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Low‐carbon sustainable development is considered an essential strategy for achieving economic growth and environmental protection, requiring a fundamental transformation of the industrial structure, including developing clean technologies, promoting energy efficiency, and adopting sustainable production and consumption patterns. Simultaneously, the evolving digital economy is acknowledged as an essential driver in optimizing the industrial structure. Therefore, can digital economy development reshape the industrial structure and lead to low‐carbon sustainable development? The main purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of industrial structure upgrading in the relationship between the digital economy and low‐carbon development. Its ultimate purpose is to explore more possible paths to achieve low‐carbon development. This paper builds a regression model based on the data of cities. We found that digital economic development can directly promote low‐carbon sustainable development, a conclusion that still holds after endogeneity discussion and robustness testing. Additionally, digital economy development can promote industrial structure upgrading and thus promote low‐carbon sustainable development, meaning that industrial structure upgrading is an effective mechanism for digital economy development to promote low‐carbon sustainable development. This paper provides empirical evidence for the positive environmental externalities of digital economic development and establishes a basic research framework of "digital economic development → industrial structure upgrading → low‐carbon sustainable development." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of sustainable development, the greatest challenge facing society today is to improve welfare of the disadvantaged while preserving the environment. This paper constructed a theoretical framework of "policy‐welfare‐environment," explored the effects in terms of individual welfare enhancement and village environment improvement, and conduct empirical tests on a sample of 1208 rural households in China. The results show that: (1) The assistance policy can significantly improve the overall welfare of the disadvantaged groups, and meanwhile, it can improve different dimensions of welfare, with the degree from high to low was a social opportunity, spiritual feeling, and economic situation. (2) The assistance policy can increase the probability of adopting environmental protection behavior, which in turn can significantly improve the village environment. (3) Welfare improvements in social opportunities mediate between the assistance policy and village environment improvements, while improvements in spiritual feelings and economic status do not. In addition, there is age heterogeneity in the welfare enhancement effect of the policy in the economic status dimension and the spiritual feeling dimension. The conclusions provide valuable policy enlightenment for assistance policy formulation and environmental governance, and can protect the ecological environment while improving public welfare, which is in line with the trend of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If unauthorized resource use is prevented, managing marine resources by allocating property rights may match economic and environmental conservation incentives. However, because of the developing exploitation of marine resources and accompanying pollution, species' living conditions in Europe's waters are changing more quickly than before. By considering the roles of fisheries productivity, intellectual property rights, intellectual capital rights, market size, governance, and economic growth from 1990 to 2022, this paper aims to investigate the dynamic effect of property rights factors on the sustainability of the fisheries industry in 27 European countries. At higher quantiles, the findings showed a significant positive association between governance and fisheries sustainability adopting a new method, the MMQR with fixed effects, the Method of Moments Quantile Regression. In addition, in EU27 nations, the impact of intellectual property rights was favorable and statistically significant from the first to ninth quantiles. The findings show that the EU14 developed nations have more excellent governance and intellectual capital rights than the EU13 developing countries, significantly benefiting fisheries sustainability. In the same way that market size and economic growth condense fisheries sustainability in EU14 developed and EU13 developing countries, it has been discovered that intellectual property rights do the same across all quantiles, supporting the growth hypothesis for fisheries‐producing countries. The findings specifically show that the beneficial solid impact of intellectual property rights, market size, and economic development on the sustainability of fisheries is more significant in EU13 developing nations than in EU14 developed countries. These results provide policymakers with helpful information for promoting property rights aspects in EU14 and EU13 nations via effective green technologies in the fisheries sector to meet sustainable development objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]