Mismatched Social Welfare Allocation and PM2.5-Related Health Damage along Value Chains within China.

Value chains have played a critical part in the growth. However, the fairness of the social welfare allocation along the value chain is largely underinvestigated, especially when considering the harmful environmental and health effects associated with the production processes. We used fine-scale profiling to analyze the social welfare allocation along China's domestic value chain within the context of environmental and health effects and investigated the underlying mechanisms. Our results suggested that the top 10% regions in the value chain obtained 2.9 times more social income and 2.1 times more job opportunities than the average, with much lower health damage. Further inspection showed a significant contribution of the "siphon effect"─major resource providers suffer the most in terms of localized health damage along with insufficient social welfare for compensation. We found that inter-region atmosphere transport results in redistribution for 53% health damages, which decreases the welfare-damage mismatch at "suffering" regions but also causes serious health damage to more than half of regions and populations in total. Specifically, around 10% of regions have lower social welfare and also experienced a significant increase in health damage caused by atmospheric transport. These results highlighted the necessity of a value chain-oriented, quantitative compensation-driven policy.

Could ecological restoration reduce income inequality? An analysis of 290 Chinese prefecture-level cities.

Ecosystem degradation and the serious wealth gap caused by rapid economic development have become problems that cannot be neglected during the progress of pursuing sustainable development and reducing income inequality in China. To determine whether ecological restoration such as vegetation cover could affect the income gap, we used data for 290 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2018 and analyzed the effect of ecological restoration on income inequality in China. In addition, we chose the year 2012 as a boundary and performed heterogeneity analysis to permit a detailed comparison of the variation in the effect over time. We found that ecological restoration can reduce income inequality in general, but this effect was not statistically significant until 2012. However, due to some practical obstacles (e.g., employment opportunities, educational attainment, social discrimination), reducing income inequality through ecological restoration will be a time consuming process and requires constant effort from the Chinese government and local managers such as funding green industries, providing more targeted technical training for the poor and social services for the rural migrant workers.