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This study examines the impact of energy poverty on internal immigration based on the current situation in which reducing energy poverty is a necessary condition for ensuring sustainable development. The threshold effects model is applied to verify the significance of energy poverty in the prediction of internal immigration. The main results suggest that energy poverty significantly and negatively affects internal immigration. A heterogeneity analysis between coastal and non-coastal regions shows that the effects are more pronounced in non-coastal regions than in coastal regions. Further analysis reveals that there exists a kink in the threshold effects. The results remain robust using the specification of the kink threshold effects model. The policy implication is that a balanced development of energy infrastructure in different regions is required to achieve better social welfare for migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-provincial power transmission in China solved the problem of electricity production and consumption spatial mismatch, which also facilitated Chinese green energy transition and sustainable development. Aiming to understand the spatial patterns and main driving factors, this paper accounted the aggregate carbon intensity per electricity produced by each province, built the inter-provincial Out–Destination matrixes of carbon emission embodied in power transmission among 27 provincial areas of 2006 and 2019, and quantitatively analyzed the change in spatial patterns of carbon flow and carbon intensity difference between power inward and outward provinces. We found that the inter-provincial power transmission has led to the reduction in the national average carbon intensity per electricity produced from 0.855 kg/kWh in 2006 to 0.628 kg/kWh in 2019 and the green energy transition of all provinces. The spatial morphology characteristics of carbon flow show the 'three corridors of West-East Power Transmission (WEPT)' pattern, in which power is transmitted from some main thermal power-dominated provinces in central and north-west China to the eastern coastal provinces. Further, it resulted in the carbon leakage from electricity consumption of the coastal provinces and carbon overload of the hinterland provinces. Despite natural resource endowment, the location of the provinces in the national power grid, the national low-carbon energy transition strategy, as well as advances in long-distance ultra-high-voltage power transmission technologies were the main factors to the formation and evolution of Chinese electricity green transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve the goal of sustainable development, China has implemented the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy. So far, there is still little evidence of the impact of the policiy on corporate behaviour. Therefore, this study collects data on Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2017 and applies the staggered difference-in-differences method to analyse the impact of the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy on the environmental, social and governance performance of companies in China. The result shows that the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy reduces environmental, social and governance performance, and this negative effect increases over time. Meanwhile, a further mechanism analysis confirms that the negative impact on environmental, social and governance performance operates through the incentive effect on environmental performance, the crowding-out effect on social performance and the spillover effect on governance performance. Furthermore, the negative effect is heterogeneous across companies and cities. Overall, our results provide empirical evidence for optimising energy conservation and emission-reduction policies in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the implementation effect of the supply-side reform (SSR) in the industrial sector of China's provinces and the reasons behind them are of great significance for China to formulate relevant policies in the future. However, this work has not yet been carried out. Industrial development performance is closely related to energy and environmental efficiency (EEE), and the effect of the SSR implementation is directly reflected in EEE. This study fills this gap by analyzing the EEE of 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2017 using data envelopment analysis and Malmquist index methods. The results show that the positive effect of China's implementation of SSR has emerged. This positive effect is mainly reflected in the implementation of measures such as reducing overcapacity, which has promoted the technological innovation of enterprises. However, the low management level and resource-allocation efficiency hinder the further improvement of the implementation effect of the SSR, which should be paid special attention to in China's future supply-side reform. In addition, we believe that in the context of China's high-quality development and carbon neutrality goals, the SSR should be given more connotations, which are to increase the requirements for strengthening green and low-carbon development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) is widely used to measure energy efficiency under the data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework, but the efficiencies obtained from DEA are structurally biased upward, and thus TFEE tends to overestimate energy efficiency. This research thus applies the bootstrapped DEA approach to correct the bias of TFEE. Using a dataset consisting of 30 provinces of China in the period 2016–2019, the bootstrapped-based test supports technology with variable returns to scale. The biased-corrected TFEE also indicates that energy consumption on average can be scaled down by 42.36%, rather than the biased value of 19.4%. The bootstrapped clustering partitions provinces into three groups: Cluster 1, with Guizhou as the representative medoid, includes half of the superior coastal provinces in terms of actual energy consumption and TFEE and half of the competitive inland provinces, whereas Cluster 3 outperforms Cluster 2 in terms of TFEE, but the actual energy consumption is higher, with Shandong and Hebei as the representative medoids, respectively. Lastly, empirical results imply that the northeast and central regions need more government attention and resources to practice sustainable development and improve TFEE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]