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Environmental pollution damages public health and affects economic development. Environmental regulation is the main way for the government to solve environmental pollution. So what type of environmental regulation works better for public health and economic development? Can environmental regulation have an influence on economic development through public health? To solve these problems, this research uses China’s provincial panel data from 2013 to 2017 to divide environmental regulation into command-control policy tools and economic incentive policy tools and uses the mediating effect model to examine the relationship among environmental regulation, public health and economic development. The results show that: (1) There is a positive correlation between economic incentive policy tools and economic development; while no significant relationship between command-control policy tools and economic development is founded; (2) The relationship between command-control policy tools and public health is not significant, while the relationship between economic incentive policy tools and public health is positive; (3) Public health does not play a mediating role between command-control policy tools and economic development but plays a partial mediating role between economic incentive policy tools and economic development. Therefore, the government should strengthen the use of economic incentive policy tools to promote public health and sustainable economic development.

Household leverage ratio is an important factor affecting family stability. Digital finance has changed the means of payment and consumption frequency, but the relationship between digital finance and household leverage ratio is still unclear. The existence of household debt is defined as the existence of leverage. The higher the household debt, the greater the household leverage. Based on the matching data of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) 2019 and the China Digital Inclusive Finance Index, this paper studies the impact of digital finance on household leverage ratio and explores its mechanism theoretically and empirically. This research finds that digital finance can significantly promote the household leverage ratio and this conclusion is still valid after instrumental variable method and robustness test. The mechanism analysis shows that digital finance can promote household over-consumption and further expand household leverage ratio. Digital finance can also reduce household leverage ratio by increasing household income. The heterogeneity analysis suggests that the role of digital finance in expanding leverage ratio is stronger for urban areas and households with low educational level. For households with higher assets, digital finance helps to reduce leverage ratio. Therefore, the government should guide residents to consume rationally and give full play to the entrepreneurship-facilitating and income-increasing effect of digital finance. Meanwhile, the residents themselves should speed up the cultivation of digital financial literacy, which is of vital significance for lowering household leverage ratio and systemic financial risks. China’s development level of digital finance ranks among the top in the world. Studying the role of digital finance in China is helpful to provide experience reference for countries around the world.

Abstract Using China's Industrial Enterprise Database (CIED) from 1998 to 2007, this paper investigates how the differential electricity pricing (DEP) policy affects the total factor productivity (TFP) of energy-intensive industries in China. Based on the TFP of energy-intensive industries estimated through the Olley-Pakes (OP) and Levinston-Petrin (LP) approaches, this paper estimates the treatment effects of the DEP policy through the method of propensity score matching and difference in differences (PSM-DID). The results indicate a significant negative effect of the DEP on the TFP of energy-intensive industries shortly after the DEP implementation. This finding could be explained by the rapidly increasing costs for energy-saving technologies that occurred within firms over a short time. Moreover, the estimated dynamic marginal effects demonstrate that the policy effect became positive in the following years, implying that the role the DEP policy plays shifted from increasing costs to stimulating technology improvement for energy-intensive industries. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the treatment effects remain large and statistically significant for regions less dependent on energy-intensive industries, regions with better policy enforcement, and small-sized firms. The results remain robust in the counterfactual test, in the robustness check that takes account of the lagging effect of policy and in the robustness checks that considers more control variables or extends the time period of analysis. Based on these findings, this paper provides important policy implications for better design of the mechanisms to improve the productivity in China.

Spring Festival travel rush is a phenomenon in China that population travel intensively surges in a short time around Chinese Spring Festival. This phenomenon, which is a special one in the urbanization process of China, brings a large traffic burden and various kinds of social problems, thereby causing widespread public concern. This study investigates the spatial-temporal characteristics of Spring Festival travel rush in 2015 through time series analysis and complex network analysis based on multisource big travel data derived from Baidu, Tencent, and Qihoo. The main results are as follows: First, big travel data of Baidu and Tencent obtained from location-based services might be more accurate and scientific than that of Qihoo. Second, two travel peaks appeared at five days before and six days after the Spring Festival, respectively, and the travel valley appeared on the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival travel network at the provincial scale did not have small-world and scale-free characteristics. Instead, the travel network showed a multicenter characteristic and a significant geographic clustering characteristic. Moreover, some travel path chains played a leading role in the network. Third, economic and social factors had more influence on the travel network than geographical location factors. The problem of Spring Festival travel rush will not be effectively improved in a short time because of the unbalanced urban-rural development and the unbalanced regional development. However, the development of the modern high-speed transport system and the modern information and communication technology can alleviate problems brought by Spring Festival travel rush. We suggest that a unified real-time traffic platform for Spring Festival travel rush should be established through the government's integration of mobile big data and the official authority data of the transportation department.

As the future direction of modern agriculture, agricultural informatization (AI) and its economic effects are worth exploring because they can well promote digital agriculture. Based on the existing research results, we propose six hypotheses around the economic benefits of AI and construct the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model with a sample of 30 Chinese provinces over the period 2001–2020 for validation. Specifically, starting from farmers’ income and regional economic growth, the entropy value method is used to construct the AI indicators, and the GTWR model is constructed to analyze the effect of AI. Furthermore, the transmission mechanism of AI was explored from the perspective of agricultural industry structure upgrading. The following conclusions were drawn. First, the level of AI in China has increased significantly, and meanwhile its spatial correlation has also strengthened year by year. Second, AI demonstrates a positive correlation with farmers’ income growth and regional economic development, which means that it has become an important contributing factor of rural economic output. Third, agricultural industry structure upgrading is one of the important ways for AI to leverage its economic effect. Hence, improving the informatization level in the rural and agricultural sectors through multi-dimensionality is of positive and pragmatic significance for the rural economy.

Based on climate change data of local cities and cash holding data of Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2019, this article studies the impact of climate change on the level of corporate cash holdings and analyzes the path of climate change on the corporate cash holding level. The results show that under the influence of climate change, enterprises hold a high level of cash holdings to cope with risks and change variables to carry out robustness tests; meanwhile, the results remain consistent. By analyzing the source channels of enterprise cash, it is found that climate change increases the cash received from selling goods, providing services, and tax refund, but decreases the cash received from borrowing. The mechanism of action shows that climate change has increased the operating risk of enterprises and thus the level of cash holdings of enterprises, but climate change has not increased the financial risk of enterprises. The main reason is that under the influence of climate change, enterprises have reduced the debt level and thus reduced the financial risk. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of climate change on corporate cash holdings is more obvious in state-owned enterprises, enterprises with high degree of financing constraints, and ecologically fragile regions. This study provides a new explanation for the influencing factors and approaches of corporate cash management strategies, which helps to better understand the cash holding strategies of listed companies in China. It also indicates that climate change is likely to be a macro incentive to aggravate the risks of real economy.

Urban leisure venues proffer spatial carriers for citizens’ leisure activities and their functions rely heavily on the spatial configuration, which have largely been ignored. The increasing needs for healthy leisure life and the availability of geospatial open data provide a rising opportunity to fill this gap. To examine the spatial distribution of leisure venues and explore its underlying dominating factors, we adopt geospatial analysis techniques—point pattern analysis and cluster analysis with multi-sources geospatial data in Wuhan, Central China. Results conclude interesting spatial discrepancy based on a three-level clustered pattern of 86520 leisure venues. We find that (1) most clusters are in urban center along the Yangtze River with all 1st-level clusters and plentiful 2nd-level and 3rd-level clusters; (2) There are just sporadic clusters in suburban areas—no 1st-level, merely one 2nd-level and some few 3rd-level ones. Moreover, we demonstrate three underlying dominating factors (i.e., the policy, population and economy) and identify that (1) No systematic (spatial-relevant) leisure policy framework is formed; (2) Population density and commercial centers have positive correlation with the distribution of leisure venues. This study contributes to spatial-relevant leisure policy-making for facilitating healthy leisure life, optimizing leisure space, guiding people-oriented urbanization transition and promoting urban competence.

More stable value chains in agriculture allow countries to take the best advantage of their factor endowments and thus achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal on ending hunger. It is, however, difficult to interpret such advantages properly due to the multivariate effects of natural, technological, and economic variables on agricultural output and food supply. The authors attempt to tackle this challenge by developing the approach to the identification of competitive advantages and matching them with the production capabilities of agricultural sectors in Central Asia. The application of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), Relative Trade Advantage (RTA), Lafay Competitive Advantage (LI), and Domestic Resource Costs (DRC) indexes to the array of 37 products results in the revealing of comparative, trade, competitive, and production advantages of five Central Asian economies for labor-intensive horticultural products and grains. Capital and technology-intensive sectors of animal husbandry and food processing are recognized as low competitive. Taking Central Asia–China collaboration as a model, the authors elaborate policy measures aimed at support, promotion, or establishment of competitive advantages. The application of the measures facilitates the concentration of the resources toward competitive and conditionally competitive products, allows to protect fragile advantages in marginally competitive sectors, and contributes to the overall improvement of stakeholders’ performance across agricultural value chains in the region.