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Drawing on the behavioral theory, this study examines how the misalignment between a firm's environmental effort and the level of subsidies received from the government in affecting the firm's investment in non‐environmental R&D. Based on a sample of Chinese A‐share listed firms from 2008 to 2019 and using polynomial regression techniques, our findings reveal that firms in the "low effort‐high subsidies" group exhibit lower non‐environmental R&D intensity compared to firms in the "high effort‐low subsidies" group. This study contributes to the literature by shedding light on the interplay between corporate environmental efforts, government subsidies, and non‐environmental R&D investment. The findings suggest the importance of aligning the environmental efforts of firms with subsidy levels from the government to effectively allocate resources for different types of R&D. The implications of this research suggest that firms should carefully consider aligning their environmental efforts with government subsidies to optimize their investment in non‐environmental R&D and overall innovation strategy. Furthermore, the study indicates that firms and governments should prudently balance the relationship between environmental R&D and non‐environmental R&D to avoid any negative impact on the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's report of government–business relation (GBR) index focuses on the roles of the GBR in improving information transparency of economy and society, but ignores the GBR's potential in enhancing environmental information transparency (EIT). This research employs the data from 120 cities in 30 provinces in China to map the distribution of GBR and EIT, which basically coincides with Hu-line (population density and developed economy boundaries in China), showing the trend of high-quality performance in the eastern region of China, but low-quality performance in the central and western region of China. To study the relations of GBR, population, GDP per capita with EIT, and their influential degree on EIT, the test of Pearson correlation coefficient, ordinary least squares, and multiple linear regressions are, respectively, applied in the study. Moreover, the intra-provincial comparison is conducted to study the discrepancies of EIT within a province in different regions of China. The results show that the EIT-population relation and the EIT-GDP per capita relation both present inverted U-shaped curves, and GBR is positively related to EIT. Moreover, there are the more balance performance of EIT within the province in the eastern China, while the central and western of that is opposite. This work firstly finds the relation among GBRI, EIT, and Hu-line and extends the application of environmental Kuznets curve. Policy and managerial implications are expounded to enhance the performance of EIT and sustainability by developing the potential of GBR and better allocating resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological efficiency (EE) provides much reference for formulating appropriate regional economic, social and environmental policies to promote sustainable development. Interactive subsystems of economy, society and environment within EE system have been considered in this paper. By innovatively integrating the merits of two advanced economic research methods (global super efficiency network data envelopment analysis (GSE-NDEA) and panel vector autoregression (PVAR) and updating the EE evaluation indicator system by following the new features of sustainable development in the recent China, this paper comprehensively evaluates EE by drawing evidence from 3 regions in China during the period of 2011–2020, and further reveals how the three subsystems within EE system interact to achieve EE enhancement. The findings show EE and its three subsystems’ trend, the major constrains of EE development, the regional discrepancies in EE progress, and the interactions among the subsystems of economy-society-environment within the EE system in different regions of China. The policy implications are proposed accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high-quality development of regional economic system is inseparable from the collective efforts of multiple economic sectors. Increasing attention has been paid to the environmental performance evaluation of different administrative levels or economic sectors, but integrated research is scarce. Taking the three industries (the primary, secondary and tertiary industries) into account, this paper proposes a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with parallel network structure to assess the environmental performance of 30 provinces in China from integrative perspective of efficiency and productivity. Then, the Tobit model is adopted to investigate the effects of external factors on the environmental performance. The results show that environmental efficiency of Chinese economy is only 0.4436 during 2010-2019 and the performance of the secondary industry is the highest, followed by the tertiary and the primary industries. Moreover, the environmental efficiency of eastern region is far higher than that of the central or western regions. Technological progress is the main driver of environmental productivity improvement for China's economic system. Most of the external factors such as energy structure and technology innovation, have different effects on the environmental performance of different regions. Finally, several targeted policy implications are suggested for improving the environmental performance of China's economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]