The development of rural tourism serves as a crucial strategy for achieving rural revitalization and common prosperity in China. However, the uneven distribution of interests caused by the imperfect tourism destination system is common, and its economic and social impacts have become a major problem and obstacle to the sustainable development of rural tourism. Tourism empowerment and community participation are important for balancing community interests and promoting the sustainable development of tourism. Therefore, from the perspective of tourism empowerment and community participation, this paper takes the Wuzhen scenic area as a case study and considers tourism empowerment as a mediating variable between system construction and community participation, with participation ability serving as a moderating variable. Employing a structural equation model, this paper investigates the interactions among system construction, tourism empowerment, community participation, and participation ability in a rural destination context. The results indicate that system construction significantly benefits tourism empowerment and community participation. Tourism empowerment exerts a significant positive impact on community participation while also serving as a partial mediator between system construction and community participation. Additionally, participation ability positively moderates the impact of system construction on tourism empowerment. This study recommends the creation of an interest linkage mechanism grounded in the property rights of tourism attractions, the introduction of oversight mechanisms for rural tourism enterprises, and the fortification of community participation through educational and informational support as strategies to ensure the sustainable development of rural tourism destinations.

The rapid development of China’s textile industry has led to consumption and pollution of large volumes of water. Therefore, the textile industry has been the focus of water conservation and waste reduction in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020). The premise of sustainable development is to achieve decoupling of economic growth from water consumption and wastewater discharge. In this work, changes in the blue water footprint, grey water footprint, and the total water footprint of the textile industry from 2001 to 2014 were calculated. The relationship between water footprint and economic growth was then examined using the Tapio decoupling model. Furthermore, factors influencing water footprint were determined through logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) method. Results show that the water footprint of China’s textile industry has strongly decoupled for five years (2003, 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2013) and weakly decoupled for four years (2005, 2007, 2009, and 2010). A decoupling trend occurred during 2001–2014, but a steady stage of decoupling had not been achieved yet. Based on the decomposition analysis, the total water footprint mainly increased along with the production scale. On the contrary, technical level is the most important factor in inhibiting the water footprint. In addition, the effect of industrial structure adjustment is relatively weak.

Urban agglomerations are not only the core areas leading economic growth but also the fronts facing severe resource and environmental challenges. This paper aimed to increase our understanding of urban eco-efficiency and its influencing factors and thus provide the scientific basis for green development. We developed a model that incorporates super-efficiency, slacks-based-measure, and global-frontier technology to calculate the total-factor eco-efficiency (TFEE) and used a spatial panel Tobit model to take into account spatial spillover effects. An empirical study was conducted utilizing a prefecture-level dataset in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA) from 2003 to 2016. The main findings reveal that significant spatial differences exist in TFEE in the YRDUA: high-TFEE cities were majorly located in the coastal areas, while low-TFEE cities were mostly situated inland. Overall, TFEE shows a trend of “decline first and then rise with fluctuation”; the disparity between inland and coastal regions has expanded. Further regression analysis suggests that industrial structure, environmental regulation, and innovation were positively related to TFEE, while foreign direct investment was not conducive to the growth in TFEE. The relationship between population intensity and urban eco-efficiency is an inverted U-shaped curve. Finally, several specific policy implications were raised based on the results.

Environmental information disclosure has attracted the attention of the capital market because it can convey corporate characteristic information. But there needs to be direct evidence that environmental information disclosure can improve the market's overall efficiency. This study examines whether corporate environmental information disclosure can improve the information efficiency of the capital market. This study takes Chinese listed companies from 2008 to 2021 as samples, constructs a panel fixed effect model, and adopts multiple linear, instrumental variable method and Heckman sample selection model. We find that the disclosure of environmental information in the Chinese market reduces the information efficiency of the capital market represented by the synchronicity of stock prices. The reason is that the information after greenwashing by enterprises needs to be of better quality and more obscure, which disrupts market information. Environmental information disclosure by enterprises prone to greenwashing significantly affects stock price synchronicity, such as low institutional ownership, non-state-owned, growth, and manufacturing firms. Finally, this paper discusses the impact mechanism and confirms that stock liquidity and analyst coverage are the two paths through which environmental information disclosure impacts stock price synchronicity. This study is significant in encouraging the government to strengthen market supervision, promoting enterprises to disclose high-quality environmental information, and improving the pricing efficiency of the capital market.

In the last decade, the public concern over environmental problems has led to the emergence of environmental regulations in firms’ information disclosure on environmental practice, especially in some developing countries such as China. Based on a panel dataset composed of the listed manufacturing firms in China during 2006–2016, this paper uses the difference-in-differences (DID) model and the propensity score matching (PSM) method to investigate whether the Environmental Information Disclosure Measure (for Trial Implementation; EIDMT) affects the firm value. The results show that EIDMT exerts a significant impact on the listed manufacturing firms’ value. In consideration of the firm’s ownership, EIDMT plays a more important role in the firm value of non-state-owned firms than state-owned firms. Furthermore, using a PSM–DID model for eastern, central, and western China, we find that EIDMT significantly affects the firm value in eastern and western China but has little impact on central China.

Energy is the essential input for operations along the industrial manufacturing chain of textiles. China’s textile industry is facing great pressure on energy consumption reduction. This paper presents an analysis of the energy footprint (EFP) of China’s textile industry from 1991 to 2015. The relationship between EFP and economic growth in the textile industry was investigated with a decoupling index approach. The logarithmic mean Divisia index approach was applied for decomposition analysis on how changes in key factors influenced the EFP of China’s textile industry. Results showed that the EFP of China’s textile industry increased from 41.1 Mt in 1991 to 99.6 Mt in 2015. EFP increased fastest in the period of 1996–2007, with an average annual increasing rate of 7.7 percent, especially from 2001 to 2007 (8.5 percent). Manufacture of textile sector consumed most (from 58 percent to 76 percent) of the energy among the three sub-sectors, as it has lots of energy-intensive procedures. EFP and economic growth were in a relative decoupling state for most years of the researched period. Their relationship showed a clear tendency toward decoupling. Industrial scale was the most important factor that led to the increase of EFP, while decreasing energy intensity contributed significantly to reducing the EFP. The promoting effect of the factors was larger than the inhibiting effect on EFP in most years from 1991 to 2015.