theory and proposes the concept of the 'comprehensive threshold' of economic development and environmental protection. The results show that less than a quarter of China's provinces have crossed the comprehensive threshold. Finally, based on the conclusions of quantitative analysis, some suggestions are proposed that the Chinese government ought to enact different strategies for the introduction of FDI according to different development situations of different provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bank industry plays a critical role in the economic development of China. In this paper, we develop a new two-stage data envelopment analysis approach for measuring the slacks-based efficiency of Chinese commercial banks during years 2008-2012, where the banking operation process of each bank is divided into a deposit-generation stage (division) and a deposit-utilization stage (division). In the approach, the increase of desirable outputs and the decrease of undesirable outputs are simultaneously considered in order to identify the inefficiency of a bank. Three efficiency statuses are first defined for such a system to investigate its input-output performance and divisional performances, and a full efficiency status is then defined based on these statuses. The empirical results show that the improvement of the banks' performances during this period was mainly contributed by the improvement of deposit-utilization stage. Besides, the results also show that our approach can provide a benchmark for the intermediate measures of the two stages of an inefficient bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industry activities produce massive bad by-products, in the form of waste water, waste gas or solid waste, which are the source of environmental issues. The growing concerns over environmental problems make China reconsider the current developing pattern, and partially necessitate the reformation of economic structure. If the environmental consequences from economic structure reformation are subject to empirical testing, it is of vital importance to make some actual measurement for environmental performance. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a slacks-based environmental efficiency index based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). An empirical application to industry sector of China presents the following findings: (1) approximately two-thirds of the nation's provinces are inefficient due to excessive resource utilization, insufficient products or considerable quantities of wastes; (2) Spearman test shows that SO and solid waste intensity have more impacts on industrial aggregated efficiency than those of electricity and COD intensity do, which implies that waste gas and solid waste should be paid more attention in pollution abatement; (3) the environmental protection activities have yielded the expected benefits, as the aggregated efficiency of regional industry has been on a rising trend during the past decade; (4) the west region of China has been developing quickly in recently years and performs well both in economy and environmental control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China becomes the largest energy consumer in 2010 but its energy productivity is well below the world average. To meet China's fast growing energy using, energy efficiency should be especially emphasized under China's energy policy. This paper focuses on the regional level of energy efficiency change in China. And we analyze total factor energy efficiency for 30 Chinese provinces over the period 1998-2009 using Malmquist index method and Tobit analysis. The Malmquist estimation results suggest there is a dropping change trend of energy productivity growth. Chinese energy efficiency still faces with huge regional disparity, but the energy technical efficiency reflects convergence in the nationwide and west region. As a result of Tobit regression, we find that industrial structure, energy consumption structure and institutional factor have different influences on energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we review the energy efficiency in China, and the following topics are discussed. (i) Some useful empirical analyses applied on the energy efficiency based on some expanded models, (ii) the relationship among environment, energy and economic growth, (iii) some important environmental efficiency evaluation indexes, and (iv) some latest researches on the emission system. Finally, some policy recommendations are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country's huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have been reversed, and may even have been exacerbated by unintended consequences resulting from these projects. China's centralized approach to biodiversity conservation, with limited local participation, creates an inflexible and inefficient approach because of conflicts between local communities and national administrators over the benefits. Although community-based conservation may be an imperfect approach, it is an essential component of a successful future national conservation plan. Biodiversity conservation should be considered from the perspective of systems engineering and a governance structure that combines centralization with community-level conservation. In this paper, we describe China's complex challenge: how to manage interactions between humans and nature to find win-win solutions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation without sacrificing human concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has been participating in the international standards activities since the reform and opening up period. China's standards action has not only brought about significant changes in the way of international trade, but also changed the connotation and manifestation of economic growth, which has further affected China's position in the world standards development. On the basis of qualitative analysis of the interaction between standards development and economic growth, this paper quantitatively analyzes the degree of interaction between them. The results indicate that the higher standards in a country, the stronger its economic strength and the higher its position in world standards development. This conclusion is helpful for the government, industry authorities, and enterprises to pay more attention to standards in quality management and improve the standards level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]