The purpose of this research is to empirically investigate the effect of internationalization on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs. The study employed an updated panel dataset (6238 firm-year observations) of Chinese multinationals from the period 2010–2019. The initial findings of the study reveal that Chinese multinationals perform better in terms of environmental and governance scores. It suggests that international market forces deal with enhancing ecological problems and concerns of stakeholders. However, results are insignificant when the social performance of multinationals is analyzed. On the other hand, multinational non-SOEs outperformed their counterparts in terms of environmental and governance performance. The findings of the paper are robust regarding the use of proxies of internationalization and endogeneities.

The one-child policy was designed as a basic national policy in China and was written into the Constitution in 1982. The main content and purpose of the policy are to advocate late marriage, late childbearing and fewer births to control population growth in a planned way. Since the implementation of the basic national policy, its positive effect upon China’s economic development cannot be ignored, but after entering the 21st century, the problems related to population aging became obvious. Consequently, the basic pension system is confronted with great challenges. Under these circumstances, China initiated the two-child policy in 2016. This paper tries to forecast the change of pension shortfall after the implementation of the “two-child” policy in Anhui Province in China by establishing a pension revenue model, a pension expenditure model and a population prediction model. The prediction results reveal that the “two-child” policy helps to alleviate the pressure on the pension system, but the effect is limited and the “two-child” policy cannot change the trend of increasing pension shortfall in the long run. To reduce the burden on the pension system, the government can consider extending the pension contribution period and retirement age to make pension system sustainable.