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Based on a unified framework, this study explores the influence of regional intellectual property protection (IPP) on domestic value added in exports. A theoretical model is constructed to illustrate that IPP affects the types and prices of intermediate goods through effects of market power, product category, and crowding-out, influences the choice of domestic and imported raw materials, and finally affects the domestic added value in exports of enterprises. Empirical evidence on the influence of IPP on the domestic added value in exports is provided utilizing China Customs Statistics, the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database, and Chinese prefectural-level data from 2000 to 2007. The results show that IPP significantly promotes the domestic value added of exports in China, but the effect is heterogeneous in terms of region and mode of enterprise trade; in the eastern region and processing trade enterprises the IPP effect is more pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the adoption of the concept of sustainable development, mega sports events (MSEs) are gradually aiming to be greener and to lower their carbon footprints. As such, does the hosting of MSEs provide an opportunity for urban green transformation? Taking MSEs in China as a quasi-natural experiment and using prefecture-level panel data from 2000 to 2020, we empirically explored the effects and mechanisms of MSE hosting on the green economic development in urban areas by applying a time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) approach. The findings revealed that the hosting of MSEs can significantly increase the green total factor productivity (GTFP) of the host city, indicating that MSEs promote the green transformation of urban areas. The results of the mechanism analysis showed that hosting MSEs promotes urban green transformation through three channels: encouraging residents to choose public transport, promoting the development of the digital economy, and upgrading of the industrial structure. In addition, the effect of hosting MSEs on green transformation is stronger in cities where the public is more concerned about the environment. We argue that host city governments should implement the concept of green sports when organizing MSEs, increase public concern about the environment, focus on the development of urban public services, and vigorously develop tertiary industries to drive urban green transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between transportation infrastructure and entrepreneurship has been widely discussed by scholars. However, as an important transportation infrastructure, the impact of subway construction on entrepreneurship has been less studied. Based on the Synthetic Control Method, this paper takes the urban data of China from 2003 to 2017 as the research sample and uses the synthetic control method to study the influence of eight cities with subway service on entrepreneurship. The results show that: (1) The impact of subway openings on entrepreneurship varies across different cities. Specifically, it has a positive effect on entrepreneurship in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Changsha, while it has a negative impact on entrepreneurship in Harbin and Ningbo. In the cases of Suzhou, Wuxi, and Kunming, the influence on entrepreneurship levels could not be conclusively established. (2) For cities where entrepreneurship activity increased following the opening of subways, further investigation revealed that subway openings did not directly stimulate entrepreneurship within transport-related industries. Instead, they indirectly boosted the entrepreneurial landscape in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Changsha by accelerating the flow of resources and enhancing spillover effects within their respective advantageous industries. This study's contributions are twofold. Firstly, it introduces innovative perspectives and methodologies for assessing the impact of subway systems on entrepreneurship, highlighting the differentiated effects observed across various cities and industries. Secondly, it emphasizes the importance of considering local advantageous industries in subway construction planning for government authorities, as this can maximize the subway's potential to drive entrepreneurship in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SO2 emissions have brought serious hidden danger to human health and environmental quality, thus hindering sustainable economic development. The development of high-speed rail indirectly has an important impact on SO2 emissions through its economic effects. Controlling SO2 emissions from the source has increasingly become the focus of many scholars, and it is very important to assess the environmental effects of high-speed rail on SO2 emissions reduction. We use the panel data of 285 cities in China from 2007 to 2017, and adopt the spatial Difference-in-Differences model to study the impact of the opening of high-speed rail on SO2 emissions. We also introduce an improved spatial DID model that distinguishes neighboring treatment groups and neighboring control groups to test the spatial spillover effect of high-speed rail on neighboring heterogeneous samples. We find that the opening of high-speed rail significantly reduces the city's SO2 emissions through the internal accumulation effect of technological innovation and industrial structure optimization and the urban external interaction mechanism of the cross-regional flow of production factors. Moreover, the spatial spillover effect of the opening of high-speed rail on neighboring cities is significantly positive, especially the spatial spillover effect of HSR on SO2 emissions from neighboring cities without HSR. In addition, heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect varies with the different cities' tiers and income levels. These findings are conducive to accurately assessing the environmental effects of high-speed rail, and provide important policy references for achieving sustainable development and reducing SO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-speed rail (HSR) is often claimed to bring different regions and cities closer together by shortening travel times, which can reduce the costs and increase enterprises productivity to promote a sustainable economy. However, another view argues that HSR transfers economic activities from peripheral cities to core cities, resulting in unbalanced regional economic development and damaging the sustainability of the economy. Based on microdata from China, this paper empirically investigates the impact of HSR on the enterprises productivity in both core cities and peripheral cities and explores the impact mechanism from the perspective of allocation effect and distribution effect caused by HSR. The results show that the connection of HSR positively affects the enterprises productivity in core cities, while it negatively affects the enterprises productivity in peripheral cities, with effect values of 1.38% and -8.45%, respectively. The conclusion still holds after endogenous treatment and multiple robustness tests are conducted. Additionally, the allocation effect analysis shows that the market access caused by HSR has an optimization effect on the resource allocation efficiency of both core cities and peripheral cities. The distribution effect analysis reveals that the distribution of enterprise productivity in peripheral cities has market heterogeneity, regional heterogeneity, and location heterogeneity. The important policy significance of this paper is that, in order to promote the sustainable development of enterprises and the economy, it should reduce policy restrictions and promote the effective flow of capital and talents, carry out the dislocation development of industry for peripheral cities, and 'build a nest to attract the phoenix.', 1. Introduction The impact of high-speed rail (HSR) on economy and society is attracting more and more scholars' attention in the recent years [1-3]. In China, improving enterprise productivity and [...]

Previous studies have investigated the determinants of urban tourism development from the various attributes of neighborhood quality. However, traditional methods to assess neighborhood quality are often subjective, costly, and only on a small scale. To fill this research gap, this study applies the recent development in big data of street view images, deep learning algorithms, and image processing technology to assess quantitatively four attributes of neighborhood quality, namely street facilities, architectural landscape, green or ecological environment, and scene visibility. The paper collects more than 7.8 million Baidu SVPs of 232 prefecture-level cities in China and applies deep learning techniques to recognize these images. This paper then tries to examine the influence of neighborhood quality on regional tourism development. Empirical results show that both levels of street facilities and greenery environment promote tourism. However, the construction intensity of the landscape has an inhibitory influence on the development of tourism. The threshold test shows that the intensity of the influence varies with the city's overall economic level. These conclusions are of great significance for the development of China's urban construction and tourism economy, and also provide a useful reference for policymakers. The methodological procedure is reduplicative and can be applied to other challenging cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of the "ear of high-speed railways", the space–time distance between cities has drastically decreased. The opening of high-speed railways has not only increased the factor-flow speed across regions, but has also reduced the cost of factor movement. However, there is some controversy about whether high-speed railways can be used to promote regional economic growth. The Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway is the earliest section of the Beijing–Guangzhou high-speed railway, and it was the first high-speed railway in China with a real speed of 350 km per hour. The Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway opening spawned a three-hour economic circle in the south of China, injected new vitality into the economic and social development along the line, and had an important impact on accelerating regional economic interoperability and integration. Taking this into account, this paper took the Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway as the case study. Firstly, this paper used the theory of system dynamics to analyze the mechanism of the impact of high-speed railway opening on regional economic growth. Secondly, the accessibility model was used to analyze the impact of the high-speed railway opening on the accessibility of cities along the line, and a difference-in-differences model (DID) was used to explore the impact of the high-speed railway opening on regional economic growth. Finally, on the basis of the analysis of the previous mechanism, the mechanism of the impact of the high-speed railway on regional economic growth is discussed. The results of this study show the following: (1) Since the opening of the high-speed railway, the accessibility of cities along the line has grown by more than 60%. (2) The opening of the high-speed railway has promoted regional economic growth, mainly through the influence mechanism of "increasing the total cargo volume". This study not only scientifically and quantitatively analyzed the impact of the opening of high-speed rail on regional economic growth, taking the Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway as an example for empirical analysis, but also further summarized the high-speed railway construction achievements in China and provides reference experience for planning the opening of high-speed railways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs the agglomeration model of crossregional labor flow and market accessibility based on the new economic geography model. Using panel data in 2000-2013, this paper examines the impact of high-speed railways on industrial agglomeration. The results show that high-speed railway significantly promotes the spatial agglomeration of industrial firms. The high-speed railway promotes industrial agglomeration by promoting crossregional mobility of industrial labor and improving market accessibility. We also construct the instrument variable based on HSR construction cost and apply the TSLS model to solve the potential endogenous problems. At the same time, PSM results also get the net effect caused by the repair of a high-speed railway, which verifies the robustness of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have attempted to compile various multi-region input-output (MRIO) tables for different countries. However, due to city-level data scarcity and methodology constraints, almost no MRIO table covers a large number of cities with more disaggregated sectors in countries with large economies, such as China. Based on two large-scale firm-level datasets, the China Annual Survey of Industrial Firms (CASIF) survey and the China Customs Data (CCD) database, from 2000 to 2013, this paper uses China as a case study and presents a new compilation method to construct an MRIO table covering 284 prefecture-level administrative cities and 334 four-digit sectors, which is by far the most comprehensive MRIO table with the largest number of cities and the most segmented industries in China. Unlike existing MRIO tables constructed based on provincial single-region IO (SRIO) tables, we use information along with various linear constraints implied by sector-level and firm-level statistics. This paper expands on the direct decomposition method by developing auxiliary econometric models necessary for estimations and consistency adjustment. In addition, a comparative analysis shows the reliability of our method, which guarantees better coherence and comparability with the MRIO officially published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS). Therefore, our proposed methodology provides the possibility of producing more disaggregated MRIO tables in other similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time varying difference-in-differences setting, we empirically test the impact of high-speed rail (HSR) connections on urban clusters in China. We construct an urban cluster centrality index to reflect changes in the economic positions of counties in clusters. The results show the following: (1) The HSR connection has a positive effect on urban cluster centrality, especially for counties with higher centrality. (2) The heterogeneity effect indicates that western counties centrality has greatly increased their urban cluster centrality compared to eastern areas. (3) Mechanism estimation indicates that the different result to western and eastern counties is due to the high skill labour transfer from eastern to western counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we discuss institutional quality and export product quality within a unified framework and explore the influence of institutional quality on product export quality empirically by matching regional-level data, Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database and the China Customs Import and Export Database in the period of 2000–2011. To reflect institutional quality as comprehensively as possible, we construct an index system including six institutional factors: financial service, open-door, government intervention, corruption, property rights protection and judicial fairness. To avoid the loss of information and minimize the endogeneity of reverse causality, we take advantage of microdata of enterprise in regression. The results show that, on average, the improvement of institutional quality has a positive impact on export product quality; Compared with processing trade, export product quality of general trading enterprises is more affected by local institutional quality. Among the various factors of institutional quality, corruption and judicial fairness have the greatest impact on export product quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses a two-way fixed effect model to examine the correlation between the development of high-speed rail and the growth of green technology innovation by adopting the panel data of 284 Chinese cities between 2004 and 2013. The empirical results show that the supply of high-speed rail services has a significant promoting influence on the advance of urban green technology innovation capabilities. In particular, cities located in central and western China, along with those cities with relatively little government support or relatively backward public cultural infrastructure, have more chances to benefit from the supply of high-speed rail services. In addition, by employing a mediating effect model, this article finds that the industrial collaborative agglomeration plays an important mediating role between high-speed rail and regional green technology innovation. Therefore, this article suggests that the Chinese central government should continue to accelerate the construction of the rapid transportation network and expand the coverage of high-speed rail services in China to increase the growth of green technology innovation and achieve steady and sustained economic growth in China. Meanwhile, local governments should actively guide the collaborative agglomeration of manufacturing and related producer service industries under local conditions to stimulate the expansion of the green technology innovation market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We collected COVID-19 epidemiological and epidemic control measures-related data in mainland China during the period January 1 to February 19, 2020, and empirically tested the practical effects of the epidemic control measures implemented in China by applying the econometrics approach. The results show that nationally, both traffic control and social distancing have played an important role in controlling the outbreak of the epidemic, however, neither of the two measures have had a significant effect in low-risk areas. Moreover, the effect of traffic control is more successful than that of social distancing. Both measures complement each other, and their combined effect achieves even better results. These findings confirm the effectiveness of the measures currently in place in China, however, we would like to emphasize that control measures should be more tailored, which implemented according to each specific city's situation, in order to achieve a better epidemic prevention and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the panel data of 263 prefecture-level cities in China, this article explores the development of green technology innovation under the influence of intra-city industrial collaborative agglomeration and inter-city network connectivity. Regression results prove that both of them can enhance green technology innovation. However, further heterogeneity tests suggest that the promoting power of industrial collaborative agglomeration is only significant in the eastern, central and medium-level cities. Meanwhile, there is a significant negative moderating correlation between industrial collaborative agglomeration and network connectivity. This negative moderating effect is particularly significant in the eastern, high and low-level cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport enables trade between people, which is essential for the development of civilizations. Transport is a crucial necessity for specialization, allowing production and consumption of products to occur at different locations. High-speed rail (HSR) allows the flow of people between regions, cities, countries. With rapid global development in HSR technology for passenger transportation, it plays a vital role in transportation systems. The improvement of the quality of cities with different emphasis will bring different economic development results. Therefore, exploring the impact of high-speed railways and quality of place on economic development is necessary. This paper takes the prefecture-level city with a high-speed railway opened in 2008–2013 as the research sample and takes other prefecture-level cities in the country as the control group. The study findings revealed that employment, investment in fixed assets, average wage, and higher education institute significantly affect China's regional economic growth. Institute of higher education reflects the negative effect on the regional economic growth whereas the employment, investment in fixed assets, and average wage rate positively impact it. Based on the results, it can be concluded that China's regional economy is significantly affected by its quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]