Evaluation of the coupling coordination degree between digital inclusive finance and green technology innovation in China.

Digital inclusive finance (DIF) has been growing fast in recent years in China, and green technology innovation (GTI) is strongly promoted by the Chinese government. The coordinated development of DIF and GTI is important for China's economic transition to high-quality development. Therefore, utilizing the panel data of 288 prefecture cities from 2011 to 2020 in China, the research evaluates the coupling coordination degree between DIF and GTI (CCD-DG), analyzes spatial-temporal characteristics of CCD-DG, explores its regional disparities and finally analyzes its spatial effects. Results demonstrate that CCD-DG at the prefecture-city level showed a rise from 2011 to 2020, but the degree was only in the stage of basic coordination till 2020, which was mainly driven by the development of DIF in recent years. The regional disparities in CCD-DG remarkably existed but gradually narrowed down during the observation period, which mainly originated from the between-subregions differences as a result of the huge difference in GTI. Additionally, there was a significant spatial spillover effect of CCD-DG and its spatial distribution was roughly consistent with the spatial effect layout. Policy implications based on these results are finally proposed, including formulating policies with local characteristics to promote CCD-DG, emphasizing the discrepancies of CCD-DG between the East and the Northwest, and that within the Northwest and the South, etc.

Are the Benefits of a High-Emission Vehicle Driving Area Restriction Policy Greater than the Costs?

China implemented a vehicle driving area restriction policy to control air pollution by delimiting a no-driving area for high-emission vehicles (HEVs). Current academic research does not evaluate the benefits and costs of this policy based on vehicle level and lacks evidence at the regional level. Therefore, a cost-benefit analysis method is developed to evaluate the benefits and the costs of this policy, based on 2.128 million HEVs in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region from 2008 to 2015. The benefits, the costs, and net benefits of this policy were CNY 98.49, CNY 5.80 and CNY 92.69 billion. The cost-benefit ratios of the BTH region, Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei were 1:16.98, 1:20.88, 1:14.52 and 1:16.55, respectively. Beijing's cost-benefit ratio was the maximum at the city scale. This work can provide scientific support for promoting driving area restriction policies on older gasoline vehicles and older diesel vehicles, the improvement of cost-benefit analysis and efficient decision-making for the Chinese government.

The Impact of Green Technology Innovation on Carbon Emissions in the Context of Carbon Neutrality in China: Evidence from Spatial Spillover and Nonlinear Effect Analysis.

The Paris agreement is a unified arrangement for the global response to climate change and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its long-term goal is to hold the global average temperature rise well below 2 °C. China is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 through various measures, one of which is green technology innovation (GTI). This paper aims to analyze the levels of GTI in 30 provinces in mainland China between 2001 and 2019. It uses the spatial econometric models and panel threshold models along with the slack based measure (SBM) and Global Malmquist-Luenberger (GML) index to analyze the spatial spillover and nonlinear effects of GTI on regional carbon emissions. The results show that GTI achieves growth every year, but the innovation efficiency was low. China's total carbon dioxide emissions were increasing at a marginal rate, but the carbon emission intensity was declining year by year. Carbon emissions were spatially correlated and show significant positive agglomeration characteristics. The spatial spillover of GTI plays an important role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In the underdeveloped regions in China, this emission reduction effect was even more significant.

New indices system for quantifying the nexus between economic-social development, natural resources consumption, and environmental pollution in China during 1978-2018.

It is meaningful to study how China can maintain the sustainable utilization of natural resources and the continuous improvement of environmental conditions while ensuring the stable development of the economy and society. In this study, a new indices system was proposed for the analysis of nexus among social-economic-natural resource-environment complex systems following the DPSIR (Driving Force - Pressure - State - Impact - Respond) framework, CCD (Coupling Coordination Degree) analysis and VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model were applied for quantifying the synergy and trade-off of China in the nexus framework. Results showed that: (1) Although China's rapid development has caused big consumption of natural resources and increasing pollutants discharges during 1978-2018, China has not got into trouble of extreme resource depletion and ecosystem collapse. On the contrary, China guaranteed food supply, stopped forest degradation, and avoided pollution-induced healthy crises & life-shortening. (2) Adjustment of water pollution industries and the increase of wastewater treatment investment contributed 39% and 37% to the reduction of water pollutant discharge, respectively. The contribution of energy structure adjustment to acid rain control was 26%. The pollutants discharged in no less than 70% of the provinces are strictly controlled below the environmental capacity. The increase of fertilizer application and effective irrigated area contributed 32% to China's grain increase, and China's grain self-sufficiency rate has been maintained above 110%. The improvement of the water-saving irrigation rate contributed 28% to the reduction of water consumption. The reduction of comprehensive efficiency contributed 23.8% to the decrease in energy consumptions per GDP. The CCD assessment showed that China has entered a phase of pre-eminently coordinated development since 2013.

Spatially differentiated effects of socioeconomic factors on China's NOx generation from energy consumption: implications for mitigation policy.

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) has become the priority of China's air pollution control, but the regional socio-economic factors responsible for NOx generation are embedded with spatial disparities, which leads to different effects of air quality policy at the local level. This study applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to investigate the drivers of NOx generation from energy consumption (NGEC) in China's 30 provinces, to explore nonstationary spatial effects of NGEC. The results showed that population size has always been the dominant factor in spatial NGEC across all regions of China, although there is a minor north-south difference. However, the effect of per capita GDP and energy intensity leads to a significant north-south difference when they are influencing NGEC, which shows a minor west-east difference from thermal power generation (TE). We also found that in Northern and Northeast China, the transition towards cleaner energy structure based on natural gas has started correlating significantly with NOx generation through a weakly negative effect in 2015. Our findings show alternative strategies on NOx reduction, which include the spatially differentiated effect of regional socioeconomic factors on energy consumption.

Improving air pollution control policy in China--A perspective based on cost-benefit analysis.

To mitigate serious air pollution, the State Council of China promulgated the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in 2013. To verify the feasibility and validity of industrial energy-saving and emission-reduction policies in the action plan, we conducted a cost-benefit analysis of implementing these policies in 31 provinces for the period of 2013 to 2017. We also completed a scenario analysis in this study to assess the cost-effectiveness of different measures within the energy-saving and the emission-reduction policies individually. The data were derived from field surveys, statistical yearbooks, government documents, and published literatures. The results show that total cost and total benefit are 118.39 and 748.15 billion Yuan, respectively, and the estimated benefit-cost ratio is 6.32 in the S3 scenario. For all the scenarios, these policies are cost-effective and the eastern region has higher satisfactory values. Furthermore, the end-of-pipe scenario has greater emission reduction potential than energy-saving scenario. We also found that gross domestic product and population are significantly correlated with the benefit-cost ratio value through the regression analysis of selected possible influencing factors. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that benefit-cost ratio value is more sensitive to unit emission-reduction cost, unit subsidy, growth rate of gross domestic product, and discount rate among all the parameters. Compared with other provinces, the benefit-cost ratios of Beijing and Tianjin are more sensitive to changes of unit subsidy than unit emission-reduction cost. These findings may have significant implications for improving China's air pollution prevention policy.