Reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is one of the biggest challenges for global sustainable development, in which economic growth characterized by industrialization plays a formidable role. We innovatively adopted the input and output (I-O) table of 41 countries released by World I-O Database to determine the industrial structure change and analyze its impact on CO₂ emission evolution by developing a cross-country panel model. The empirical results show that industrial structure change has a significantly negative effect on CO₂ emissions; to be specific, 0.1 unit increase in the linkage of manufacturing sector and service sector will lead to a decrease of 0.94 metric tons per capita CO₂ emissions, indicating that upgrading industrial structure contributes to carbon mitigation and sustainable development. Further, urbanization, technology and trade openness have significantly negative impact on CO₂ emissions, while economy growth and energy use take positive impacts. In particular, a 1% increase in per capita income will contribute to an increase of 8.6 metric tons per capita CO₂ emissions. However, the effect of industrial structure on environment degradation is moderated by technology level. These findings fill the gaps of previous literature and provide valuable references for effective policies to mitigate CO₂ emissions and achieve sustainable development.

In recent years, China’s economic growth has shown a continuous downward trend, but the financial industry’s added value as a percentage of GDP and the financial development level have continued to rise, and real estate investment still maintains a relatively high proportion of total fixed asset investment in society. Taking financial development as the starting point, which is measured by the balance of loans from financial institutions as a percentage of GDP, this paper selects China’s provincial panel data from 2003 to 2017, and uses the system generalized method of moments to empirically study how financial development affects real estate investment and economic growth. The results reveal that financial development pushes up the proportion of real estate investment in fixed asset investment but has a negative impact on economic growth. The increase in the proportion of real estate investment promotes economic growth and plays a masking effect on the suppression of economic growth by financial development. Further analysis shows that financial development affects the growth of the real economy by restraining the development of the secondary industry and increasing real estate investment is conducive to alleviating the restraining effect of financial development on the growth of the real economy.

With China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization, sustainable urban development is one of the most significant challenges that the country will face in the future, and the rational evaluation and improvement of urban land-use efficiency (ULUE) are becoming crucial for land and urban development. Existing studies rarely examine ULUE, and there is a dearth of urban land use analysis in terms of different functions, regional differences in levels of development, and innovation capacity. Therefore, we take the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China’s economic and innovation center, as our research target and propose a new framework to analyze its comprehensive ULUE. First, we summarized the patterns of land-use change in the PRD region as a whole along with nine major cities from 2000 to 2020 on the basis of data from the China Land Survey. Then, we constructed a multidimensional evaluation model for ULUE and analyzed the spatial differences and causes of multidimensional performance in nine major cities. Finally, we calculated the innovation capability index of the PRD region and established a coupling coordination–evaluation model to analyze the coordination relationship between innovation capability and urban land use. The three main findings of this study are as follows. (1) The growth rate of urban land in the PRD region as a whole exhibited stage differences. (2) The comprehensive ULUE in the PRD urban agglomeration was high, and the spatial variability of functional performance in each dimension was obvious. (3) The level of coordination between innovation capability and urban land use in the PRD region was high, and the coupled coordinated development exhibited a decreasing spatial distribution pattern. Thus, the PRD region mainly relies on the cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to drive innovation development of the region.