The Role of Heterogeneous Marine Environmental Regulation in SDGs-Integrated Marine Economic Development
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsYour paper is a comparative analysis of two approaches (the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) and the Difference-in-Differences (DID)) to assessing the impact of three systems of marine environmental regulation—market incentive; command-and-control; and public participation - on the SDG-integrated development of the marine economy in China. Your findings are that overall, the market incentive system performs best, but that each system has its pluses and minuses, as the following passage shows in evaluating them on five dimensions of development:
“market-incentive-based regulation promotes innovation-driven and open cooperation dimensions while inhibiting industrial coordination, green construction, and sharing of livelihood. Command-and-control regulation positively promotes people's livelihood sharing but negatively impacts the other four dimensions, with the strongest inhibitory effect on innovation-driven development. Public participation-based regulations inhibit innovation-driven development and sharing of livelihood, with the most pronounced suppression observed in innovation-driven development. Conversely, they promote industrial coordination, green construction, and open cooperation” (lines 23-31)
The topic of your study is interesting and salient, but your paper raises the following issues.
(1) Why did you feel the need to use two approaches (SCM and DID) to assess the impact of the three systems of environmental regulation (market; top-down; and bottom-up)? Why cannot you make such an assessment directly? For example, could you not judge each regulatory system on how well it is successful in achieving the five dimensions or goals of SDG-integrated development of the marine economy in China: innovation-driven; open cooperation; industrial coordination; green construction; and sharing of livelihood”? (lines 23-23)
On lines 87-90 you claim SCM and DID provide more rigorous methods of judging the success of these three regulatory systems:
“synthetic control and difference-in-differences methods offer more rigorous, counterfactual-based quasi-experimental designs to better identify the net effects of regulations on the SDGs-integrated marine economy”.
More rigorous than what?
You describe your use of the SCM in section 3.2.1, but you do not describe your use of DID in section 3.2.2. Instead, section 3.2.2 describes your use of the AHP-EW Combined-Weight Model. Where does this method fit into your SCM and DID methodological framework? On lines 695-701, you mention the DID method as follows:
“Although the synthetic control method can overcome the subjectivity and arbitrariness in the selection of the control group, and the above text has tried to avoid this issue, the focus of marine economic development varies among different coastal regions, making it difficult to avoid situations where the gap with the treatment group is too large to fit. To address this issue, when it is not possible to find a suitable control group fitting object, the Difference in Differences (DID) model is used as a further supplementary argument”.
On lines 754-760, you state that the DID method confirms the results of the SCM method:
“these two validations are conducted using the Difference in Differences (DID) method. Table 4 shows
that the DID results confirm that market incentive-based regulation has a significant driving effect on innovation driven, and other control variables are consistent with theoretical expectations. Similarly, it also confirms that command-and-control regulation has a significant driving effect on shared livelihood, and other control variables are consistent with theoretical expectations”.
So, is SCM the primary method and DID a secondary method? If so, were the results of DID to contradict the results of SCM, would you ignore the DID results?
(2) How did you choose the five dimensions of marine development? On lines 79-82, you simply introduce them as a given:
“While a relatively comprehensive indicator system exists for measuring the SDG-integrated marine economy across five dimensions—innovation, coordination, greening, openness, and cooperation—a unified classification for diverse marine environmental regulations is still lacking”
Your wording of the five dimensions varies. On lines 22-23, you state them as “innovation-driven; open cooperation; industrial coordination; green construction; and sharing of livelihood”. On lines 80-81, you state them as “innovation, coordination, greening, openness, and cooperation”. On lines 94-5, you state them as “innovation, coordination, green, openness, and sharing”. On lines 488-489, you state them as “innovation-driven development, industrial coordination, green construction, open cooperation, and shared prosperity”. On lines 691-692 and lines 744-745, you state them as “innovation driven, industrial coordination, green construction, open cooperation, and shared livelihood”. On lines 813-814, you state them as “innovation, coordination, green, openness, sharing”. These differences matter. For example, the term ‘sharing’ may mean participation, whereas the term ‘sharing of livelihood’ or ‘shared prosperity’ may mean equality of distribution of goods.
(3) Where do you get your evidence from to conclude that, for example, the market system performed best overall? Much of your theoretical analysis of the effects of the three regulatory systems in section 2 is not underpinned by citations – only about 12 sources are cited in seven pages of assertions about these effects. In section 3, you provide considerable empirical evidence to support your theoretical account of these effects, but some of these effects seem counter-intuitive to me. For example, on lines 835-840, you describe one of those effects (green construction) as follows:
“Green construction effect: Marine environmental regulation engages governments, markets, and the public in governance, yet their impacts vary. Results indicate that only public participation-based regulation promotes ecological improvement. In contrast, as corporate entities prioritize profits over social responsibility, both command-and-control and market-incentive regulations inhibit green ecological development”
In my experience, public participation often opposes ecological improvement – NIMBYISM – and top-down measures are needed to implement green policies such as the installation of inland wind turbines.
Your Conclusion seems self-contradictory in that on lines 849-869 you call for the optimisation of all three regulatory systems:
“this study proposes the following policy suggestions: (1) Optimize the role of market incentive-based regulation… (2) Optimize the role of command-and-control regulation…(3) Optimize the role of public participation-based regulation”.
The term ‘optimise’ suggests using a system as much as possible. If this is what you mean, what happens if the regulatory systems come into conflict? My interpretation of your paper’s recommendations is not optimisation but selective use of each regulatory system – i.e., using the market system to promote innovation and open cooperation; using the command-and-control system to promote livelihood-sharing; and using the public participation system to promote industrial coordination, green construction, and open cooperation.
(4) I suggest you follow a consistent ordering of the three regulatory systems throughout the paper. As it stands, you begin by listing them in the following order - market incentive; command and control; and public participation (lines 14-15). But in section 2, you list them as command-and-control, market-based incentives, and public participation (lines 110-111). Then later in section 2, you return to analyse their effects with market-based incentives first, then command and control, then public participation.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors- Overall, I can see authors' great effort to write manuscript. I give minor revision with below comments.
- Authors mentioned marine pollution incidents and their side effects. Authors can add "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2024.140630" as reference.
- Authors can enrich the research gap between their research and others.
- I recommend authors to add figure of UN's SDG (THE 17 GOALS - Sustainable Development Goals) for reader's understanding.
- In most figures, font size is small to read. Please increase it.
- Graphs are too small to read. Please enlarge its scale.
- Authors used R2 and RMSPE, so equations related to these should be added.
- In table 6, R2 values are quite low. Wasn't it possible to increase the R2 values?
- I recommend authors to add discussion section.
- Conclusion section is quite long. Authors can compact it.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThank you for your comprehensive consideration of my queries. I am happy to recommend publication of your revised manuscript.
Well done!
