Can ecological civilization pilots improve corporate environmental transparency? This study examines this question using the staggered implementation of China's Water Ecological Civilization Pilot Cities (WECPC) program as a policy shock. Based on A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2023, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to assess its effect on corporate environmental information disclosure quality. The results show that the WECPC program significantly improves disclosure quality, and this finding remains robust across alternative measurements, matching estimations, placebo tests, high-dimensional fixed effects, and count data models. Mechanism tests indicate that the policy works by strengthening corporate environmental emphasis, increasing investor attention, and alleviating financing constraints. Heterogeneity analyses further show that the effect is stronger among firms with higher green narrative capacity, state-owned enterprises, high-technology firms, and firms located in regions with greater emphasis on green transition. This study provides firm-level evidence on how ecological governance pilots enhance environmental transparency and offers implications for improving environmental disclosure systems and modernizing environmental governance.
Water scarcity poses a critical challenge to agriculture. This study explores the combined impact of smart farm technologies (SFT) and water allocation policies on the greenhouse agriculture system in Almería, a region in southeastern Spain characterized by severe water stress. A system dynamics model was developed to simulate key variables, including greenhouse area, aquifer volumes, and water prices, while accounting for constraints such as reliance on desalinated water and the costs of technological implementation. The results indicate that improving irrigation efficiency by 3% annually can stabilize aquifer volumes and sustain 75% of the initial greenhouse surface after 10–12 years, while simultaneously reducing water consumption and lowering water prices. Sensitivity analysis reveals that aquifer recharge rates below 65% lead to system collapse, highlighting the critical need for effective recharge management. The findings confirm that SFT adoption alone cannot resolve water sustainability challenges. Instead, integration with policies such as stricter groundwater regulation and investment in non-conventional water sources is essential. This research contributes to addressing the irrigation efficiency paradox by demonstrating the necessity of combining technology with policy to achieve sustainable agricultural practices. The Almería case underscores the importance of dynamic, adaptive systems to ensure resource conservation and agricultural productivity under increasing climate and water stress.
China has become an increasingly important site for rethinking water economics and policy under conditions of rapid institutional change, environmental pressure and regional inequality. This invited review examines 44 recent China-related peer-reviewed papers in Water Economics and Policy (WEP) and asks what this body of work contributes to the journal’s intellectual agenda and to future research on water and environmental governance. The review is not designed as an exhaustive systematic review of China’s water literature. Instead, it offers a corpus-informed thematic synthesis of how WEP papers have studied China’s policy experiments, regulatory instruments, implementation arrangements and governance outcomes. Six thematic clusters are identified: water pricing, taxation and economic instruments; environmental regulation and implementation capacity; agricultural water use and water-saving technology; basin and spatial governance; water–energy–carbon linkages and virtual water; and urban water ecology and welfare valuation. Across these themes, the corpus shows that China-related research in WEP is strongest when it connects economic analysis to governance capacity, institutional incentives, policy coordination, spatial heterogeneity and distributive consequences. The review argues that China should not be treated merely as a large empirical case, but as a policy laboratory for examining how state steering, market instruments and local implementation interact in complex water governance systems. It concludes by outlining a future research agenda that moves from policy-effect estimation toward mechanism-oriented, institutionally grounded and internationally relevant studies of water governance.
Enhancing the green efficiency of water use (GEWU) is essential for the sustainable management and conservation of urban water resources, with digital infrastructure providing key technical support for sustainable utilization. This study develops a theoretical model to investigate the impact of digital infrastructure on GEWU and its underlying mechanisms. A multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model is employed to verify the relationship by using prefecture-level panel data from China spanning 2010 to 2023. Our findings indicate that advancements in digital infrastructure have led to a significant 1.07% improvement in GEWU. This positive effect is predominantly driven through the enhancement of urban innovation capacity, industrial structure and pollution control. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that digital infrastructure has a more significant impact on GEWU in megacities, the eastern region, and the Huai River and Hai River basins. These findings highlight the potential of integrating advancements in the digital economy with water management strategies, providing a promising avenue for promoting sustainable water use and conservation at both local and global levels.
Following up and updating the previous work for the author [Remoundou, K and P Koundouri (2009). Choice experiments informing water resources policymaking: A review. In The Use of Economic Valuation in Environmental Policy, pp. 33–51. Routledge], this paper reviews the most pertinent studies regarding DCE conducted for the market/non-market valuation of water resources and the environment. The paper uses two different literature survey methods: (1) a narrative review and (2) an econometric meta-analysis, performed by designing a three-equation model estimated by a 3SLS routine. Three different equations considered three types of WTP elicited in the narrative review: WTP for the water as a utility; WTP for the water as an object of a policy project, and WTP of the water for the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and environmental benefits. Results show that the literature has consolidated the DCE approach to water preferences as a policy instrument based on a well-recognized protocol, whose research variations and addenda are mostly focused on marginal refinement and diversification in application. Results from the econometric meta-analysis show an empirical regularity on the (homogeneously) preferred and most valued attribute types (water quality and recreation) and on the (maybe consequent) importance and consistency of DCE as a technical instrument to elicit preferences for natural resources, considering not only the difference in preferences and socio-economic variables but also the specificity of the context where valuation is applied.
Wastewater governance is a core component of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, and the supply imbalance of urban and rural wastewater treatment facilities is a common challenge in the urban-rural transformation of developing economies. As key nodes of urban-rural integration, towns in Western China have prominent shortcomings in the supply efficiency of wastewater treatment facilities, yet existing studies lack systematic quantitative assessments targeting this region. Based on panel data of wastewater treatment facilities in towns across 11 provinces in Western China from 2015 to 2022, this paper adopts the DEA-Malmquist Index to conduct static efficiency measurement, decomposition of dynamic Total Factor Productivity Change (TFPCH), and regional heterogeneity analysis. The findings show that the overall static supply efficiency of wastewater treatment facilities in towns of Western China is below the medium level. During the study period, the arithmetic mean of Comprehensive Efficiency was only 0.595, and the dual deficiency of Pure Technical Efficiency and Scale Efficiency restricted the improvement of performance. Tfpch achieved an average annual growth rate of 22.7%, which was entirely driven by Technological Change. By contrast, Technical Efficiency Change experienced an average annual decline of 7.2%, with the continuous decline of Pure Technical Efficiency Change being the core bottleneck; there is significant inter-provincial heterogeneity in supply efficiency, with the overall performance of southwestern provinces outperforming that of northwestern provinces. This study can provide empirical evidence for the optimization of environmental infrastructure in Western China, as well as a reference for environmental governance in similar regions worldwide.
Sanitation and hygiene coverage in Bangladesh remains inadequate, with >25% of the population not accessing basic services and >70% not accessing safely managed services (SMS). Low coverage causes significant health, social, environmental and economic impacts on the population. This study models the economic damages of inadequate sanitation, the costs of providing sanitation, and cost–benefit ratios. Costs include capital, operations and maintenance. Damages include health impacts (medical costs, lost productivity, value of life) and loss of time from accessing sanitation. Benefits include averted damages, reuse of sanitation products as biofertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions reduced. Data are sourced from reports of government and development partners, and peer-reviewed literature. The economic cost of inadequate sanitation in Bangladesh is US$12.7 billion in 2024, which is equivalent to 3% of Gross Domestic Product. Major contributors are the opportunity costs of time (20.7%) and premature death (77.0%). Medical costs equate with 2.2% of total healthcare expenditure. The total cost of reaching universal household SMS from 2024 to 2030 is US$21.5 billion. Benefits exceed costs by 3.8 times (rural 5.4 and urban 2.4) over the course of 20 years and generate an annual economic rate of return of 85%. Cost per DALY averted is US$1,153. The economic burden of inadequate sanitation remains high in Bangladesh due to health and productivity impacts of shared and unimproved sanitation and the low rates of safe human excreta management. High economic returns of providing SMS are shown in this study, suggesting SMS investment is a deserving use of public and private funds.
Transboundary pollution is a persistent governance failure in decentralized systems, where fiscal and political incentives lead local governments to shield polluting enterprises from cross-jurisdictional accountability. Exploiting the staggered establishment of prefecture-level environmental courts in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we combine a regression discontinuity design with staggered difference-in-differences estimation to identify high-pollution zones near county-level boundaries and to assess whether judicial centralization mitigates this externality. Using firm-level data from Chinese industrial enterprises, we find that these high-pollution zones have an average width of 17.108[Formula: see text]km and that the establishment of environmental courts significantly reduces industrial wastewater discharge within them. The effects operate through two channels: improving factor allocation efficiency by weakening localized judicial protection of polluting enterprises, and strengthening green innovation incentives by raising the expected legal costs of illegal emissions. Heterogeneity analysis reveals stronger effects in regions with more stringent administrative enforcement, along coastal city boundaries, and among pollution-intensive border-zone firms.
Water resource management poses persistent challenges for economic policy analysis due to heterogeneous users, institutional fragmentation, and dynamic feedback between human behavior and hydrological systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) has increasingly been applied to address these limitations, yet its use in water policy analysis remains fragmented across domains and modeling traditions. This paper reviews the application of ABM in water resources management from an applied economics perspective. Focusing on four major policy domains—individual water demand, basin-scale allocation and coordination, groundwater over-extraction, and water pollution regulation—we synthesize how ABM has been used to represent behavioral heterogeneity, institutional interaction, and micro–macro feedback. The review highlights the value of ABM as a policy laboratory for exploring mechanisms, trade-offs, and distributional consequences under decentralized and second-best conditions, while also identifying key methodological challenges related to validation, integration, and behavioral specification. We conclude by discussing implications for future research and policy practice, emphasizing the complementary role of ABM alongside econometric evidence and optimization benchmarks in ex ante water policy assessment.
Against the backdrop of increasing vulnerability of global marine ecosystems, leveraging market-based environmental regulation to promote the green transition of marine enterprises has become a central policy concern. This study utilizes the implementation of China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law (EPTL) in 2018 as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs an intensity-based Difference-In-Differences (DID) framework using panel data on marine-related firms from 2010 to 2023. The core dependent variable is a firm-level green transition index derived from textual analysis of annual reports, measured as the natural logarithm of one plus the frequency of green-transition-related keywords, capturing firms’ strategic commitment to environmental sustainability. The results show that the EPTL significantly increases the log frequency of green-transition-related keywords in annual reports, indicating that tax-induced cost pressure is translated into firms’ strategic environmental reporting. The findings remain robust to alternative dependent variables are employed, including the share of green invention patents in total patent grants and pollution emission intensity per unit of revenue. Mechanism analysis suggests that the policy operates through strengthened external supervisory pressure and enhanced firm-level innovation incentives. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the policy effect is more pronounced among firms with core marine businesses, those in the midstream of the industrial chain, firms facing lower financing constraints, and those operating in highly competitive industries. The results remain stable after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. This study extends the theoretical boundary of environmental taxation in the context of the marine economy, provides micro-level evidence for the effectiveness of market-based environmental instruments in developing countries, and offers policy insights for refining differentiated environmental taxation, strengthening coordinated regulatory systems, and improving green financial support mechanisms.
Environmental policy interventions, particularly large-scale ecological engineering projects, play an important role in shaping regional sustainability transitions. China's South-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project, the world's largest inter-basin water diversion initiative, addresses spatial imbalances in water resource distribution while entailing stringent environmental regulatory requirements. This study examines the project's spillover effects on green innovation, a critical driver of sustainable development, by treating the SNWT as a quasi-natural experiment. Empirical findings revealed that cities along the project route experienced significant increases in innovation activity post-implementation: general invention patent applications rose by 24.2% and green invention patents rose by 28.2%. Further investigation revealed that the project did not trigger substantial industrial relocation, nor did it lead to notable contractions in industrial output or investment scales. However, industrial enterprises in these cities exhibited an approximate 7% decline in labor demand. This decline was accompanied by reductions in pollution emissions and improvements in green productivity, pointing to a possible labor-technology substitution effect driven by innovation advances. These findings highlighted that well-designed environmental policies could stimulate green technological innovation, while also revealing potential trade-offs, such as a crowding-out effect on labor. Our investigation offered insights for evaluating large-scale ecological engineering projects as tools for sustainable development governance.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region faces acute water scarcity, with recent assessments indicating that roughly 83% of its population lives under extremely high water stress. Given the structural nature of this challenge, the effectiveness of public institutions in managing water resources and mitigating demand pressures emerges as a critical determinant of water stress outcomes. In light of these considerations, this study examines the association between government effectiveness and water stress across 17 MENA countries from 2009 to 2021. Government effectiveness is measured using the WGI Government Effectiveness index, which captures perceptions of public service quality, civil service capacity, policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of government commitments. Using the Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) and the Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) estimators, with the Fama-MacBeth (FMB) regressions as a robustness check, the analysis finds that government effectiveness is negatively associated with water stress (beta = - 0 . 190). On the other hand, GDP per capita and urbanization are positively associated with it (beta = 0.871 and beta = 0.129 , respectively); precipitation and foreign direct investment are negatively associated with water stress (beta = - 0.385 and beta = - 0.018 , respectively). In the MENA context, the positive coefficients of GDP per capita and urbanization suggest that economic expansion and rapid urban growth tend to increase agricultural, industrial, and municipal water demand, often faster than water infrastructure and management capacity can adjust. Taken together, the findings indicate that governance capacity matters because stronger implementation and administrative performance can help contain demand pressures and support more sustainable water management in a highly water-stressed region.
Water-related ecosystem services, such as infiltration, streamflow regulation, and water quality, are central to the well-being of forest-dependent Himalayan communities but are increasingly threatened by forest degradation, Lantana camara invasion, and rising fire risk. Conventional payments for ecosystem services (PES) and carbon-focused afforestation schemes rarely capture these hydrological co-benefits or the strategic trade-offs communities face under ecological uncertainty. This study develops a hydrology-integrated, blockchain-enabled bioeconomic model that links forest growth, water-service valuation, lantana dynamics, and fire risk to a performance-indexed token pricing system. Token values adjust in real time to ecological indicators such as carbon buffer size, water-service gains, cumulative harvesting, invasive-species pressure, and fire hazard, with smart contracts converting these indicators into payments. Results show that blockchain-based pricing creates strategic incentives not present in traditional PES. Communities face a trade-off between early credit sales for immediate income and retaining larger carbon buffers that strengthen water services and future token values. When post-fire income is absent, high fire risk encourages precautionary liquidation. However, when post-fire income streams such as water PES and fuelwood are available, this effect is moderated, and higher risk can instead reduce token prices and dampen sales. Strong hydrological benefits and rising token price trends promote long-term accumulation. Lantana removal competes across oak and pine stands, revealing tensions among hydrological gains, fire reduction, and restoration costs. Policy experiments indicate that subsidies and higher water-PES payments shift outcomes toward greater restoration and improved watershed resilience. Under explicit fire risk, blockchain-based crediting enables communities to partially transfer wildfire-related financial risk to external buyers by monetizing uncertain future carbon benefits, thereby supporting higher conservation effort than would be possible under traditional PES.
Water pollution, as a significant source of environmental contamination, is characterized by its regional, structural, complex, and interrelated nature. This study uses panel data models to test the impact of water pollution on corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance, with a sample of listed companies in China (2016-2023). ESG refers to an indicator that assesses a firm's comprehensive performance across three dimensions: environmental protection, social responsibility, and corporate governance, reflecting its capacity for sustainable development and fulfillment of social responsibilities. This study employed two methods, Bloomberg-Sino-Securities and Bloomberg-Wind, to measure corporate ESG. The findings reveal that water pollution has a significant positive effect on corporate ESG performance. Heterogeneity analysis further identifies that the positive impact of water pollution on ESG performance is more pronounced in regions with low levels of water pollution, in non-polluting industries, and where there is high public environmental awareness, robust environmental regulation, strong local enforcement, as well as among state-owned enterprises and those with high levels of external attention. These conclusions carry important implications for improving corporate environmental management strategies and advancing urban sustainable development.
Water environment governance (WEG) plays an important role in absorbing pollutants and reducing carbon emissions. This study focuses on the synergistic pollution reduction and carbon mitigation effect achieved by implementing WEG through process mechanisms and policy measures, and explores the focus point aimed at achieving the co-benefits of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation effectively at a local level within the basin. After selecting synergy indicators of comprehensive environmental pollution and carbon emissions and conducting modeling tests, the synergistic pollution reduction and carbon mitigation effect of WEG in the Yellow River Basin is examined. The analysis results show that WEG is characterized by the "Matthew effect" (i.e., the phenomenon of "the stronger get stronger"), and it can generate a synergistic pollution reduction and carbon mitigation effect with a lag, though the extent of reduction differs between pollutants and carbon emissions. The process mechanisms of source decarbonization (i.e., industrial structure transformation) and process emission reduction (i.e., green technology innovation) can achieve overall co-benefits, while end sink enhancement (i.e., environmental regulation) is only effective in reducing the pollution. The mixed nature of policy measures influences the overall co-benefits: homogeneous policy measures (e.g., river chief system policy and water ecological civilization construction pilot) contribute positively, while the opposite is true for heterogeneous policy measures (e.g., integrating WEG and energy utilization policies). These findings provide useful operational recommendations for decision-makers to efficiently reduce pollutants and carbon emissions and promote low-carbon sustainability in China's watersheds.
