Ecosystem services (ES) are key benefits that humans derive from natural ecosystems, including provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. As urbanization accelerates globally, urban green spaces (UGS), increasingly recognized for their role in improving environmental quality and enhancing human well-being, provide essential ES that help mitigate the effects of urbanization. However, the factors influencing public preferences for these services, particularly environmental knowledge and religiosity, remain underexplored. This study seeks to bridge this gap by examining how environmental knowledge and religiosity shape public preferences for ecosystem services, with a particular focus on regulating services (e.g., air quality improvement, carbon sequestration) and cultural services (e.g., outdoor recreation, aesthetic enjoyment). A survey of 1236 respondents conducted in China reveals that both environmental knowledge and religiosity significantly enhance preferences for regulating services, especially in relation to air quality improvement (M = 4.33) and carbon sequestration (M = 4.26). Furthermore, higher education levels correlate with stronger preferences for ecosystem services, and coastal residents exhibit greater preferences for these services compared with inland residents. This study emphasizes that disseminating environmental knowledge through education and religious practices can significantly enhance public awareness of ecosystem services and foster greater support for green infrastructure investments. Policy recommendations include the adoption of targeted communication strategies in urban green space planning to enhance public engagement and support.

Crime affects social stability and people's safety, and directly increases the cost of urban development. Existing literature shows that income distribution affects crime, but it mainly focuses on the effect of income inequality and poverty, with scant evidence addressing the impact of income polarization on crime. Applying data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) and judicial documents from 2014 to 2018, this paper demonstrates that rising income polarization significantly increases crime in cities. The result still holds after a series of robustness checks. Heterogeneity analyses show that income polarization has a more pronounced effect on criminal activities related to violence, robbery and stealing, drug and financial fraud. Moreover, cities with a higher proportion of young and migrant populations would be more adversely affected by income polarization. Mechanism analyses indicate that income polarization exacerbates crime by increasing alienation, reducing job-seeking willingness and happiness of residents.

In the current literature strand, most of the literature is devoted to the role played by mineral and governance policies in environmental quality. However, their criticality in income inequality is mainly overlooked by scholarly works. This research investigated the nexus of mineral and governance policies with income inequality while exploring the importance of per capita income, health expenditure, and poverty. Covering the extended period from 1984Q1 to 20223Q4 in the case of China, this research confirms the presence of long-run equilibrium association between variables. Due to the non-normal data distribution, this research uses quantile regression and a series of robust non-parametric and parametric approaches. The research concludes that mineral resources, health expenditure, governance efficiency, regulatory quality, and poverty headcounts significantly reduce income inequality. Wealth from mineral and health expenditures substantially improves the living standards of the general public. The governance policies are also beneficial in equal wealth distribution of the country. On the contrary, per capita income and government stability are the region's leading factors of income inequality. Based on the predicted results, this research recommends improved minerals management, strengthening of governance institutions and policies, and enhancement in health expenditure to tackle the issue of income inequality.

The issue of relative poverty is emerging as a prominent topic in research and society. However, studies focusing on the determinants of relative poverty among the elderly within a comparative context over time remain scarce. To address this gap, this study employs the reweighting Recentered Influence Function-Oaxaca Blinder decomposition method to understand the changes in relative poverty among the elderly across 16 European countries and utilizes microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study spanning approximately 2005-2022. The results indicate reduction in relative poverty among the elderly. The results demonstrate the following key factors that contributed to reducing poverty rates among the elderly: participation in the labor market, university attendance of the household head and access to public and private pensions. In contrast, living alone has been associated with an increase in poverty rates. These findings may have implications for policy. Hence, to alleviate poverty among the elderly, improvements in terms of job opportunities and the efficacy of pension systems can be extremely helpful.

The income inequality effect of infrastructure investment is under-researched despite the fact that the world has been confronted with the formidable challenge of worsening income distribution. This paper addresses this gap by: (i) highlighting deficiencies in conventional inequality modeling, (ii) proposing an empirical framework that entails estimation of both income growth and income inequality effect of infrastructure using one model, and (iii) applying this model to individual-level data from rural China to estimate income growth and income inequality effect of specific public utility infrastructures. Our findings reveal that the usage of telephone and tap water infrastructure fosters rural income growth, particularly benefiting lower-income individuals, indicating benign income inequality effect. These effects are particularly notable in inland China. An investigation into underlying mechanisms shows that public utility infrastructures help improve educational attainment and health status in lower-income rural households, stimulating growth in income and reducing income inequality. These findings imply that development of public utility infrastructure can serve as a powerful policy instrument for government interventions to reduce income inequality and promote growth, especially in developing countries.

This article investigates the redistributive effects of government and private transfers on income inequality in China, based on data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) during 2012-2020. The results indicate that, first, both government and private programs have inequality-reducing effects and the effect from the government is much larger. More specifically, old-age pensions have the largest inequality-reducing effect, followed by government subsidies, private transfers, and charity donations. In urban areas, old-age pensions have larger redistributive effects, while in rural areas, government subsidies, private transfers, and charity donations contribute to lower inequality. However, compensation for land expropriation and housing demolishment is inequality-increasing. Moreover, the redistributive effects of the transfers are highly driven by their budget size rather than their targeting.

The human capital literature focuses on private returns to education or the efficiency impact of education. From the perspective of a society or public policy of view, the distributive impact of education is perhaps more important. This study firstly proposes a simple analytical framework which combines both the impacts to analyse the social welfare effect of education. Using Chinese micro data, it is found that education expansion led to higher average wage as well lower inequality, contributing to the improvement in social welfare from 2010 to 2018.

The mission of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to achieve shared prosperity through cross-border trade, investment flows, connectivity, people bond, and policy coordination. This motivates us to explore and evaluate the distributive effects of trade and investments under the BRI, as it offers a quasi-natural experiment for impact evaluation by taking the BRI economies as the treatment group and other countries as the control group. Estimation results show that the BRI has generated benign distributive impacts, as the Gini estimates in BRI economies are significantly reduced after the implementation of the BRI. Further, the benign distributive impacts are found to come from imports from China. More specifically, imports from China that are complementary to local labor inputs are positively correlated with labor participation, thereby helping raise the labor share in national income and reduce income inequality. Conversely, imports of machinery, agricultural products, minerals, and so on from China are found to be negatively correlated with the GDP share of the primary industry. In other words, they help promote industrialization and urbanization in BRI economies, which are expected to lead to better income distribution in the long run.

中国省级收入不均等与人均消费正相关,且该正相关关系相当稳健,这违背了边际消费倾向递减的经济学基本原理,意味着大量的财政转移和其他旨在降低收入不均等的政策可能失效,并带来内需的减少而非增加,甚至危及"双循环"和中国经济的持续发展.本文旨在分析城乡分割对收入不均等-消费之间关系的影响.首先,展示了收入不均等-消费正相关之谜,接着通过构建理论模型和实证分析揭开谜底,最后提出政策建议.具体来说,本文的创新点包括:(1)在不区分城乡的情况下,本文发现中国省级收入不均等与消费正相关,且该关系相当稳健.这是本文定义的收入不均等-消费正相关之谜.(2)构建理论模型,揭示了城乡分割如何影响收入不均等与消费之间的关系.(3)进行一系列实证分析,从不同的视角证明,是城乡分割导致了收入不均等与人均消费正相关.本文的政策含义是:中国需要加快推进城镇化和市民化进程,在城乡充分融合的前提下缩小贫富差距,才能提振内需,对冲全球化逆流和百年一遇的国际局势动荡的影响,进而畅通双循环,促进中国经济的持续发展.

Income distribution and environmental degradation represent two of the most important goals in the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). However, the linkage between income inequality and carbon emissions remains controversial. Relying on a large set of cross-country panel data (217 countries from 1960 to the latest), this paper contributes to the literature by using the instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal impact of income inequality on carbon emissions and exploring the underlying transmission mechanisms. Our modelling results indicate that there is a trade-off between income inequality and CO2 emissions. And the underlying mechanisms include (1) diminishing marginal propensity to emit (DMPE) coupled with the economic law of diminishing marginal propensity to consume (DMPC); (2) high income inequality induces increases in R&D expenditure, leading to reductions in CO2 emissions; (3) political freedom does not significantly affect the relationship between income inequality and CO2 emissions.

发挥三次分配调节作用,对于降低收入极化,形成中间大、两头小的橄榄型分配结构,最终实现共同富裕,具有重要意义.本文基于CFPS居民微观调查数据,按照居民收入来源,采用MT指数法和循序分解步骤,解析了第二次分配和第三次分配对收入极化的再分配效应.研究结果表明:第二次分配和第三次分配显著降低了居民收入极化程度,且在城镇地区再分配效应更明显;总体而言,80％以上的再分配是通过公共转移收入来实现的,第三次分配降低市场收入极化的贡献不到20％;从转移收入类别来看,养老金的再分配效应最高,其次是政府补助、私人转移收入和社会捐助,而征地和拆迁补偿的再分配效应为负,即会加剧收入极化程度;各类转移收入的再分配效应与其规模弱的正相关而与其瞄准性弱的负相关.本研究表明,发挥三次分配调节作用、实现共同富裕,提高第三次分配的规模尤为重要,政策引导和鼓励社会组织参与第三次分配也需要重视.

Individual or household income has been the conventional yardstick of poverty. Presently, nonincome factors are universally accepted as measures of poverty. Attention on the multiple dimensions of poverty and their policy implications has been growing in the past 20 years. However, few studies have analyzed relative multidimensional poverty, especially in China. Moreover, the relationship between relative welfare poverty and happiness has been rarely studied, particularly given that the decline of poverty seemed not bringing a significant increase in happiness in China. This research gap is noteworthy because enhancing the subjective well-being of the people is crucial to a nation's sustainable economic development. On the basis of the microlevel data from China General Social Survey, this study puts forward a welfare approach to analyzing the relative multidimensional poverty and then determines the link between relative welfare poverty and individual happiness. Our results show that 1) relative welfare poverty has not declined significantly and 2) there is a significantly happiness-reducing effect of relative welfare poverty.

Although China is experiencing a deterioration in wealth distribution where housing is playing a dominant role, this issue has received scant research attention despite its importance. Combining four rounds of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data, this paper measures and discusses wealth inequality in China, with a special emphasis on the contribution of housing. Our analysis reveals that housing is the largest contributor to wealth inequality, responsible for around 70 percent of total wealth inequality, and its contribution has been increasing over time. Our research efforts have focused on the housing wealth disparity, exploring its composition from alternative perspectives. The results show that housing wealth inequality has also been rising over time and an absolute majority of housing wealth inequality is due to within‐group gaps. Finally, we employ Wan's (2004) regression‐based decomposition methodology to quantify the contributions of different determinants to housing wealth disparity in China, and to demonstrate serious biases in the conventional approach that is often used to analyze housing wealth inequality.

作为新兴与转型经济体的代表,金砖国家的贫困问题对联合国可持续发展目标的实现至关重要.此外,对众多欠发达国家而言,贫困是"三农"问题的核心.遗憾的是,针对金砖国家贫困所进行的比较研究相当不足.鉴于此,本文总结对比分析金砖五国过去几十年的减贫历程,同时实证估算各国贫困发生率,并将贫困的变化分解为经济增长和不均等效应,以厘清贫困下降的来源.研究结果表明,经济增长对金砖五国的减贫无一例外地发挥了主导积极作用,这与政府重视经济发展和开发式扶贫的策略紧密相关.但是,不均等的上升部分地抵消了经济增长的减贫效应,而且削弱了后续经济增长对减贫的作用.这些研究发现的政策含义为:金砖国家在努力促进经济增长的同时,必须高度重视收入分配恶化的问题.本文弥补了现有文献的空缺,为发展中国家解决"三农"问题,实现全球可持续发展目标,彰显金砖国家尤其是中国对全球减贫的贡献提供了素材和科学依据.

Most welfare states design their tax/benefit-system to combat income poverty. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social transfers and income taxes in alleviating poverty. We use micro-data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine the antipoverty effect of social transfers and income taxes. Our data also allow us to decompose the trajectory of the market income poverty to disposable income poverty into 7 different benefits, income taxes and social contributions. On average across 49 countries, 15 percent of the total population is lifted out of poverty via tax/benefit-systems. As far as specific social programs are concerned, only three programs account for the bulk of total poverty reduction: old-age/disability/survivor scheme (81%), social programs for family and children (14%) and the unemployment scheme (8%).

<span id="ChDivSummary" name="ChDivSummary" class="abstract-text">居民消费的持续增长是一个国家经济稳定且高质量发展的重要因素。数字金融所推动的手机支付对居民消费的影响是巨大和深远的。本文首先构建了一般均衡理论框架,从支付便利性的角度证实数字金融的发展通过缩短居民的购物时间来增加消费。紧接着,本文将中国数字普惠金融发展指数和中国家庭追踪调查数据相结合,实证研究发现,数字金融的发展显著地提升了居民消费,从而有助于经济增长。更重要的是,本文发现数字金融主要通过提升支付的便利性来促进居民消费,而流动性约束的放松并不是数字金融发展提升居民消费的主要原因。最后,数字金融的发展尽管更多地提升了农村居民收入,却没有显著提升农村居民消费,这体现了破除城乡分割的紧迫性。</span>

Based on firm level data for the period of 1998–2007, this paper attempts to explain the growth differences between private enterprises and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, in the context of liquidity shocks, and institutional and financial environments. It is found that (1) when liquidity tightens, the private enterprises face stricter credit constraints than SOEs, which restricts the development of private enterprise; (2) when liquidity becomes abundant, private enterprises face fewer financial limitations and grow much faster than SOEs; (3) the effect of liquidity shocks on the growth rate gap between private enterprises and SOEs has weakened during the period 2002–2007. These findings reveal that the credit discrimination against private enterprises can be mitigated by improving institutional and financial environments, which weaken the effects of liquidity shocks on firm growth.