This article attempts to investigate the impacts of bilateral trade on the environment by estimating the embodied carbon emissions between China and Germany over the period 1999–2018. The above impacts are broadly explored in the literature both under the framework of theoretical and empirical analysis. However, there exist fewer empirical studies exploring the nonlinear relationship between trade volumes and carbon emissions between a well-developed and emerging economies. By applying the multiregional input-output (MRIO) model, this article aims to reveal the impacts of trade on the environment in the case of China–Germany. Specifically, trade amounts between China and Germany rank high with a similarly increasing trend and both of them are large net exporting countries. However, China experienced much larger carbon emissions embodied in its exports to Germany. Despite potential concerns on the carbon leakage issue of China from Germany, we find that the bilateral trades fit an inverse U-shape in the embodied carbon emissions, which suggests that the trade between the two countries can finally reduce carbon intensity without obstructing economic development particularly in the long-term. This paper guides policy-makers to quantify the issue of CO₂ transfer among bilateral trades in order to achieve the target of trading sustainability.

Educational disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic during school closures have become a remarkable social issue, particularly among the developing countries. Ample literature has verified the adverse effects of the long-lasing epidemic on school education. However, rare studies seek to understand the association between the severity of COVID-19 and distance learning, an alternative education pattern, and foster policy designs to promote educational transition, particularly targeting the post-crisis phase of the COVID-19. By combining four data surveys, this article empirically examines the impacts of COVID-19 on children’s distance education with the application of various appliances across 60 developing countries. The results suggest that, after controlling socio-economic, geographic, and demographic variables, a higher level of mortality rate of COVID-19 contributes to more households participating in distance education. In particular, this positive term is larger for distance education by using TVs and radios compared with the usage of digital appliances. To explore the potential channel of the above linkage, this article argues that the positive association between mortality rate and the use of traditional appliances is weakened through higher levels of stringency in lockdown measures. Timely policies are, therefore, recommended to guide towards distance learning with economic and technological supports to guarantee a wave of inclusive educational recovery in the ongoing post-COVID-19 era.

With the steady growth of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade, the driving forces of emissions have attracted extensive attention. Most of the literature has verified a bundle of the influential factors; however, further analyses are necessary to understand the predominant and heterogeneous driving factors in different economies and/or industries. Accordingly, by applying the multiregional input–output (MRIO) model, this article firstly evaluates the embodied carbon emissions of China’s export from 1992 to 2020 in total volumes and by 14 industries. Then, the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) estimations allow us to discover that urbanization, technology update and gross domestic product (GDP) are the leading three prioritizing factors in generating China’s export emissions. Interestingly, this paper discovers that raising the proportion of female parliamentarians contributes to an abatement of emissions. Furthermore, the empirical results suggest that the heterogeneities of those factors do exist among industries. For example, the percentage of females in parliaments turns out to have a larger effect among labor-intensive industries only. In facing with rapid globalization and economic development of China, this paper provides important policy implications towards specific industries in terms of mitigating trade emissions. It guides policy-makers to achieve “carbon neutrality” by avoiding carbon leakage in net-export countries such as China.

Gender disparities in behavioral and psychological responses to public crises have become increasingly significant, particularly in the aftermath of such events, due to their far-reaching socio-economic consequences. This study investigates these disparities using data from a cross-national survey of over 6,000 individuals across six countries. Employing the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique, the study quantifies both the explained and unexplained components of gender differences in coping behaviors, travel intentions, and negative emotions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, we explore a novel channel by examining the moderating role of individualism, as measured by Hofstede’s cultural index, in shaping gender differences in these crisis responses. Our findings reveal that women are more likely to engage in preventive behaviors and experience higher levels of negative emotions compared to men. Meanwhile, men’s work-related travel intentions are more affected by the pandemic, whereas women’s leisure-related travel intentions are more impacted. Furthermore, women from individualistic cultures are less inclined to adopt preventive behaviors. In addition, different income groups and countries display heterogeneous gender dynamics in these crisis responses. Grounded in the Activating Event-Belief-Consequence (ABC) theory, our results highlight the necessity of adopting a gender-sensitive approach in policy-making and public health interventions, especially for women in economically disadvantaged and collectivist societies, thereby fostering equitable and effective outcomes in the face of future public crises across different regions and cultures.