China has shifted control over resources and decision making to local governments and enterprises as the result of the economic reforms over the past three decades. This devolution of decision-making to local levels and enterprises has placed environmental stewardship in the hands of local...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a dynamic model of endogenous urban growth with two sectors of production. Production exhibits increasing returns to scale on aggregate. Urban environmental pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic...

A spatial welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It incorporates agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities and various land use categories. The model is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations...

This paper describes a methodology to develop a Computable General Equilibrium model with a sub-national detail starting from a global database and model presenting the country-level as the highest resolution. This procedure is demonstratively applied to Italy, but can be transferred to any...

Existing studies have investigated the environmental dividends of substituting high-speed rail for other energy-intensive vehicles from an engineering standpoint, but they have yet to explore the economic effects of high-speed rail and the associated carbon emission reduction benefits. To fill...

With the appearance of “wellbeing stagnation”, the Chinese government has gradually realized the negative impact of increasingly severe environmental problem on people’s wellbeing, and has then has formulated a series of environmental policies. Based on the balanced panel data from2014 to...

This paper addresses the issue of whether the powers of monitoring compliance and allocating tradeable emissions allowances within a federation of countries should be appointed to a unique federal regulator or decentralized to several local regulators. To this end, we develop a two stage game...

In this study we explore in detail the causes of corruption in China using two different sets of data at the regional level (provinces and cities). We observe that regions with more anti-corruption efforts, histories of British rule, higher openness, more access to media and relatively higher...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...