Land is an increasingly scarce resource that plays a critical role in achieving many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Land scarcity, namely the imbalance state between cropland availability and demand, can be mitigated by the trade of agricultural products, but how effective it is remains unclear. Here, by integrating grid-level data on cropland into multi-regional input–output analysis, this paper accounts for the scarce land footprint and virtual scarce land flows within China at a 1 km × 1 km resolution. Results show that over 70% of China’s land footprint and scarce land footprint can be attributed to less than 20% of the land, and nearly 38% of the land footprint and scarce land footprint hotspot clusters are found to cross provinces. Generally, while virtual land trade mitigates the land scarcity of land-importing provinces by 50.8%, it disproportionately aggravates the land scarcity of land-exporting provinces by 119.8%. These findings challenge the dominant thinking about food trading and call for new policies to improve land resources management and promote collaborative governance across administrative boundaries. Our study also highlights the critical importance of considering land scarcity, shedding lights on how it may be integrated into environmental footprints to better assist the SDG framework.

Regional cooperation has been increasingly recognized as indispensable in promoting coordinated regional development in China’s new urbanization. The “city-helps-city” cooperation arises as an important type of regional approach to reduce regional inequalities. This study focuses on the “city-helps-city” cooperation of the Mountain-Sea Cooperation Project in Zhejiang province and aims to examine how this type of cooperation affects the interjurisdictional linkages of backward places. First, based on the cellphone signaling data from China Mobile and social network analysis, we capture the interjurisdictional linkages represented by the population flow between poverty counties and other municipalities as our dependent variables, which are expected to be stimulated by the regional cooperation of Mountain-Sea projects. Second, through text semantic analysis on the news data of Mountain-Sea cooperation, we further identify three measures of cooperation, including the diversity of cooperation fields, the intensity of different cooperation focuses, and the legitimacy of cooperation as our main explanatory variables. Last, we run regression models to show differentiated impacts of cooperation diversity, intensity, and legitimacy on the linkages between poverty counties and developed places. The findings interrogate whether and how Mountain-Sea cooperation effectively engages backward localities in the regional network of economic production, social affairs, and institutional arrangements to enhance their linkages with other places. This study not only contributes to theoretical and empirical understandings of the state-driven “city-helps-city” cooperation as the new regional institution in transitional China, but also attempts to provide policy implications on reducing regional inequalities from the perspective of intercity cooperation.

Recent literature has widely discussed how housing price is linked to consumption and tenure choices, while tended to ignore that consumption and tenure choices are inter-correlated. This study employs the simultaneous equation model to explore how the housing purchase intention affects the non-housing consumption, considering the role of housing market sentiment. The result shows, on average, the housing purchase intention is associated with higher non-housing consumption, and a higher sentiment magnifies this positive relationship. Housing price level and growth decrease the household’s enthusiasm of purchasing a new house, while sentiment is positively related to the housing purchase intention. Renters’ behavior is less likely be affected by sentiment. In addition, the heterogeneous analysis indicates that households face a trade-off between housing and certain kinds of commodities. This study has some significant, practical implications on optimizing households’ wealth allocation, implementing housing policy and improving the social welfare.