Accessibility to transportation is a crucial factor for economic growth. Transportation land, defined as the land used to support transportation infrastructure, such as city and inter-city rail, ports, and air travel, is a critical element for constructing transportation facilities and has attracted increasing attention from researchers and policy makers. Transportation land transfer (TLT) is defined as the act by which the state transfers transportation land-use rights to a land user (collective or individual) within a certain period of time as the land owner (all land in China is owned by the state). The land user pays a land-use right transfer fee to the state. This article first reveals the multidimensional effect between TLT and economic growth based on data from China’s 30 provinces for 2007–2019. The study found the following. (1) A continuous increase in the availability of transportation land is vital to ensure sustainable economic growth, and the construction of transportation land between adjacent areas has positive spatial spillover effects. (2) These positive effects work through three mechanisms, i.e., increased employment, industrial interactions, and improvements in economic operational efficiency, with a time lag. (3) The positive effects of TLT on economic growth have significant heterogeneous moderating effects on the differences in the economic development stage, the level of industrial structure, and urbanization rate. The study expands the front-end to back-end analysis of land use, provides a reference for countries and regions at different stages of development to promote economic growth using transportation land construction, and presents beneficial insights for governments to efficiently avoid the mismatch of transportation land resources.

High land use efficiency is the key to improving total factor productivity, and also an important force behind achieving sustained economic growth. Existing studies have mainly focused on the land use efficiency of the industry sector. Yet, the issue of land use efficiency of the service sector (SLUE) has been largely overlooked. This study examines regional differences and efficiency decomposition by using a slack based model (SBM) of undesirable output, and the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) under a data envelopment analysis framework. The results reveal that: (1) In China, the land use efficiency of the service sector is unbalanced, showing an inverted growth law of “low in developed areas and high in backward areas”. (2) The land use efficiency of the service sector can be decomposed into technical progress, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency. From the decomposition results, the growth rate of pure technical efficiency presents a trend of “low in the east and high in the west”; the scale efficiency also falls into the situation of weak group growth. Technological progress has maintained steady improvement. (3) The coordinated improvement of land use efficiency of the service sector needs to focus on resolving the “beggar-thy-neighbor” issue caused by existing large regional differences. In this article, the puzzle of land use efficiency differences in the service industry is well solved, and thus provides valuable enlightenment for the benign growth of service industries in countries and regions around the world.

The exploration of the dependency structure of the Chinese and EU carbon trading markets is crucial to the construction of a globally harmonized carbon market. In this paper, we studied the characteristics of structural interdependency between China’s major carbon markets and the European Union (EU) carbon market before and after the launch of the national carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) and the occurrence of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) by applying the C-vine copula method, with the carbon trading prices of the EU, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Shenzhen and Hubei as the research objects. The study shows that there exists a statistically significant dependence between the EU and the major carbon markets in China and their extremal dependences and dependence structures are different at different stages. After the launch of the national carbon ETS, China has become more independent in terms of interdependency with the EU carbon market, and is more relevant between domestic carbon markets. Most importantly, we found that the dependence between the EU and Chinese carbon markets has increased following the outbreak of COVID-19, and tail dependency structures existed before the launch of the national carbon ETS and during the outbreak of the COVID-19. The results of this study provide a basis for the understanding of the linkage characteristics of carbon trading prices between China and the EU at different stages, which in turn can help market regulators and investors to formulate investment decisions and policies.