Inflection Point of Green Total Factor Productivity by Low-Carbon Regulation from Chinese Economics Recovery

The sustainable growth path of emerging economies has transformed from the traditional extensive model to high-quality development. Due to the impulse force of low-carbon regulation, the measurement of input–output efficiency changed into green total factor productivity (GTFP) which considers environmental factors. Past research on GTFP focused on enterprise investments to promote green innovation for their resource allocation efficiency, but green investments are often limited from marketization that is interactively influenced by low-carbon regulation. Therefore, handing green investment to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions for green economics recovery is a big challenge. Then these hypotheses are tested by the main study of 170 cities in China. Results suggested that GTFP has an inverted S-shaped curve with three inflection points and four development stages under the influence of low-carbon regulation. It means that improving green productivity is costly toward making green investments without the driving of green innovation. However, the inflection point of the growth curve—when enterprise investment activities ignore the interaction between low-carbon regulation and green investment policy—will come slowly to a period of high-quality development. Moderating results suggested that the green productivity would be weakened and the inflection point would be delayed by the low-carbon marketization index if the low-carbon regulation intensity was neglected. Therefore, this research advanced an effectively co-ordinate growth curve to search for the inflection point of green economics recovery.

Green productivity analysis of raw rubber production

Rubber is a well-known commodity that has been cultivated for a relatively long time in Indonesia. Rubber plays an essential role in contributing foreign exchange incomes, job opportunities, and providing industrial raw materials. In 2014, Indonesia became the second-largest rubber producer after Thailand, with a rubber yield of 3,979 tons. Increased rubber production is linear to the environmental damage that occurs so that productivity improvement tools based on environmental or green productivity are needed. This research aims to determine the factors influencing productivity level and improvement efforts by considering the environmental performance indicator. The method used is the Environmental Performance Indicator (EPI). Two expert respondents filled the weighted result, i.e., academician and head of waste treatment. The selection of alternative improvement using Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR). The result is Multi Soil Layering (MSL) which could save the cost of IDR 253,651,626.2 per year or 70% water savings. This alternative can increase productivity by 11.12% from 76.13% to 85.25% and raise the EPI value of 0.766 from 0.201 to 0.967.

Research on the Impacts of Heterogeneous Environmental Regulations on Green Productivity in China: The Moderating Roles of Technical Change and Efficiency Change

Due to the publicly owned resource attributes of the ecological environment, the treatment and governance of the environment should be guided by governments, which are mainly represented as environmental regulations. However, whether environmental regulations affect green productivity and what effects heterogeneous environmental regulations have on green productivity are still implicit. In addition, the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change are ignored. To examine these issues, this study investigated the impacts of heterogeneous environmental regulations on green productivity and the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change using the dynamic spatial Durbin model based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2018. The results show the following: compared with efficiency change, technical change has a stronger promotion effect on green productivity in China; considering the spatial spillover effects and the temporal lag effects of green productivity simultaneously, the negative path-dependent feature is not supported any longer, while the spatial spillover effect is still the power source for promoting green productivity in China; the moderating roles of technical change and efficiency change for the nexus between heterogeneous environmental regulations and green productivity in China are partly and conditionally supported at national and regional levels; the direct and indirect effects of heterogeneous environmental regulations on green productivity at the regional level have a feature of spatial heterogeneity. This study provides both theoretical and practical implications, in particular for China, to promote green productivity from the dual perspectives of space and time.