Cross-Border E-Business and Air Quality: A Quasi-Natural Experiment from the Perspective of Natural Resources

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1.There are errors in the writing of some English words as well as punctuation marks.
2.Necessary references to data sources should be provided
3.The conclusion section is too cumbersome and not clear enough.

This is an excellent paper and I have no more review comments.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In the abstract, line 18 you wrote; “: The China Comprehensive Pilot Zone for Cross-border E-commerce (CBEC-PZ)…

The wording that you abbreviated (the acronyms) do NOT match the abbreviation you given between (Parenthesis)

 What is CBEV-PZ?

Line 20 in the abstract you wrote, “However, few studies have investigated its environmental impact.” The environmental impact of what? On what?

This sentence here However, few studies have investigated its environmental impact. Is called incomplete sentence that does not mean anything. Has no subject nor an object in the sentence structure.

 

Line 21 you wrote “agile governance mechanism, ecological competitive advantage and reverse innovation effect.”

What is Agile mechanism?

What is competitive advantage? and

What is innovative effect?

 

Line 23 you wrote, “difference-difference method” It should read (difference-in-differences) Is this mistake an intentional mistake or a naïve mistake?

Line 25 you wrote, “further uses the data of the final energy consumption structure of resources at the city” What data?

When you say in the abstract the data, this means the reader knows what are you refereeing to? Which is not clear from these sentences.

 

Under key words you write DID

Then you did not define this DID till line 66 when you wrote difference-in-differences (DID). If you want to define DID it has to be up in front of the Tile, Abstract or the key word; not later on

We did not has to go far to see many mistakes:

1-    Figure 1 is names figure 1 twice. Two figures both numbered Figure 1!

2-    Table 2 is not to be found anywhere after table 1 was shown. Then, there are more tables all the way to table 6.

3-     Line 107 you wrote “electric vehicles” then, you defined it and abbreviated it in line 184 and wrote electric vehicles (EVs). It should be the other way around. The electric vehicles (EVs) goes to line 107 and EV in line 184.

Was these intentional mistakes by not reading the manuscript before submission?

This indicates lack of care of the authors towards the final form of the manuscript submission for the first round of review. 

We just discovered that there are two Tables both labeled Table 3! You can not be serious! 

Best,

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English writings needs lots of fixing. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of “Cross-border E-business and Air Quality: the Quasi Natural Experiment from Perspective of Natural Resources”. Submitted to “Sustainability”.

COMMENTS: From the study of this work, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. The abstract must be improved. The abstract should answer the following questions: What problem was studied, and why is it important? What are the significant results? What conclusions can be drawn from the results?
2. Complete proofreading is important throughout the manuscript to rectify typos/grammatical errors.
3. The writing flow and style, arrangement of the information should be revised, to give a clear view of the work.
4. Methodologies are not sufficiently explained.
5. What is the limitation of the current work and what is the suggestion for the prospect?
6. What data sources are used to assess air quality and energy consumption at the city level?
7. What role does institutional innovation play in achieving sustainable urban economic development?
8. Why was GDP per capita chosen as the measure of regional economic development?
9. How do these socio-economic indicators interact with CBEC-PZ policies to influence air quality?
10. Is there a particular reason for focusing on six pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, SO₂, NO, CO, and O₃)? Could other pollutants (e.g., VOCs, NH₃) have been included?
11. How does averaging daily AQI values over a year help in understanding long-term air quality trends?
12. What type of weight matrix was used in your spatial analysis, and why was it chosen over other alternatives (e.g., contiguity or distance-based matrices)?

 

Major revision as briefly mentioned above is required for further consideration.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review Comments
Recommendation: Major revision required

1. At the outset, I wish to compliment the authors for the great hard work they have put into working on this topic. Nevertheless, I have a few concerns. I suggest that the manuscript needs to make some modifications before publication.
2. For readers to quickly catch your contribution, it would be better to highlight major difficulties and challenges, and your original achievements to overcome them, in a clearer way in the abstract and introduction.
3. The Authors should add more information and rewrite the introduction to point out how their work helps advance the state of the art.
4. There was no proper validation of the methodology.
5. Section 5 is poorly presented.
6. Moran scatter plot of air quality level can be for 2017 and 2024.
7. The purpose of the work is not clear at all.
8. There are many expression errors in the paper, and the author should carefully check and revise them.
9. There are formatting issues with some references.
10. Check the numbering of all Figures.
11. The Conclusions need to be pointed out and more specific. Conclusions should always be quantifiable. I was looking for not just "increase" or "decrease" in values but wanted to understand the reasons for this "increase" or "decrease" in values, which were not presented in the paper. Hence, please rewrite the entire Conclusion.
12. Moreover, the manuscript could be substantially improved by relying and citing more on recent literature.
13. The use of technical terms is not appropriate. Also, this version is full of grammatical mistakes.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Send it to an English native for corrections.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 5 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an exhaustive paper focused on quantitative evaluation of air pollution as a results of cross-border business activities along Yangtze River in China. 

Three mechanisms have been proposed for pollution treatment in the area under study. First is referred to competitive pressures access by means of policy stimulating reverse innovations of enterprises as a result of finding cost-effective solutions to reduce pollutant emissions. The second mechanism is to encourage firms to adopt green technologies such as low-carbon and cleaner production technologies. The third direction is to develop government mechanism for environmental monitoring and efficient pollution control. All these procedures are able to act as catalyst for environmental remediation in urban area.

After a consistent review on state-of-the arts in the field of reverse innovation of cross-border E-business policy at pilot cities, the agile governance of natural resources is presented. The section devoted to "Data and statistics" contains information on cross-border E-commerce comprehensive pilot zones, on renewable and non-renewable resources data, and socio-economic data.

Research methodology for modeling the process control, empirical analysis, heterogeneity and expended analysis.

The paper is ended with final conclusions, adequately highlighting the strong points of the work.

The paper is well written, both in content and its form, the text is correct, and research methodology is clearly developed. 

As minor correction in abstract (line 27) and in text is referred to cardinal points: North, South, East, West should be written with capital letters for nouns (not for adjectives). 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good work for the second version. keep up the good work. 

There is minor points such as you wrote (operations[24]) the reference is attached to the end of sentence. While in (transformation [2,3] ) the references are not touching the end of the sentence. 

Usually you leave one space when referencing [10,11]. 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Now paper reads well.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you for your constructive feedback.

Should any further refinements be required to meet the journal’s standards, please do not hesitate to reach out.  We appreciate the opportunity to contribute to sustainability and look forward to your guidance on next steps.