• Energy Research
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Abstract Trading energy efficiency (TEE) is adopted by more and more countries to cope with global climate change. This article studies the effects of TEE by investigating an optimization model, and several interesting conclusions are obtained. Firstly, it is observed in the model that TEE stimulates energy efficiency innovation, that is, promotes the firms to increase innovation investments. Secondly, it is proved that TEE reduces the marginal emission and total emission of the firms, while outputs are promoted by TEE. Meanwhile, TEE does not reduce energy inputs. Finally, TEE under carbon tax performs better than that without carbon tax. Based on these results, to improve the energy efficiency and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, it is suggested for the governments to adopt TEE with carbon tax.

Abstract Energy efficiency improvement will reduce the effective price of energy services, and hence at least partially mitigate original expected energy conservation. Therefore, the magnitude of rebound effect is important for the design and timing of an effective energy conservation policy. Under the framework of translog cost share equations, we estimates the direct rebound effect for heavy industry in China for the first time by conducting an empirical research on the relationship between the direct rebound effect and the ease with which energy services can substitute for other inputs. Additionally, asymmetric price responses are specified in the model for the rebound effect estimation. Empirical results in our paper indicate that the rebound effect for heavy industry in China is about 74.3%. This reveals that energy efficiency improvement can save energy to a certain degree since the rebound effect is less than 100% (“back-fire”), but most of the expected reduction in heavy industry energy consumption is mitigated. These findings prove that energy pricing reforms and energy taxes should be further implemented to achieve effective energy conservation in China’s 12th Five Years Plan.

With respect to conventional energy, the significant advantages of new energy are the balanced regional distribution and the large resource extent which, to some extent, could be regarded as infinity compared with human's demand for energy. The development and utilization of new energy are beneficial to optimize energy consumption structure, to protect ecological environment, and to guarantee energy security. Accelerating the development of new energy industry is strategic choices of pulling domestic demands, cultivating new economic growth points, improving employment opportunities, and promoting economic and social sustainable developments. New energy mostly characterizes disadvantages of low energy density and decentralization, which are difficult to substitute for fossil energy on a large scale in the near future. More efforts will be needed in the aspects of technology, cost and management. In this paper, the development status and prospect of new energy were reviewed, and some suggestions were put forward based on the problems existed in the development process of new energy in China.

In this study, we investigate whether outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) either augments or impedes domestic public and private investment, incorporating the role of institutional quality into the context of developed and emerging countries. To this end, we apply a cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approach to analyze panel data from the period 1996–2017. Our empirical findings suggest that OFDI augments private capital formation for developed countries. Institutional quality (IQ) is found to be a driving factor that promotes private capital formation in the established economies of developed countries. However, OFDI has a negative association with the public capital formation in the established economies of developed countries, while IQ has a positive association with it. In the context of emerging economies, OFDI is found to be too insignificant to have an effect on private and public capital formation. Interestingly, IQ has a detrimental effect on both private and public capital formation in emerging economies. Our findings are robust. The empirical findings of this study imply that institutional quality should continue to be improved in developed countries, while it should surpass a certain threshold for emerging economies to promote domestic capital formation.

To study the economic and environmental effects of human capital, previous studies measure human capital based on education; however, this approach has many shortcomings because not all educated people are innovative human capital. Hence, this study introduces the concept of innovative human capital by developing a new index that measures human capital based on the number of patents every one million R&D staff full-time equivalent. After this, this paper studies the impact of innovative human capital on CO2 emissions in China. The provincial panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2017 is analyzed using the fixed effect, ordinary least squares, and the system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM). The analysis revealed that innovative human capital alleviates environmental deterioration in China. The findings unfold the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) considering innovative human capital in the model. It implies that Chinese economic development will eventually support environmental sustainability if China continues to develop its innovative human capital. Among the control variables, economic structure, population density, and energy intensity stimulate environmental degradation by increasing CO2 emissions. However, FDI has a negative relationship with CO2 emissions. Lastly, the study proposes comprehensive policies to increase innovative human capital for environmental sustainability.

Local government's environmental expenditure (LGEE) is critical to ecological protection and environmental governance, and it has not played its due role. By constructing a theoretical model of the competitive effect of LGEE under the intervention of central government, this study used the spatial econometric model to analyze the competitive effect of LGEE based on the data of 30 provinces in China from 2007 to 2016. The main results show that (1) from the perspective of the national area, LGEE shows a U-shaped development model together with economic growth; (2) a significant positive spatial effect in interprovincial LGEE is observed in eastern region, indicating that local government tends to adopt the competitive strategy of mutual imitation. Local government will not reduce environmental expenditure as fiscal decentralization increases; (3) the coefficient of the spatial effect in LGEE is significantly negative in central and western regions, which is manifested as a competitive strategy of mutual substitution. The coefficient of fiscal decentralization is significantly negative, indicating that LGEE relies mainly on the transfer payments from central government, and the essence of interprovincial competition regarding environmental expenditure is the competition for the transfer payments from central government.

Sustainable tourism is essential for tourism sector development. Environmentally responsible behaviors and behavioral intentions are important prerequisites for sustainable tourism. This research explores the behavioral intentions of university tourism students and significant factors affecting these behavioral intentions. The questionnaire survey method was applied to university students from the tourism departments of nine universities in Taiwan. A total of 390 valid questionnaires were collected. The pro-environmental behavioral intentions of the students ranged from moderate to high. Environmental knowledge positively affected behavioral intentions and positively influenced environmental sensitivity and environmental responsibility. Furthermore, environmental sensitivity and environmental responsibility exerted a full effect in mediating the relationship between environmental knowledge and behavioral intentions. Hence, increasing students’ environmental knowledge will enhance their behavioral intentions. However, by improving students’ sensitivity and responsibility, their intentions to protect the environment can be more effectively elevated. Development implications and recommendations for sustainable tourism and higher education are provided.

Ecological and environmental protection is the core content of ecotourism development. A quantitative evaluation of the effects of ecotourism environmental protection (hereinafter referred to as EEP) measures on protected areas is conducive to a deeper understanding of the key issues related to ecotourism development in China, thus providing the theoretical basis for formulating the relevant national policies of sustainable ecotourism development in China. This paper first discusses the evaluation index system and then establishes an index evaluation model of EEP measures and their effects on protected areas. Using surveys of more than 1110 protected areas in 27 provinces (autonomous regions or municipalities), we evaluated the EEP measures and their effects from a quantitative and spatial perspective. The completeness of EEP measures for Chinese protected areas was moderately effective, and the implementation status of the protection measures varied with the protection region. The effectiveness of EEP measures in different provinces and regions showed significant differences. The effectiveness decreased from east to west. The evaluation index values of the environmental protection measures displayed a high correlation with the effects of environmental protection on protected areas. The ecological protection measures should be further improved and strengthened according to their regional differences during ecotourism development.