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Challenges brought on by the rapid rate of economic growth include the depletion of natural resources (NAR) and environmental deterioration. Due to its abundant mineral resources and rapid economic growth, China has gained attention from both the developing and developed worlds. Using data from 1970/Q1 to 2020/Q4, this paper evaluates the time‐frequency nexus between CO2 emissions and natural resources, coal consumption, and economic growth. The study employs the Wavelet Local Multiple Correlation (WLMC) to explore this nexus. This approach enhances the capacity to comprehend the fundamental relationships between these indicators at different frequencies. To the best of the investigator' knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation to explore the time‐frequency nexus between natural resource, economic growth, coal use, and CO2 emissions in China, thus filling a gap in the literature. Furthermore, wavelet coherence is employed as a robustness check. The WLMC bivariate cases revealed that economic growth, coal consumption, and natural resources drive CO2 emissions positively at all frequencies, that is, in the short and long‐term, thus leading to environmental degradation. Furthermore, the wavelet coherence results support the outcomes of the WLMC bivariate cases. This study offers significant implications for policy and insights that are supported by the findings. [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]

Regional efficiency refers to the ratio of the effective total output and the total input of regional factor resources under certain production technology conditions. At present, China's traditional economic growth mode is based on the mode of sacrificing the environment for economic growth. At the same time, the influence and restriction of natural resources and natural environment on human social and economic development are more obvious than ever before. The contradiction between social and economic development, resources, and environmental preservation has become increasingly prominent. Problems such as resource shortage, environmental pollution, and ecological imbalance have exposed the disadvantages of the traditional development model, and so human beings have begun to seek new high-quality development models. Therefore, the research on regional efficiency in this paper is based on the idea of coordinated development of resources, environment and social economy, and multi-objective optimization algorithm, which constructs the evaluation index system of regional efficiency, comprehensively measures the regional efficiency, and inspects the development status. Evaluating the regional efficiency is conducive to analyzing the problems existing in regional development, saving resources, and promoting the sustainable development of the region. [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]

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]

When technologies could be "dirty" and "clean" in the context of green development, technical change does not necessarily mean (green) productivity growth. This paper studies the nonlinear impact of technical change on green productivity in China by applying a panel smooth transition regression approach with a panel data set of 284 prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2015. Green productivity is measured by the meta-frontier Malmquist–Luenberger productivity growth (MML) index. Technical change is considered in three dimensions: indigenous technical change indicated by the stock of knowledge based on patents, technology transfers from foreign direct investment (FDI), and absorptive capacity. We find a non-linear relationship between technical change and green productivity contingent on specific economic situations and the city's endowment of natural resources. In general, indigenous technical change shows an adverse effect on green productivity in China, which is much more prominent in the resource-dependent cities than in the non-resource-dependent cities. Technology transfers from FDI may either improve or hinder green productivity growth as economic situations change, while absorptive capacity has a small but positive effect. Also, these two effects are affected by the city's endowment of natural resources. Accordingly, we discuss some policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]