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To gain a deeper understanding of the intrinsic dynamic relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in China. This study employs panel cointegration and causality models, utilizing the SYS-GMM technique to assess the factors influencing economic growth in China's green finance sector from 2002 to 2022. The research explores the interactions among multiple variables related to the Chinese economic context, including economic growth, carbon dioxide emissions, total natural resource rents, energy consumption, and environmental impact. While considering key factors that may cause structural disturbances in the time series analysis. The findings indicate the existence of long-term cointegration relationships among these variables, with positive correlations between economic growth and total natural resource rents, energy consumption, energy quantity, and ecological footprint. Results also show a bidirectional causal relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption and a unidirectional correlation between energy consumption and GDP growth. Additionally, energy intensity (EI) improvements supported by green finance are linked to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions, with a coefficient of -1.933 (p < 0.05), underscoring the role of technological innovation. Further evaluations suggest that investments in renewable energy can promote economic growth, create job opportunities, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Energy-saving measures and green finance-supported technological innovations play crucial roles in improving energy intensity and reducing CO2 emissions. The study also underscores the importance of economic diversification to reduce dependence on natural resources and enhance economic stability. Future research should further explore the economic feasibility and environmental benefits of emerging technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), providing deeper insights into sustainable energy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic development and environmental sustainability have recently become global priorities. This study utilizes the nonlinear autoregressive distribution lag model (NARDL) to investigate the asymmetric effects of natural resource rents on economic growth and environmental quality in China and the United States from 1970 to 2020. The findings indicate that natural resource rents exert asymmetric effects on economic growth and environmental quality in both countries; however, the impact patterns differ between the two countries. In the short term, a decrease in natural resource rents significantly increases GDP per capita in the US, while an increase in natural resource rents has no effect. Moreover, natural resource rents do not influence the ecological footprint in the US. By contrast, China's GDP per capita remains unaffected by natural resource rents, while the ecological footprint is significantly influenced by both positive and negative changes in natural resource rents, exhibiting asymmetric impacts. In the long run, an increase in natural resource rents significantly impacts both GDP per capita and the ecological footprint in the US, while a decrease only impacts the ecological footprint. By contrast, both increases and decreases in natural resource rents impact per capita GDP and the ecological footprint in China. These findings highlight the importance of tailoring country‐specific policies to facilitate sustainable economic development and enhance environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship among ecological footprint (EF), electricity consumption, and GDP in China using annual data ranging from 1960 to 2019. However, factors like trade openness, urbanization, and life expectancy might increase EF as ecological distortions are mainly human-induced. This study explores the effect of these variables on the environment, which is captured by EF. Quantile Regression estimates indicate that electricity consumption and real GDP increase environmental degradation, while trade and urbanization reduce EF, allowing for a higher environmental quality. On the other hand, the spectral Granger-causality tests reveal that only urbanization and life expectancy affect environmental degradation over the whole frequency domain. In the current geopolitical scenario, relevant policy implications may be derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth target management drives China's economic expansion, leading to potential carbon emission externalities. This study examines the impact of economic growth target setting on carbon emission performance in 257 Chinese localities from 2004 to 2020. Using cluster standard error regression, 2SLS instrumental variable regression, and the spatial Durbin model, the results show that moderate growth targets improve urban carbon emission performance. Conversely, aggressive targets do not enhance regional carbon emission performance. Moderate growth targets foster innovation in green technology, while aggressive ones encourage investment in fixed assets and new city growth, impeding performance. Cities in the eastern and western regions, with larger populations and less reliance on natural resources, benefit more from effective economic development targets. The establishment of local targets negatively affects neighboring regions' carbon emissions performance, particularly at a spatial scale of 100 to 200 km. This paper contributes to understanding the environmental consequences of growth target setting and offers insights for balancing economic growth with carbon emission governance in emerging market countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has made huge efforts to increase the efficiency of its resources and change its resource-intensive economic trajectory. A question which should be raised is whether the impacts of such shifts can be measured. Exergy analysis provides a unified method of ecological diagnosis of resource allocation and metabolism in social systems from a biophysical perspective. This paper explores the resource utilization pattern within Chinese society by employing an exergy-based accounting method. Nationally total resource consumption amounted to 153.7 EJ in 2017, and non-biological resources reached 137.1 EJ. China's resource self-sufficiency rate was revealed as 79.1%. After China experienced a transition period with a medium–high economic growth rate, the total net resource input into Chinese society marked an increase of around 1% from 2012 to 2017. The per capita resource consumption dropped from 112.0 GJ in 2012 to 110.6 GJ in 2017. The proportion of resource exergy consumption in the tertiary sector was upregulated from 10.0% in 2012 to 17.6% in 2017. To be specific, the exergy conversion efficiency of the domestic sector rose from 1.3% in 2012 to 20.6% in 2017. The results confirm that the resource exergy utilization structures and the conversion efficiencies of the main social sectors in China's economic transition period were significantly optimized towards a more sustainable future. A reasonable analysis of the resource exergy utilization pattern provides a solid reference for assessing the comprehensive effect of the changed development speed, industrial structure, and driving force of a developing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a close relationship between natural resources and production in many sectors, and production and consumption can also have an environmental impact. Low environmental quality affects economic growth and well-being. Environmental protection and economic growth cannot be maximized simultaneously. Choosing the right balance between the two aims is imperative for each country. By moderating the role of merchandise trade and manufacturing value-added from 1970 to 2016, we examine the dynamics of China's natural resource rents, environmental sustainability, and sustainable economic growth. Overall, the results of this study indicate that natural resources improve environmental sustainability at the expense of economic growth. In contrast, financial development, merchandise trade, and urban population growth promote environmental degradation. It is vital to understand governance mechanisms to sustain natural resource policies, considering environmental, social, and governance concerns to benefit society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional GDP calculations exclude the ecological environment and natural resource depletion, arguing that sustained economic growth can lead to sustained welfare improvements. The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) is a monetary measure of sustainability and economic welfare aimed at overcoming some of the limitations of GDP. Given the significant impact of industrial development, the demographic composition, and the balance of payments in economic growth and sustainable economic well-being, we propose an improved ISEW method (SE-ISEW), where the structural index is used instead of the Atkinson index as a measure of structural imbalance. This study calculates and compares the ISEW and SE-ISEW for 30 provinces in mainland China from 1997 to 2017 and discusses highly controversial methodological assumptions related to income inequality, long-term environmental damage, and nonrenewable energy consumption. Findings show that China's GDP is larger than ISEW and SE-ISEW respectively. Moreover, the "relative threshold effect"—increases in social welfare are slower than the expansion of economic scale—has been found in many provinces. In the case of rapid economic growth, the gap between GDP and ISEW or SE-ISEW has increased over time. This study reveals an unbalanced development of China's economic growth and sustainable welfare growth and provides a new way of thinking about structural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economies that depend on natural resources can experience a resource drag effect when economic growth is limited by constraints on the availability of those resources. Therefore, this study uses panel data and the improved Solow growth model to explore the resource drag effect on China's regional economic growth from 1987 to 2017 and makes innovative contributions to address these four gaps in the previous literature: the resources gap, the consistent measurement gap, the regional gap, and the temporal gap. The empirical results indicate that the resource drag effect reduced China's overall annual economic growth by 0.58% during the study period, with reductions of 1.07%, 0.29%, 0.79%, and 0.46% in the Eastern, Western, Central, and Northeastern regions, respectively. In the meantime, the resources drag effect changed in individual regions and across regions. The results on energy drag are most notable. Policies such as "West-to-East Electricity Transmission" and "West-to-East Gas Transmission" promoted economic growth of the Eastern and Western Region, facilitating continued growth in both regions and attracted the return of labor to the Western region. The results indicate that the policies such as west-to-east energy transfer for helping to even out the economic growth conditions in different regions. Labor force mobility has also been important to alleviate resource dependence of agricultural production in Central regain, while other regions have managed to continually grow through improvements in inefficiency. Also, growth in some regions/provinces continues to depend upon increases in water, land, and energy availability and export. This will become increasingly problematic as the social prices of these inputs rise to account for environmental damage. Therefore, the government should adjust the industrial structure of each region to optimize use of resource endowments, alleviate dependence on natural resources, and achieve sustainable economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the economic side, China has attained rapid development; yet, the ecological aspects pose threats to its sustainable development. The nexus between economic growth, natural resources, human capital, and financial development has an important inference for the environment, and therefore, this endeavor examines the influence of said variables on the ecological footprint in China via adopting the novel dynamic simulated ARDL approach by utilizing the data from 1985 to 2018. The outcomes of the analysis confirm that natural resources and financial development have a considerable positive short- and long-run relation with the ecological footprint. Besides, this depicts that natural resources and financial development lead to an upsurge in ecological footprint in China. Furthermore, human capital also upsurges the negative influence on the environment. Economic growth also upsurges the ecological footprint; however, the outcomes also yielded an interesting insight lending credence to the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve in China. So, it is important to offer awareness sessions to the community as well as to human resources working in different sectors regarding the significance of sustainability by giving training related to the reduction of the excessive consumption of scarce resources. Moreover, a watchful deliberation must be given while implementing strategies about sustainability concerning the specified factors and their potential impact on ecological footprints so that the targets of Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, and 13 could be accomplished by the Chinese economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's breakneck economic growth has been accompanied by an expanding development finance agenda. Many have hypothesized that China is undermining the West's drive to promote good governance globally, and in Africa in particular, by predominantly distributing money to poorly governed countries. This paper explores whether the determinants of Chinese development finance in Africa differ from those of Western countries. It finds that Western countries send more development finance than China to better governed African countries—those with lower corruption levels, better democratic outcomes, and a better human rights track record (though only the latter two have a negative relationship with Chinese development finance in absolute terms). This paper also finds that bilateral trade and UN voting alignment have a stronger impact on China's development finance than that of Western countries and that China allocates more development finance than the West to richer and more resource-dependent African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the relationship between CO2 emissions in China and its prospective determinants, namely economic growth, globalization, financial development, and natural resources during the period from 1980 to 2017. We present more detailed analyses across multiple econometric approaches within a multivariate system, e.g., the Bayer‐Hanck combined cointegration approach, the ARDL bounds test approach, ARDL estimates in short run and long run, robustness check by cointegration regressions (i.e., FMOLS, DOLS, CCR), and Granger causality approach in the frequency domain. Our results show that economic growth and natural resources have a positive impact on CO2 emissions in China, although globalization contributes to improving its environmental quality. Meanwhile, there is no statistical evidence that CO2 emissions in China could be affected by financial development. The causality analysis reveals that globalization, economic growth and natural resources all lead to CO2 emissions in the long run, while financial development only causes the short‐run CO2 emissions, which further demonstrate our findings. Such findings are meaningful for policymakers to achieve the sustainable development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern era, human resource is a crucial factor for economic development. Several studies reveal that rapid economic growth of developed countries has been linked with investment in human capital. Efficient and proper management of the workforce is an important factor in development of a country. The importance of human capital formation is now fully recognized because healthy and skilled people, along with physical capital, help in capital formation and raising economic growth. Therefore, large scale investment in human capital is required for the full and optimum use of natural resources. Improvement in the health of masses increases their productive capacity and leads to quantitative improvement in human capital. This paper examines the role of health facilities in human capital formation as well as in economic development. The current study analyzes the trends of current health expenditure as percent of GDP in India and China. An effort has been made to compare the impact of health expenditure on value added per worker in agriculture and its allied sectors in India and China by employing multiple regression model using data from 2000 to 2017. Findings reveal that independent variable (current health expenditure) explains the variation in dependent variable (value added per worker) to an extent of 37.9% and 56.9% in India and China, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has been undergoing rapid economic growth since its reform and opening-up at the expense of resource depletion and environmental pollution. We estimated the monetary costs of resource depletion and environmental pollution in China over the past 14 recent years by establishing integrated mathematical models with System for Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) framework. Results showed four points. Firstly, the total temporal costs of natural resource depletion and environmental pollution witnessed an inverted 'U' shape pattern with the turning point in 2012. The relationship between cost of mineral resource depletion, as well as water pollution cost, and per capita GDP were found to follow the Inverted-U shape environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). Secondly, the average annual share of natural resources of the total costs was more than 80%, indicating that the rapid economic growth of China is highly dependent on resource depletion. Thirdly, Although China still has the highest worldwide in its total energy consumption and CO 2 emission, China's struggles with adjustment of industrial & energy consumption structure, and pollution controls have resulted in a general temporal decline of the share of resource and environmental costs to China's GDP. The green GDP of China is growing at an average rate of 14.76%. Finally, although in the process of manufactured goods for the whole world, China has reduced environmental pollution and left it at home as much as possible. Driving forces behind the progress in green GDP of China were analyzed by using Differences-in-Differences method and Spearman rank correlation analysis. [Display omitted] • An integrated model was proposed to calculate China's costs of resources and environment. • Total costs of resource depletion and environment witnessed an inverted 'U' shape. • Driving forces behind decreasing trend of green GDP in China were analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]