Search Results (1,295)

China’s transition from rapid growth to high-quality development requires pharmaceutical manufacturing to pursue productivity gains that are both innovation-driven and sustainable. New quality productive forces (NQPF)—characterized by technological innovation, optimized factor allocation, and industrial upgrading—offer a pathway toward this goal by linking efficiency improvement with resource efficiency and cleaner production. Using panel data from A-share-listed pharmaceutical manufacturing firms during 2017–2024, this study constructs a multidimensional firm-level NQPF index and employs a two-way fixed-effects model to examine its impact on total factor productivity (TFP), together with the mediating role of innovation quality and the moderating effect of R&D intensity. The results show that NQPF significantly improves enterprise TFP, with stronger effects among large-scale firms and those in eastern and western China. Innovation quality serves as an important transmission mechanism, while R&D intensity positively moderates the NQPF–TFP relationship; these findings are confirmed by a series of robustness checks. The study contributes to the literature by identifying firm-level transmission mechanisms and boundary conditions in the pharmaceutical industry, rather than treating NQPF as a macro-level concept or a direct productivity driver. From a sustainable-development perspective, these findings suggest that NQPF-driven productivity gains are consistent with, and may lay the foundation for, the sustainable transformation of pharmaceutical firms: higher TFP implies more efficient use of knowledge and material resources, and the innovation-quality mechanism indicates that NQPF encourage firms to move toward original and technologically advanced innovation—an essential condition for cleaner production and green technological upgrading. In this sense, high-quality innovation and R&D investment are not merely efficiency-enhancing factors but also potential enablers of sustainable industrial development. Because TFP is used as the outcome variable, however, the environmental and social dimensions of sustainable development are not directly estimated and remain an avenue for future research. The findings offer differentiated policy implications for pharmaceutical firms of different sizes and regions, emphasizing that strengthening NQPF and promoting high-quality innovation are critical for balancing efficiency gains with long-term sustainability in the pharmaceutical sector. Full article

Digital agriculture (sensors, Internet of Things, machine learning, robotics, digital twins) has for fifteen years been sustained by massive investment promising more productive, precise, and sustainable agriculture, yet adoption remains heterogeneous and systemic impact limited despite intense scientific output. The dominant explanation treats this as a diffusion deficit and calls for more farmer training, advisory support, and subsidy; this reading leaves the structure of research itself unexamined and does not, on its own, explain why the gap between announced and delivered performance persists across technology generations. We argue that, alongside diffusion-side and demand-side factors, the paradox has a further, under-recognised upstream component: research design oriented towards technological artefacts rather than guaranteed functions. We develop the case for this complementary reading using Stahel’s performance economy framework and the Product-Service Systems literature. Four contributions follow: a tripartite typology of function (service-, specification-, and process-function) articulated hierarchically explains why research centred on specification-function alone cannot guarantee a service-function; current research is characterised, on the reading developed here, by three cumulative biases and three blind spots, including data governance and the under-representation of the social sciences; a four-axis reorientation agenda is proposed; and the framework is distinguished from Agricultural Innovation Systems, Responsible Research and Innovation, and mission-oriented research by specifying the functional level these leave indeterminate. Full article

Effective modal shift policies require accurate valuation of the external costs associated with freight transport. However, South Korea’s logistics policy currently relies on valuation parameters that have not been systematically updated since 2013. This study recalibrates the unit benefits of shifting freight from roads to rails using a hybrid estimation framework that combines bottom-up emission estimation with a top-down allocation of aggregate external costs, grounded in national statistics harmonized to a 2022 base year (with some inputs drawn from the most recent earlier survey years and price-adjusted to 2022) and link-level national traffic data (KOTI View-T 3.0). We quantify the reductions in average external costs per ton/kilometer across five impact domains: air pollution, climate change, noise, traffic accidents, and congestion. The analysis yields a total unit benefit of KRW 151.81 per ton/kilometer, a figure approximately 3.7 times the inflation-adjusted benchmark currently in use. A decomposition of this difference shows that updated emission inventories, accident statistics, and valuation parameters alone raise the unit benefit to KRW 69.6 KRW per ton/kilometer (approximately 1.7 times the benchmark), while the revision of the road freight traffic share, from the 3.5% assumed in earlier travel demand models to the 21.2% observed at the link level, accounts for the remainder. Scenario analyses covering the principal allocation and valuation assumptions place the total unit benefit between KRW 38.6 and 217.7 per ton/kilometer: the benefit exceeds the benchmark in every scenario except the single most conservative variant, which combines all unfavorable assumptions simultaneously—including the legacy freight share—and falls approximately 5% below it. These findings indicate that the parameters currently used in policy appraisal may materially underestimate the social benefits of rail freight under the assumptions adopted here. We recommend that policymakers utilize these updated unit values to recalibrate freight subsidies and investment appraisals to align with the 2050 Carbon-Neutral Strategy. Full article

Sustainable Responsible Investment (SRI) emphasizes the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into investment decisions. This study examines the relationship between ESG disclosures and individual investors’ trading behaviors, with corporate reputation as a mediating construct within the framework of signaling theory. Extending signaling theory, the study incorporates both cognitive and affective dimensions of corporate reputation to explain how ESG signals are interpreted by investors in emerging markets. Primary data were collected in 2025 from 390 individual investors in the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used for analysis. The findings reveal that environmental and governance disclosures have a significant positive impact on investors’ behaviors, while social disclosures show a limited direct effect on both cognitive and affective corporate reputation dimensions. The results further indicate that corporate reputation significantly mediates the relationship between environmental and governance disclosures and investors’ behaviors. However, no mediation effect is observed for social disclosures. The study demonstrates that both cognitive (rational evaluation) and affective (emotional trust) dimensions of corporate reputation enhance the credibility of ESG signals and strengthen their influence on investment decisions. Overall, the study contributes to the ESG and signaling theory literature by highlighting how dual-dimensional corporate reputation shapes investors’ responses to ESG disclosures in emerging markets such as Pakistan. Full article

Balancing decarbonization with grid reliability requires managing renewable volatility through Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) or Capacity Remuneration Mechanisms (CRMs) alongside carbon emission trading (CET). However, their comparative systemic impacts remain unclear. This study evaluates the strategic equivalence of CET-RPS and CET-CRM regulations using a Stackelberg duopoly model. We endogenize grid-side storage investment and parameterize source-storage synergy to establish a rigorous equivalence mapping anchored in a unified macroeconomic penetration target. The results reveal that the CRM exhibits dual systemic impacts contingent on technological readiness. Immature conditions necessitate excessive capacity prices, inducing speculative over-investment. Conversely, mature synergy creates a substitution effect that efficiently offsets public compensation budgets. Furthermore, the dynamic policy phase boundary demonstrates that stricter decarbonization targets require higher technological readiness for the CRM to dominate the RPS in social welfare. Additionally, imposing stringent administrative capacity derating factors on storage fails to alter its physical deployment, instead unintentionally transferring wealth to conventional high-carbon generators. Regulators must therefore synchronize capacity market deployment with storage technology maturity and adopt dynamic capacity accreditation to prevent such distributional distortions. Full article

Carbon emissions trading market is an important institutional innovation to promote green and low-carbon transformation of economic development and sustainable economic and social development. With the quasi-natural experiment of China’s carbon emissions trading pilot policy since 2013, this paper constructs a multi-period double-difference model based on the panel data of 30 provinces and systematically evaluates the effectiveness as well as the heterogeneous performance of the carbon emissions trading policy on carbon emissions. The results show that the implementation of carbon emissions trading policy significantly reduces regional carbon emissions, with a significant impact coefficient of −0.1701 at the 1% level, and the finding passes a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact effect of carbon emissions trading policies is more significant in the eastern and central regions and more significant in regions with high levels of human capital. Mechanism analysis indicates that the carbon emissions trading policies achieve carbon emission reduction through the market mechanism and government intervention mechanism, and promote regional investment in scientific and technological innovation, reduce the total amount of energy consumption, and optimize the structure of energy consumption. Further analysis indicates that the carbon trading policy exerts a significant spatial spillover effect on carbon emission reduction. Full article

From the perspective of the increasing marginal tendency toward tax avoidance, this paper proves that groups with higher wealth levels possess stronger willingness and capacity for tax avoidance, which continuously widens the wealth gap. As wealth inequality keeps worsening, it is bound to exert profound impacts on economic growth. This paper further sorts out three transmission channels through which wealth inequality affects economic growth: increasing returns to scale of physical capital investment, erosion of fiscal tax bases, and accumulation of per capita human capital. These three channels jointly generate a nonlinear impact of wealth inequality on economic growth. Based on an unbalanced cross-country panel dataset, this paper adopts the income Gini coefficient lagged by 20 years as the instrumental variable for the wealth Gini coefficient, and incorporates core variables involved in the theoretical model for empirical research. The empirical results are consistent with theoretical deductions. Unlike existing studies that only conclude a negative correlation between the two variables, this paper identifies an inverted U-shaped effect of wealth inequality on economic growth, offering new considerations for policy design by social planners. Full article

As the impact of climate change becomes increasingly disruptive worldwide, the gap in adaptation finance is widening. Despite advancements in adaptation planning and implementation in every sector and region, the growing resource gap necessitates more ‘effective’ climate adaptation projects. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to provide an exploratory analysis to identify and examine potential factors associated with the effectiveness ratings of multilateral-funded agricultural climate adaptation projects that have been implemented on the ground, completed and documented. Forty-four projects from multilateral funds were collected and analyzed for this purpose. The study employed a two-pronged approach to cross-complement the implications—key contributing factors to the effectiveness, rated per the actual outcome of the projects, were identified from the terminal evaluation documents of the highly satisfactory and unsatisfactory projects (conventional content analysis); and, effectiveness ratings were assessed against various socio-economic indicators of the countries where the projects were executed through Spearman’s correlation analysis to identify the possible association. The results implied that the contributing factors associated with the effectiveness ratings converge around several elements: (i) capacity building and education; (ii) local engagement and social inclusion; (iii) healthy and resilient livelihood; and, (iv) governance and commitment. Additionally, social inequality indicated its relevance to the project effectiveness ratings. While effectiveness ratings were found to have a positive and moderate correlation (r: 0.274; p < 0.1) with Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), such a correlation was not explicit with HDI. In addition, the study found strong correlations with multiple ‘inequality’ indicators—the gender inequality index, inequality-adjusted life expectancy index and inequality-adjusted income index. These results from the various ‘inequality-adjusted’ indexes further suggest the importance of considering all levels of the community, particularly those groups in the most disadvantageous positions, often farmers, to close the inequality gap. Overall, the findings and implications from this study are expected to provide a basis for future climate adaptation investments in agriculture. Full article

Growing safety-related risks and increasing regulatory pressures have highlighted the importance of safety investment for corporate sustainable development. However, little attention has been paid to whether and how corporate safety investment enhances total factor productivity (TFP). Using panel data from Chinese A-share listed enterprises in high-risk industries over the period 2012–2024, this study examines the impact of safety investment on TFP. The results show that safety investment significantly improves TFP of enterprises in high-risk industries. Mechanism analyses indicate that this positive effect operates primarily through strengthening organizational resilience and alleviating financing constraints. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the enhancing effect of safety investment is more pronounced in enterprises with high levels of safety investment, state-owned enterprises and enterprises with weaker internal controls. Further analysis shows that safety investment improves corporate sustainable development performance and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance by enhancing TFP. These findings contribute to the literature on corporate safety management and operational efficiency by demonstrating that safety investment is not merely a tool for mitigating workplace risks but also a strategic resource that strengthens corporate safety governance, improves operational efficiency, and ultimately promotes sustainable corporate development. Full article

This paper examines the macro–micro impact of drought in South Africa using a computable general equilibrium model calibrated to the structure of the South African economy. Drought is represented as a severe supply-side shock: a 50% decline in total factor productivity in agriculture, forestry and fishing. The analysis traces how this shock is transmitted from agricultural production to prices, trade, employment, household income, consumption and welfare. The results show that agricultural output falls by 19.5%, agricultural prices rise by 43.3%, and agricultural imports increase by 84.8% as the economy shifts towards external supply. These sectoral effects generate wider macroeconomic losses, including a 1.0% decline in real GDP, a 1.7% increase in unemployment, a 1.2% fall in household income and a 1.5% reduction in household consumption. Welfare declines for both rural and urban households, but rural households experience larger losses because of their stronger dependence on agriculture, farm income, livestock assets and food markets. The findings show that drought is not only an agricultural or hydrological event; it is an economy-wide and distributional shock transmitted through production, price, trade and labour-market channels. Although imports help to cushion domestic scarcity, they do not fully offset higher prices or welfare losses. Policy responses should therefore combine drought-resilient agricultural investment, water-resource resilience, targeted social protection, food-supply stabilisation and rural livelihood diversification. Full article

This study examines the relationship between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and investment efficiency and investigates whether board gender diversity moderates this relationship among Saudi listed firms. Using a sample of non-financial companies listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) with available ESG scores over the period 2015–2023, the study employs panel regression analysis to assess the impact of ESG performance on investment efficiency. The findings indicate that higher ESG performance is associated with a greater tendency toward overinvestment rather than improved investment efficiency. However, board gender diversity significantly weakens this relationship, indicating a moderating effect of female board representation. The results remain robust across alternative specifications. This study advances to the ESG and corporate governance literature by providing empirical evidence from Saudi Arabia, an emerging market undergoing significant institutional reforms under Vision 2030 and highlights the importance of board gender diversity in improving the effectiveness of firms’ sustainability strategies. Full article

Given the rising global interest in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), this paper investigates whether a company’s ESG news affects equity investors’ sentiment, addressing a gap in the relevant research. Interest in ESG investing has grown rapidly, yet existing research measures investor sentiment only indirectly—through market-wide proxies such as the CBOE Volatility Index, low-frequency investor surveys, or realized stock returns—measures that conflate sentiment with risk aversion and fundamentals and cannot isolate firm-specific reactions to ESG news. This study measures investor sentiment directly from investors’ own expressions: we pair firm-day ESG news-sentiment scores for all S&P 500 constituents with investor sentiment extracted from stock-related tweets using a finance-tuned RoBERTa model. Using Bayesian Ridge Regression (BRR), the study finds that ESG news significantly impacts equity investors’ sentiment. This study contributes to both academic and managerial practice by establishing the association and sensitivity of ESG news and investor sentiment in academic literature and proposing a framework for firms to practice effective sustainability management. Full article

Tourist engagement has redirected tourism scholarship from static satisfaction evaluations toward the interactive, value-creating psychological processes that bind tourists to destinations. Focusing on low-carbon tourism, where success hinges on translating environmental awareness into sustained behavioral change, this study argues that whether experiences translate into engagement depends on the interplay between external social resources and internal personal resources. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), we examine the joint effects of tourist experience, social support, and self-efficacy using survey data from 206 adult tourists with low-carbon travel experience. The results reveal that the average, unconditional effect of experience on engagement was not statistically significant; experience is not inconsequential but conditional, its impact depending on the resources tourists bring to it. Social support negatively moderates the experience–engagement path, reflecting a resource-substitution mechanism whereby abundant external resources crowd out tourists’ direct psychological investment in the experience. This inhibitory pattern is conditional on self-efficacy: for tourists with strong efficacy beliefs, social support becomes a functional tool that works synergistically with the travel experience to elevate engagement. This moderated moderation forms a single conditional architecture that extends COR Theory and SCT by clarifying when internal and external resources substitute for or reinforce one another. In practice, the findings advocate for empowerment-based service design: cultivating mastery experiences and self-efficacy unlocks the positive potential of social support and deepens engagement in sustainable travel. Full article

Implementation of real-scale systems for rainwater harvesting, treatment and reuse of greywater in residential areas is challenging because several factors should be considered for full adoption and satisfaction of decision-makers, urban developers and users. Technological, construction, operational, social (acceptance), impact on water resources, regulatory, and economic factors are involved. This study presents the implementation of a full-scale hybrid system for rainwater harvesting, treatment and reuse of greywater in a residential building located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. The study included intervening in the hydraulic infrastructure of an already constructed residential building for collecting greywater, harvesting and collecting rainwater, designing and constructing an 80 m² controlled natural soil treatment system (CNSTS) and a 65 m³ storage tank for treating and storing rain and greywater. Furthermore, the full-scale hybrid system was monitored under real operating conditions for a two-month period to assess its performance. Results showed that the CNSTS has the potential to replace up to 2835 m³ year⁻¹ of potable water, equivalent to 65% of the building’s annual water consumption. The CNSTS achieved removal efficiencies of up to ~90% for Chemical Oxygen Demand, 90% for surfactants, and 50% for total nitrogen. Most of the measured parameters complied with the corresponding limits established by the Mexican standards NOM-003-SEMARNAT-1997 for non-potable water reuse, NOM-001-SEMARNAT-2021 for wastewater discharges, and NOM-127-SSA1-2021 for potable water with the exception of methylene blue active substances (surfactants), which exceeded the permissible limit during the initial monitoring stage, highlighting the need for further optimization of the system’s vegetative cover. Based on these findings, conceptual designs and preliminary evaluations were conducted for additional buildings, resulting in potable water substitution rates above 90% with investment payback periods of 2 to 5 years, depending on the water demand and the water catchment potential. Full article

The study presents methodological approaches to developing regional agri-food strategies integrating economic, social, and environmental indicators, aiming to improve socio-economic and environmental efficiency in the context of food security. To assess regional sustainable development, a hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward’s method was applied to compare Russian regions based on indicators of agricultural specialization, economic efficiency, food security, social conditions, and environmental impact. The analysis identified seven distinct regional clusters with significant socio-economic and environmental differences. A critical finding is that all clusters exhibit persistent problems with waste disposal and neutralization, alongside an acute shortage of investment for technological modernization and additional processing capacity. Key priorities for improving efficiency in achieving food security are identified, and differentiated sustainable development strategies for the selected groups are proposed, including recommendations for adapting governance mechanisms and state support. The need for fundamentally new forms of financing innovative businesses is substantiated. This study provides a differentiated framework for developing regulatory tools for regional agri-food systems based on cluster analysis results. The findings have practical value for planning socio-economic and environmental development programs and for formulating state innovation policy in agricultural support. Full article