Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment最新文献

With the development of economy, people’s awareness of environmental protection has been constantly awakened, and their attention to environmental governance has also been increasing. The environmental conditions of residential areas are also becoming more and more important for residents to make settlement decisions. This study is the first to match the data of the air quality index to the data on the health monitoring of the floating population at the urban level. Moreover, it is the first to discuss the influence of environmental pollution on the settlement decision of the floating population. The results reveal that the higher the degree of environmental pollution (the level of infrastructure and public welfare) in a city, the greater the probability that the floating population will leave the city. The effects of environmental pollution are significant after considering other household, personal, and city characteristics of a population. Regarding family income constraints, the impact of environmental pollution on the migration decision of middle-income groups in the floating population is significantly lower than that of low-income groups. Moreover, there is a threshold effect of income. The influence of environmental pollution on the corresponding floating population settlement decision is different under different urban scales and current housing prices.

In the context of global carbon neutrality, new energy vehicle promotion (NEVP) has become an important means of reducing carbon emissions. This paper constructs a theoretical model and uses panel data on NEVP in 21 countries from 2012 to 2018 to empirically examine the green effect of NEVP. The results indicate the following: (1) NEVP significantly reduces greenhouse gases emissions, and the green effect can be transmitted and diffused through a direct path. (2) Replacing fuel-fired vehicles and accelerating the end-of-life vehicle scrapping process significantly conducted the green effect, and aggravating traffic congestion was not statistically significant. (3) The transmission mechanism of the green effect is regulated by regional economic heterogeneity. In regions with better development of fuel-fired vehicles, the transmission of the green effect is subject to the elimination of fuel-fired vehicles and traffic congestion governance, and the transmission efficiency is low. However, regions with a relatively weak fuel-fired automobile industry foundation show a strong “advantage of backwardness”, and the green effect is more prominent. This means that global NEVP should be further accelerated to achieve the green effect and the goal of global carbon neutrality.

The comprehensive use and efficient management of straw are significant for agriculture's green and low-carbon transformation. This paper uses literature research and comparative analysis to systematically review the literature on comprehensive straw utilization and governance policy research in China over the past five years. The current literature has explored two major directions: regional and industrial policies and the main actors involved in the comprehensive use of straw. The research is complementary and fruitful concerning both micro and macro perspectives; however, the extant literature suffers from a lack of attention to straw intermediaries and enterprises and a lack of research across time. Therefore, this paper provides an outlook for future research. In the future, scholars should pay more attention to straw intermediaries and enterprises, conduct continuous observations of multiple regions over time to obtain panel data, and further test the heterogeneity of factors to obtain more scientific and valid results.

China has announced its ambitious targets of attaining a carbon peak before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Although China is a developing country, its oil sector plays a key role in carbon emissions and thus has a responsibility toward climate change. It is very important to understand the role of the oil industry of China in climate governance. This raises the following question: how have oil companies in China framed and tailored their climate strategies? By employing the concept of ecological modernization as a theoretical framework, this study observes the driving forces of climate policies, low-carbon energy, advanced technologies, and market mechanisms by collecting and analyzing reports published by three oil companies. The main findings are that state-owned oil companies in China have adopted the ideas and institutions of national climate strategies, low-carbon energy systems, and emerging financial and market tools. The analysis of the reports reveals that the main motives for the climate strategies of the companies are China’s administrative system, international climate cooperation, the transformation of the energy mix, and emerging market mechanisms.

This paper uses the mediation effect and a spatial panel model using panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2011 to 2019 to study the relationship between the digital economy, industrial structure, and carbon emission. The research results show that the development of digital economy can effectively promote the reduction of carbon emissions. The development of the digital economy has a significant role in promoting the rationalization of the industrial structure. The digital economy not only directly suppresses carbon emissions, but also indirectly has a significant inhibitory effect on carbon emissions by promoting the rationalization and improvement of the industrial structure. The development of the digital economy suppresses the optimization of the industrial structure. The improvement of industrialization has hindered the industrialization process. It is necessary to strengthen research and development into digital technology and enhance the capacity of the digital economy to promote carbon emissions reduction.

Accelerating the construction of ecological civilization and promoting the management of health environment problems is one of the core elements of the implementation of the “Beautiful China” and “Healthy China” strategies with Chinese characteristics in the new era. Based on the scientific connotation of ecological civilization, this paper systematically assesses the level of interprovincial ecological civilization construction in China using the combined CRITIC empowerment method and explores the impact of ecological civilization construction on the health burden of urban and rural residents using interprovincial panel data from 2003 to 2018 with the help of panel feasible generalized least squares, simultaneous equation estimation, and the extended regression model. It is found that there is a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between provincial ecological civilization construction and urban and rural residents’ economic health burden, as well as a significant U-shaped relationship between ecological civilization construction and urban and rural residents’ disease burden. Fiscal decentralization, urbanization, and industrialization are the three important indirect mechanisms through which ecological civilization affects the health burden of urban and rural residents, and fiscal decentralization plays a typical role in crowding out the health effect of ecological civilization. In the eastern and central regions, ecological civilization construction has effectively reduced the health burden of urban and rural residents, but it is more significant for improving the economic health burden of rural residents. While the “catching-up trend” of the progress of ecological civilization construction in the western region is obvious, ecological civilization plays an important role in alleviating the economic health burden of urban residents. After the robustness test, the conclusion still holds. This study provides an important empirical basis for local governments to improve the accuracy of their policies in promoting the “Beautiful China” and “Healthy China” strategies.

Promoting the use of ethanol gasoline is an important approach for China to achieve sustainable and high-quality development. Based on the daily air quality data of Tianjin, China, from 2013 to 2020, this paper investigates whether the implementation of the ethanol gasoline policy helped improve air quality using regression discontinuity analysis. We find that the implementation of the ethanol gasoline policy had a very limited positive effect on the overall air quality index (AQI) and no obvious effect on the reduction of particulate matter (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀). However, the results reveal that the ethanol gasoline policy reduced SO₂, NO₂, and CO by about 36%, 19%, and 20%, respectively. These findings provide policy insights for other cities in China and other rapidly developing cities in the world to promote the use of ethanol gasoline.

The integration of the cultural tourism industry with high-quality development is believed to be an important method of alleviating poverty. Most research in this area has focused on single towns, cities, or regions without considering the spillover effects of neighboring areas. To fill this gap, this study applies a spatial panel econometric model to empirically test the spatial spillover effects of integrating the cultural tourism industry with high-quality developments and their mechanisms of poverty alleviation based on provincial panel data of the Chinese Mainland from 2010 to 2020. Four key results are presented. First, there is an obvious spatial dependence on the high-quality development scale, specialization level, and poverty level of cultural tourism integration. The common panel model is found to overestimate the impact of this integration on poverty alleviation because it ignores the spatial spillover-related explanatory variables. Second, the scale of development quality is found to have no significant impact on poverty alleviation when integrating cultural tourism; however, the level of development specialization has both a direct impact on poverty alleviation and the spatial spillover effect. Third, the integration of the cultural tourism industry in the Central and Western regions is shown to have a strong direct effect on poverty reduction through high-quality development. However, the spillover effect on poverty reduction in the Eastern region is greater than that in the Central and Western regions. Fourth, the integration of high-quality development and cultural tourism is found to have a direct impact on poverty alleviation overall by promoting tourism consumption, material capital accumulation, and structural transformation.

Optimizing the allocation of water resources is critical for promoting the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure and coordinated development in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei regions of China. Based on specific regional and water conditions, to strengthen the constraints on water resources, the “three-step” adaptive management approach of “scheme design–scheme diagnosis–scheme optimization” of water resource allocation are adopted to facilitate the coordinated optimal allocation of water resources and industrial structure in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei regions. First, from the level of overall industry, a water resource allocation scheme for the regions is designed by applying the master–slave hierarchical mode and a bi-level optimal model to determine the ideal amount of water resource allocation for the regions and respective industries. Second, the diagnostic criteria of spatial balance, structural matching, and coordinated development are constructed to determine the rationality of the water resource allocation scheme. Then a benefit compensation function with water market transactions is developed, to adaptively adjust the water resource allocation scheme. Finally, the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure are promoted to improve water consumption efficiency and the coordinated development of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei regions. The study can provide reference for the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei regions to realize the comprehensive optimal allocation of water resources in the regions and improve the adaptability of water resources and industrial structure optimization.

While the Harris-Todaro model is a traditional approach used in researching the urban-rural dichotomy, it fails to explain families’ goals to maximize their current utility in terms of intertemporal decision-making conditions. To fill this gap, in this paper, an urban-rural dichotomy model involving labor migration and education is established, in which it is assumed that family utility derives from consumption and children’s educational achievement. The steady-state path derived through the Bellman equation suggests that increasing educational investment and family education intensity leads to a significant urban-rural difference in children’s educational achievement. Compared with the traditional Harris-Todaro model, the transversality condition is loosened in this model, while the unavailability of loans constrains migrant families. Four hypotheses are made and tested using an empirical study. An ordinary least squares regression was used in the analysis, but due to the endogeneity caused by missing variables, the instrumental variable method and two-stage least squares regression were used. The results demonstrate that the household registration system can explain 44.5% of the educational achievement difference, and the initial difference is inflated 4.73 times after nine years of compulsory education. This divergence could increase the differences caused by household registration status, resulting in larger income gaps and intergenerational heredity of identities.