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To urge nations worldwide to implement robust measures for enhancing human development and mitigating the pressures exerted on the planet by human activities in pursuit of sustainable development, this study encompasses 154 countries globally, using the seven major regions as focal points. Leveraging the Planetary Pressure Adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI) proposed by the United Nations Development Programme on December 15, 2020, as a metric for human development levels, this paper aims to standardize and internationally compare human development data from 1990 to 2021. Subsequently, employing the Theil index, the study assesses the global human development status across the seven regions to analyze spatial disparities in PHDI. Lastly, a comprehensive Generalized Diese Index Method (GDIM) is constructed to accurately reflect absolute and latent factors, dissecting the driving forces impacting global PHDI. The study explores critical pathways for high-quality human development within the harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature. It validates the robustness of GDIM results through a stepwise regression. Research findings indicate varying levels of PHDI development across regions, with a distinct spatial hierarchy evolving: higher human development levels in Europe and Eastern Europe, favorable levels in North and South America, similar levels in Oceania and Asia, and significant improvement potential in Africa. As globalization progresses, overall differences in PHDI gradually decrease; however, disparities persist between and within regions. Economic, technological, and per capita welfare effects consistently positively drive PHDI. In contrast, environmental pressure effects, social effects, per capita value-added effects, and output carbon intensity effects consistently exert hostile driving forces. Population size effects on PHDI show a fluctuating trend. Moreover, in terms of cumulative contribution values, the top three contributors to driving forces are economic, technological, and per capita welfare effects. • This paper measures the new Human Development Index. • This paper analyzes spatial differences in PHDI. • This paper studies the role of the decomposed drivers on global PHDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on data of 285 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2017, this paper mainly studies the impact of the spatial agglomeration of Foreign direct investment (FDI) on the green total factor productivity(TFP) of Chinese cities by SDM model. It is measured that China's urban green TFP generally has been developing well from 2003 to 2017, and progress in green technology plays an important role in improving urban green TFP. Both global Moran index and local Moran scatter plots show that FDI and green TFP are characterized by strong spatial agglomeration. This suggests green TFP is closely related to the spatial agglomeration of FDI in a region. The paper finds that FDI plays a positive role in promoting green TFP in high-high and high-low cluster cities, and the technology spillover effect of highly agglomerated FDI is more significant than that of decentralized FDI, thus promoting the upgrading and agglomeration of green TFP in itself and surrounding cities. The positive benefits of low-high and low-low cluster cities are not significant. Therefore, it is necessary to go beyond its policy of administrative regions and give full play to radiation effect of High-high FDI agglomeration cities and promote the green TFP of their surrounding cities. • Green TFP is closely related to the spatial agglomeration of FDI in a region. • The impact of FDI on green TFP of different agglomeration cities is different. • Technology spillover effect of highly agglomerated FDI is more significant than that of decentralized FDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural producer participation and spatial coordination of land use decisions are key components for enhancing the effective delivery of ecosystem services from private land. However, inducing participation in Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes for coordinating land management choices is challenging from a policy design perspective owing to transaction costs associated with participation. This paper employs a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of such costs on participation and land use in the context of an Agglomeration Bonus (AB) scheme. The AB creates a coordination game with multiple Nash equilibria related to alternative spatially-coordinated land use patterns. The experiment varies transaction costs between two levels (high and low), which affects the risks and payoffs of coordinating on the different equilibria. Additionally, an option to communicate is implemented between neighbors arranged on a local network to facilitate spatial coordination. Results indicate a significant difference in participation and performance under high and low transaction costs, with lower uptake and performance when transaction costs are high. These effects are, however, impacted by transaction costs faced in the past. Communication improves both AB participation rates and performance with the effect being greater for participants facing high transaction costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to better understand the persistent environmental problems in urbanizing economies. We examine the effectiveness of environmental policy in an economy with agglomeration economies and endogenous firm relocation and entry/exit. We show that, although environmental regulation is effective in the short run, in the presence of agglomeration economies, spatial relocation of firms in response to environmental regulation can undermine the effectiveness of regulations, rendering them less effective or even ineffective. In fact, we show that regulation might even be counter-productive, i.e., exacerbate environmental problems, at certain stages of development. We present initial empirical evidence in the context of water pollution in China that demonstrates the importance of agglomeration economies in determining the impacts of environmental regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how cross-country differences in environmental regulatory stringency among member states of the world's largest multinational cap-and-trade system, the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), influenced the FDI location choice of listed multinationals (MNEs) regulated by the environmental policy. After controlling for other country characteristics driving FDI location choice, we find that the likelihood of EU ETS-covered MNEs locating new FDI projects in less environmentally stringent member states strongly depends on firm- and industry-specific environmental characteristics during the system's first two phases. Our results are robust to different measures of environmental stringency and provide evidence for the existence of an intra-regional pollution haven effect (PHE). This investment behavior by MNEs is, moreover, only found in the industries least compensated for the environmental costs induced by the policy. This suggests that the EU inadvertently promoted an intra-regional PHE not only by allowing cross-country variation in environmental stringency but also by overly focusing on and compensating for external carbon leakage risk. Our conclusions have major implications for countries and regions currently establishing or implementing an emissions trading system. • We examine the largest multinational cap-and-trade scheme in the world, the EU ETS. • Current research on the pollution haven effect focuses on FDI outside the EU ETS. • We explore intra-EU ETS differences in environmental stringency among member states. • Using a conditional logit model, we find evidence of an intra-regional PHE. • PHE driven by most polluting firms in industries with limited strategic flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing affordability issue in mega-cities creates a significant job-housing mismatch and undermines productive new business creation. This paper focuses on Beijing and investigates whether improved accessibility via the subway network helps new firms benefit from agglomeration economies and, at the same time, provides workers with easy access the low-cost rental housing. Using commercial rental housing transaction records and dynamic bilateral subway travel time from 2010-2015, we build the measure of the accessibility to business clusters and low-cost rental housing through the subway network at a high spatial resolution. Taking advantage of exogenous shocks from the network reconfiguration due to the rapid subway expansion in Beijing, we employ a matched difference-in-differences estimation in multiple periods to identify the causal elasticity estimate of the new firm formation with respect to the accessibility to business clusters and low-cost rental housing. We demonstrate that the subway network is more conducive to firm establishments. The effects are more salient for firms in skill-intensive sectors. New skill-intensive firms increase by 0.44% given a 1% increase in the accessibility to business clusters. The elasticity of new skill-intensive firms with respect to the accessibility to low-cost rental housing is about 0.74. Our findings that transit-oriented development leads to a higher concentration of new skill-intensive businesses, pointing to the importance of an efficient public transit system capable of serving the dispersed workforce and improving the efficiency of firm location choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]