Search Results (652)

Urban well-being in China emerges from spatially uneven configurations of development intensity, environmental pressure, governance input, public-service capacity, land-use transformation, and urban–rural conditions. Using a balanced panel of 294 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2023 (5880 city–year observations), this study combines spatial mapping, Local Moran’s I, Getis–Ord Gi*, and two-way fixed-effects (TWFE) models to examine how governance-related conditions and ecological and environmental pressure are associated with resident well-being. Prefecture-level cities are treated as urban–rural territorial governance units encompassing urban cores, peri-urban areas, and surrounding county-level jurisdictions. Spatial diagnostics reveal non-identical clustering of resource and environmental intensity (REI), government regulation and investment (GRI), ecological and environmental pressure (EEP), and resident well-being (RWB). REI is positively associated with EEP, and this association remains positive after excluding observations containing ordinary statistical completion. EEP is negatively associated with RWB in the full-sample TWFE and one-year-lagged specifications, but the association weakens in the 2014–2023 and restricted samples, indicating temporal and sample boundaries rather than a stable mediating mechanism. GRI shows contrasting cross-city and within-city patterns, consistent with a distinction between governance capacity and pressure-responsive adjustment. Dimension-level results further show that EEP is negatively associated with rural disposable income, whereas medical service capacity is positively associated with rural disposable income. Overall, the study provides a spatially grounded account of heterogeneous governance–environment–welfare relationships across Chinese prefecture-level territories. Full article

Land transport infrastructure (LTI) is a core component of sustainable transport systems, shaping mobility, efficiency, and the spatial distribution of development gains. Existing studies of urban–rural income inequality mainly focus on individual transport modes or aggregate infrastructure scale, with limited attention to transport-system composition and its contextual dependence. This study addresses this gap by conceptualizing LTI as a layered system and examining how its internal composition is associated with urban–rural income inequality across different levels of urbanization and economic development. Using a balanced panel of 286 prefecture-level cities from 2013 to 2023, the study constructs ratio-based indicators of compositional shifts within road systems, within rail systems, and between rail and road infrastructure. Two-way fixed-effects models incorporate interactions with urbanization and economic development. Conditional marginal-effect maps are then used to identify how these associations change across development contexts. The results reveal a clear stage-dependent pattern. Urbanization generally attenuates the inequality-widening association of mobility-oriented upgrading, whereas economic development influences whether such upgrading reinforces spatial polarization or supports wider diffusion. When urbanization and development are both sufficiently advanced, the marginal association may shift toward inequality reduction. At earlier stages, accessibility-oriented roads and conventional rail tend to show stronger equalizing associations. Mobility-oriented roads and high-speed rail are more likely to be associated with narrower inequality in more advanced settings. Mechanism-oriented analyses yield evidence consistent with two potential channels: the agricultural–non-agricultural labor-productivity gap and the non-agricultural employment share. The extended analyses and robustness checks broadly support the main findings. These findings indicate that transport infrastructure upgrading should be evaluated not only in terms of efficiency, but also according to whether the resulting infrastructure mix broadens access to opportunities, improves resource allocation, and supports inclusive regional development. Full article

Digitization is reshaping how banks operate, yet whether it improves corporate financial performance remains unsettled. This study examines how the digital transformation that banks disclose relates to the structure of their key financial performance indicators. Using a balanced panel of 73 listed Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) banks over 2020–2025 (438 bank–year observations), digital transformation is measured by a text-mined digital disclosure index (DDI, 0–100) constructed from annual reports and decomposed into nine themes. Bank fixed-effects regressions with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, one-year-lagged specifications, and two-step system GMM are estimated across profitability, net interest margin, cost efficiency, credit risk and capital adequacy. Disclosed digitization more than doubled over the window, but its associations with performance are conditional rather than uniformly positive. Within banks, a higher DDI value is associated with wider net interest margins, yet also with lower profitability, higher cost-to-income ratios, modestly higher credit risk, and thinner capital buffers. This pattern is consistent with an investment or build-out phase in which the costs of digital transformation are visible before any efficiency or stability dividend and in which margins are the single offsetting benefit. The six-year window observes only this cost-bearing segment and not any later recovery, so the study documents the investment-phase drag rather than a completed cycle. The theme decomposition indicates that the margin association is closest to regulatory technology, cybersecurity, broad transformation and payments. Because the design is observational, the results are interpreted as within-bank associations rather than causal effects, and, although precisely estimated, these associations are economically modest. The study contributes a transparent theme-decomposed measure of bank digitization and evidence on its limits for corporate financial performance in an emerging-market banking region. Full article

Nuclear energy has attracted significant interest from policymakers because of its potential to improve environmental sustainability (ES). This study investigates the interplay among nuclear energy consumption (NEC), economic growth (GDP), renewable energy utilization (REN), urbanization (URB), and ES, measured by the load capacity factor (LCF). We analyze 16 OECD countries selected for continuous nuclear operation and complete data from 2000 to 2023. Unlike prior single-country or single-energy studies, we jointly model nuclear and renewable energy within a panel quantile framework to compare their heterogeneous effects on ES. Using the Method of Moments Quantile Regression, we find that NEC, REN, and URB are positively associated with LCF; GDP is negatively associated; REN shows a larger elasticity than NEC; and NEC’s effect strengthens at higher quantiles. Robustness checks with alternative estimators, indicators, sample periods, year fixed effects, and a formal test of the load capacity curve hypothesis broadly confirm these findings, although the implied turning point of the income–LCF relationship lies beyond the sample income range. Results suggest that OECD countries would benefit from coordinated investment in both nuclear and renewable energy, alongside sustainable urbanization policies. Full article

Universal health coverage requires simultaneous progress in service coverage and financial protection, yet these dimensions are commonly assessed separately. We conducted a secondary ecological panel analysis using official World Health Organization/World Bank indicators. A document-oriented workflow preserved irregular subgroup structures before conversion to an unbalanced country–year panel comprising 981 observations from 159 countries/economies between 2000 and 2023. The primary inferential specification was a two-way fixed-effects model with country and year effects and country-clustered standard errors; a country fixed-effects model with a linear time trend, a random-intercept model, and generalized estimating equations were complementary robustness analyses. We also examined service domains, wealth- and rural-urban inequalities, beta convergence, and exploratory country typologies. Mean service coverage rose from 58.9 in 2000 to 74.0 in 2023, whereas mean financial hardship fell from 24.0% to 17.3%. In the primary model, each one-point increase in service coverage was associated with a 0.441-percentage-point reduction in hardship (95% confidence interval, −0.707 to −0.175; p = 0.001). Mean poorest–richest and rural–urban hardship gaps were 53.7 and 12.5 percentage points, respectively. The inverse association was largest in low-income settings, where socioeconomic gradients were also steepest. Service coverage gains should therefore not be interpreted as sufficient evidence of equitable universal health coverage; monitoring systems and financing reforms should jointly target access, financial protection, and distributional gaps. Full article

Whether economic growth decouples from municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in upper–middle-income economies remains contested. We test the Waste Kuznets Curve and a disposal-to-recovery substitution effect using a 13-year panel of 1101 Colombian municipalities, combining step-wise fixed-effects models with a non-parametric generalized additive model (GAM), a family of spatial specifications, and a selection-aware recovery model. We find no evidence of income-driven decoupling in landfilling. Once the urban density and demographic structure are controlled, the income terms lose significance, the non-parametric estimate is predominantly monotonic, and density emerges as the main structural driver. Material recovery grows faster than disposal with income (relative substitution), but this signal is concentrated where recovery is measured—only 27% of municipalities report it, and coverage falls from every metropolitan municipality to one in five in the rural periphery, and the income terms are stable across every spatial representation—so that once selection is corrected the recovery elasticity falls from about 5.9 to a non-significant 1.3. Rather than spontaneous decoupling, Colombia exhibits persistent coupling alongside an institutionally engineered, spatially unequal recovery capacity. Achieving SDG 12 therefore requires stratified policies that mandate consumption reduction in mature urban economies while subsidizing shared circular infrastructure for historically neglected rural jurisdictions. Full article

Digitalisation is increasingly viewed as an instrument for narrowing the VAT gap in the European Union, yet the relative relevance of voluntary business digitalisation and mandatory administrative reporting remains unclear. This study distinguishes cloud accounting from mandatory transaction reporting and analyses an unbalanced EU-27 panel for 2013–2024, with estimations limited to 2013–2023. Sequential pooled OLS, two-way fixed-effects models and robustness checks are applied to European Commission, Eurostat and World Bank data. The initially negative association between cloud accounting and the VAT gap disappears after controlling for income and government effectiveness. Mandatory digital reporting is associated with a VAT gap of about 3–4 percentage points lower, although the small number of adopters and pre-adoption trends preclude causal claims. Theoretically, first, the findings distinguish firm-level digital capability from information directly accessible to tax administrations; second, they show that technology adoption and institutional capacity must be analysed separately. Practically, first, the results support interoperable systems providing timely, structured and verifiable transaction data; second, they indicate that cloud accounting should complement, rather than replace, mandatory reporting infrastructure. Full article

This study asks when renewable energy translates into sustainable-development progress. The central contribution is to show that the aggregate renewable-energy share is a compositionally ambiguous indicator whose developmental meaning depends on a country’s stage of energy modernisation. In an unbalanced panel of 154 countries (2000–2022) linking the Sustainable Development Report SDG Index to World Bank indicators, two-way fixed-effects estimates with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors show the renewable share to be negatively associated with SDG performance on average. Three results demonstrate that this reflects traditional biomass rather than modern renewable energy: the renewable share correlates −0.81 with clean-cooking access; the renewable association turns from negative in biomass-dependent economies to positive in modern-energy economies; and a modern-renewable-electricity measure carries no negative coefficient, with the penalty concentrated in the social goals, where household air pollution and fuel-collection burdens fall. Digitalisation is positively associated with SDG performance and similarly conditions the renewable association, but it is best read as a correlated marker of modernisation rather than an independent causal lever. All estimates are conditional associations rather than causal effects. The findings imply that renewable-energy investment yields larger developmental returns when sequenced with clean-cooking and digital-infrastructure programmes, particularly in non-high-income countries. Full article

This paper examines the relationship between revenue diversification, profitability, and risk in European banks, with particular emphasis on the structural break induced by the COVID-19 shock. Using quarterly supervisory data from the European Banking Authority (EBA) over the period 2016Q1–2024Q4, we distinguish between pre- and post-pandemic regimes and estimate dynamic fixed-effects models that account for unobserved heterogeneity and persistence in bank performance. The results reveal a pattern consistent with regime dependence. Descriptive (quintile-based) comparisons suggest that banks with greater reliance on non-interest income tended to report higher profitability prior to COVID-19, although data limitations prevent us from confirming this pattern in a full multivariate regression for the pre-COVID subsample. In the post-COVID period, once bank and time fixed effects, persistence, and balance-sheet characteristics are properly controlled for, revenue diversification does not exert a statistically significant effect on either profitability or earnings volatility; this result is robust across bank fixed effects only, two-way (bank and time) clustered, and one-way (bank) clustered specifications. We show that diversification is systematically associated with differences in bank size, capitalization, and lending intensity, indicating that income structure is closely linked to underlying business model characteristics. These findings suggest that the observed diversification–performance relationship largely reflects cross-sectional heterogeneity rather than a stable causal effect. Overall, the evidence indicates that revenue diversification does not provide a consistent improvement in risk-adjusted performance in European banking. Instead, performance and risk dynamics are primarily driven by balance-sheet composition and persistence. The results highlight the importance of accounting for structural heterogeneity and macroeconomic regimes when evaluating the role of non-interest income in bank performance. Full article

Marine fisheries play a vital role in ensuring food supply and sustaining livelihoods in coastal regions of China. However, the expansion of aquaculture has led to increasing carbon emissions and mounting pressure on resources and the environment, making the improvement of ecological efficiency a critical issue for the sustainable development of the industry. From the perspective of carbon emissions as undesirable output, this paper employs the DEA-SBM model and the GML index to measure the ecological efficiency of marine fisheries across nine coastal provinces in China from 2006 to 2023. Furthermore, using fixed-effects models, mediation-effect models, and grouped regression models, this study empirically examines the impacts of fishermen’s income and environmental regulations on the ecological efficiency of marine fisheries and their transmission mechanisms. The results indicate that ecological efficiency exhibits fluctuating trends across provinces, with significant inter-provincial disparities. Fishermen’s income has a significant positive effect on ecological efficiency, while environmental regulations show a significant negative effect. Digitalization level significantly promotes ecological efficiency, whereas fishery disaster losses significantly inhibit it. Technological adoption intention plays a partial mediating role in the pathways through which both fishermen’s income and environmental regulations affect ecological efficiency. Significant regional heterogeneity is observed, with the eastern coastal region exhibiting the strongest effects of various factors and the northern coastal region showing the weakest. Accordingly, this paper proposes differentiated enhancement pathways for ecological efficiency from four dimensions, including technological innovation-driven development, industrial structure optimization, environmental policy regulation, and regional coordinated governance, with the aim of providing theoretical foundations and policy references for the low-carbon transformation and sustainable development of marine fisheries in China’s coastal areas. Full article

Lethal foodborne illness outbreaks represent a critical intersection of public health surveillance, environmental health, and forensic toxicology. When acute gastrointestinal syndromes lead to sudden death, traditional postmortem investigation techniques are often hindered by tissue autolysis and the overgrowth of putrefactive microflora, which complicate conventional microbiological assays. This review establishes a comprehensive framework for chemical forensics by evaluating the utility of stable isotope analysis (SIA) as a supportive, probabilistic chemical proxy to complement traditional epidemiological investigations of postmortem food contamination sources. Following JBI scoping review guidelines and the PRISMA-ScR reporting framework, data from 42 peer-reviewed articles (2000–2026) were charted and synthesized to map natural isotopic variations (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ¹⁸O, δ²H and δ³⁴S) across both forensic decedents and environmental reservoirs. The findings outline a structured, multi-tissue diagnostic cascade governed by biological metabolic turnover rates: unabsorbed gastric chyme provides a direct chemical match to contaminated source food items within a hyper-acute 0–6 h window; high-turnover visceral matrices (liver, blood plasma) shift to reflect acute exposure profiles within 1–7 days; and continuously fixed keratinized matrices (hair, nails) archive multi-month dietary and transcontinental transit histories. Furthermore, compound-specific isotope analysis (CSIA) of individual amino acids offers unprecedented structural resolution, utilizing the carbon discrimination metric (Δ¹³C_glu-phe) to differentiate pristine agricultural signatures from endogenous metabolic distortions while biochemically verifying pre-mortem physiological stress and hyper-catabolic muscle wasting. Taphonomic thresholds were explicitly defined, establishing that bulk visceral soft tissues remain isotopically stable (±0.3‰) for up to 48 h at room temperature (~21 °C) before microbially induced nitrogen enrichment (δ¹⁵N > +2.8‰) alters native profiles, whereas hair and nail keratin maintain absolute isotopic stability for over 180 days postmortem. When pristine multi-isotope signatures are coupled with mandatory chloroform–methanol lipid extraction and processed through spatial Bayesian assignment models, geographic provenance tracking via environmental isoscapes achieves a predictive accuracy of 97%. This review introduces a standardized environmental health protocol designed to harmonize field environmental sampling with medical autopsies. This protocol provides a legally robust strategy for investigating unresolved lethal foodborne illness case-outbreaks, particularly those involving pediatric mortalities linked to the consumption of counterfeit or fraudulent food products in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, it aims to strengthen national and municipal legal frameworks and international biosecurity enforcement. Full article

Background: Progress toward universal health coverage in Central Asia depends on the interaction between public healthcare financing, broader social protection, and the fiscal capacity of the state. The region is analytically important because five post-Soviet health systems share a common institutional legacy while differing markedly in income, informality, migration dependence, and public financing arrangements. Methods: The study examines a country–year panel for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan over 2015–2024. Fixed-effects estimates are treated as the principal benchmark. Two-step System Generalized Method of Moments estimates are retained only as sensitivity evidence because the cross-sectional dimension is very small (N = 5). Out-of-pocket expenditure as a share of current health expenditure represents household financial burden, while changes in general government debt measure macro-fiscal pressure. Results: In the reported models, higher social protection expenditure and higher domestic general government health expenditure are negatively associated with the out-of-pocket share. The fixed-effects coefficients are −1.245 and −3.810, respectively; the corresponding System GMM sensitivity estimates are −1.830 and −4.102. Combined social and health expenditure is positively associated with the debt ratio in the fiscal model. These findings are associations rather than causal effects. An illustrative scenario analysis shows that the estimated financing gap to a 5% of GDP public health benchmark varies substantially across countries and assumptions. Conclusions: The results are consistent with a dual-channel framework in which public financing can shift health risk away from households while creating fiscal pressure when revenue mobilization and expenditure efficiency do not adjust. Policy implications therefore concern the composition, targeting, and financing of expenditure rather than spending expansion alone. The limited sample, incomplete interpolation audit trail, and incomplete archived GMM diagnostics require cautious interpretation and motivate replication with household and subnational data. Full article

This research analyses the heterogeneous effects of digital infrastructure on sustainable economic growth in five developing countries (Egypt, India, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan) using the period 2014–2025. We use panel fixed effects with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors to investigate the effect of internet penetration, mobile broadband and fixed broadband on the GDP per capita growth. Our results suggest that digital infrastructure has a statistically and economically significant impact on economic growth. Internet penetration yields the largest benefits, followed by mobile broadband, whereas fixed broadband is not statistically significant in the full model, which is reflective of limited access in these countries. An exploratory Random Forest analysis with the important caveat of limited sample size suggests that internet penetration is the most important predictor of growth, followed by mobile broadband and human capital. However, these machine learning results should be considered exploratory given the small sample (N = 60, or N = 48 when excluding Sudan) and should not be over-interpreted. Our heterogeneity analysis finds that internet penetration drives growth in middle-income countries (Egypt, India), while mobile broadband drives growth in low-income countries (Sudan, Kenya). The moderation by human capital is large: the marginal impact of internet penetration more than doubles once average education exceeds six years. However, we note that this threshold is illustrative, based on the distribution of the sample, and not necessarily a policy cutoff. The results have implications for SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 9 (infrastructure and innovation) and SDG 10 (inequality reduction). However, with our purposively selected five-country sample, these results are better considered as case-based evidence rather than statistically representative of all developing economies. The stark digital divide is evident in the 87% internet penetration in MENA countries compared to 44% in Sub-Saharan Africa and underscores the need for context-specific policy approaches. We suggest that low-income countries focus on expanding mobile broadband and middle-income countries make complementary investments in internet infrastructure and human capital, but emphasize that these policy suggestions are indicative rather than conclusive. Full article

This study examines the empirical association between horizontal eco-compensation and regional inclusive green growth. Using panel data for 81 cities in eight provinces of the Yellow River Basin from 2012 to 2022, it applies a staggered difference-in-differences model, mediation regressions, and a spatial econometric model. Double machine learning with five-fold cross-fitting is used as a robustness exercise to mitigate multicollinearity and functional-form misspecification. Conditional on city and year fixed effects and the included covariates, policy implementation is positively associated with inclusive green growth in pilot cities. The mediation regressions are consistent with three possible channels—total factor productivity, science and technology expenditure, and industrial upgrading—but do not establish definitive causal mediation. The spatial estimates indicate a significant negative association with inclusive green growth in neighboring cities. Within-group estimates are significant for upstream and downstream cities but not for midstream cities, and the midstream estimate is significantly weaker than the downstream estimate. Estimates are also significant within the medium- and high-income groups, although full-sample interaction tests do not establish differences across economic development tiers. Because policy placement is not fully random and time-varying unobservables cannot be completely ruled out, the findings should be interpreted as conditional on the maintained identification assumptions. Policy recommendations, therefore, emphasize basin-specific targeting, stronger implementation capacity in weaker areas, cross-regional coordination, and expansion rules that weigh fiscal capacity, opportunity and transition costs, and marginal benefits. Full article

The sharp rise in nominal interest rates after 2022 constitutes a substantial test for European non-financial corporations after a prolonged period of exceptionally cheap debt. This paper examines how the cost of debt financing—proxied by the lagged, ex post real long-term sovereign yield, interpreted throughout as an indicator of economy-wide financing conditions rather than a direct corporate borrowing rate—is associated with the gross investment rate of non-financial corporations in the EU-27 over 2000–2025, using harmonised annual sector accounts and two-way fixed-effects panel models, interaction designs and local projections. Three findings emerge. First, the conditional association is stronger for the real than for the nominal cost of debt: a one percentage point increase in the lagged real yield is associated with a decline of roughly 0.3–0.4 percentage points in the investment rate, and a formal test does not reject treating the nominal yield and inflation as components of the real rate. Second, this association is not stable over time: it weakens markedly after 2020, and the weakening is robust to an alternative 2022 breakpoint and to wild cluster bootstrap inference. Third, direct tests with predetermined leverage and profit shares do not account for this weakening, so stronger corporate balance sheets—including the pronounced deleveraging from around 477% to around 226% of income—remain only one candidate explanation among several. The profit-share interaction is positive, but the evidence of attenuation is weak and specification-dependent: it is not statistically significant with the one-year-lagged measure and reaches only marginal significance under two alternative measures. Full article