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Saving energy is an important strategy to address the current energy crisis and environmental degradation. Regarding the pilot policy of the energy quota trading as a quasi-natural experiment by employing a difference-in-differences method, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of this pilot policy on energy saving and its mechanisms based on city-level data in China from 2006 to 2020. We find that the energy quota trading policy can reduce the total energy consumption and energy consumption intensity of pilot cities, and the effect of the policy can gradually strengthen over time. The market-oriented reform of energy factor allocation can effectively promote energy saving and economic growth. These results are convincing through a series of robustness checks. The heterogeneity test shows that the energy quota trading has a significant energy saving effect on economically developed cities, densely populated cities and southern cities, but not in economically underdeveloped cities, sparsely populated cities and northern cities. Further mechanism inspection suggests that the pilot policy of energy quota trading mainly achieves energy conservation through industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation. Our findings provide a valuable insight for China to control energy consumption and promote the high-quality development of the energy economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the role of urban resilience in residents' subjective happiness in China. Results show that the overall urban resilience is a critical factor in improving residents' subjective happiness, and each sub-class resilience index of cities in the ecological, social, infrastructure, and economic aspects shows positive and significant correlations with residents' subjective happiness. Heterogeneous results show that the effect of urban resilience is greater for residents with higher education or living in cities with larger population size. The mechanism results show that four possible channels are confirmed. The rise of urban resilience raises residents' subjective happiness through increasing residents' income or consumption, improving their health status, and raising their social trust or social integration. The main conclusion drawn from the empirical analysis is that raising urban resilience is an effective strategy to strengthen residents' subjective happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs an evaluation indicator system for urban resilience in China on four dimensions—economy, environment, society, and infrastructure. The evaluation indicator is used by the entropy weight method to measure the resilience levels of 138 cities in 8 urban agglomerations from 2005 to 2018. Using the Theil index and variance decomposition method, we explore the size and sources of urban resilience differences among the eight urban agglomerations from the dual perspectives of space and structure and employ geographic detectors to identify the driving factors behind their differences. The results show that although the overall resilience level of the eight urban agglomerations is not high, it shows an upward trend. The differences within the eight urban agglomerations are the main spatial sources of urban resilience differences and economic resilience is the main structural source of urban resilience differences. Moreover, economic resilience and social resilience have the greatest contribution and driving effect on the resilience differences of BTH, YRD, PRD, MYR, CC, GP, and HC urban agglomerations, but the difference in resilience of CP is mainly caused by the difference in infrastructure resilience. Compared with the single factor, the impact of the interaction of each factor is even greater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a novel hybrid Trigonometric Envelopment Analysis for Ideal Solutions (TEA-IS) model to assess the ecological efficiency of 248 Chinese cities for a 14-year period and employs a difference-in-difference approach to reveal the mechanism of the impact of low-carbon pilot city policies on ecological efficiency from the perspective of green technology innovation. This TEA-IS approach not only combines the advantageous features that exist in each individual model, but also allows an analysis of ecological efficiency in terms of the synergistic effects that may exist among correlated positive and negative criteria. Machine learning methods are also employed to predict high-low performance and synergistic Chinese cities in terms of the socio-economic and demographic context. Results indicate that ecological efficiency is generally low in Chinese cities. The low-carbon pilot city policy does help to improve ecological efficiency, which results from the mechanism of green technology innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the empirical literature of the payments for environmental services (PES) projects for the environmental improvement and poverty reduction, this paper uses a meta-regression analysis method to study whether PES can achieve the effects of improving environmental quality and reducing poverty levels. For the meta-regression analysis, the literature was mainly searched by the Web of Science core journal database. The explanatory variables of meta-regression analysis are the hypothesis and related features of the models in the original literature by generally taking the binary dummy variables or categorical variables. The dependent variables used in this paper are environmental improvement and poverty reduction. The results show that PES projects based on private ownership rights are more conducive to poverty reduction and environmental improvement. If the country is a buyer of a PES project, it is more likely to achieve the effects of environmental enhancement and poverty alleviation. PES projects based on local conditions can also achieve a win–win situation for the two effects. The effects are more effective as policy implementation time is extended. The findings suggest that in developing countries, the government should set different PES projects according to different regions conditions, to promote project implementation through individual voluntary participation, and to achieve the dual purpose of environmental governance and poverty alleviation based on the expectation of long-term implementation of participant projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rail transit investment has been viewed as a prominent policy instrument for local and regional development. However, little is known about to what extent the theorised changes in land and housing values arising from rail transit access can be substantiated by evidence in a large developing country context. This paper presents a quantitative review of empirical studies that analysed the impacts of rail transit access on land and housing values in China. We review empirical analyses in 67 studies from 1997 to 2018 for which we encode quantitative results along with a range of theoretically combinations of spatially contextual characteristics, data and methodological-design characteristics. The results show that there are significant variations in the size estimates of effects of rail transit access across studies. Such variations are associated with rail project types, data and methodological designs. Our study provides the insights on what has already been known and what needs to be known on evaluating real estate consequences of rail transit improvements in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education, as an investment in human capital, is regarded as an important determinant of sustainable economic growth [1-2]. The purpose of this study is to explore the cointegration and causality between the investment in education and sustainable economic growth in Guangdong province by using the panel data of 21 cities from 2000 to 2016. We construct a variable intercept panel data model with an individual fixed effect based on the Cobb-Douglas production function, estimating the contribution of the investment in education to economic growth by introducing lags. The findings show the existence of the feedback causality between education and sustainable economic growth. Also, the results reveal that the local financial investment in education plays a positive and statistically significant role in promoting sustainable economic growth. However, the contribution of the local financial investment in education to economic growth varies in different areas. The investment in education in the Pearl River Delta region have the most obvious pull effects on its regional economy, whereas the Western region takes the second place. Meanwhile, the local financial investment in education for its role in promoting economic growth obviously has a two-year hysteresis effect. These findings have important implications for Guangdong's solution to the imbalance between regional educational investment and sustainable economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Carbon emissions trading is one of the important economic means to solve the environmental externality. Based on the data of CO 2 emissions from the thermal power plants over the period from 2005 to 2010 in China, this paper uses no-parametric optimization models to estimate the potential economic gains and potential carbon emissions reduction under three allocation strategies of carbon emissions trading allowance. Results show that the maximum potential gains can be obtained by the spatial allocation scenario for the combination of CO 2 -SO 2 emissions trading, and the output growth ratio among power plants varies huge. The establishment of jointed CO 2 -SO 2 emissions trading is usually highly beneficial to achieve the three targets, including the optimal allocation of resources, the increase of potential gains and the reduction of pollutant emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]