Small and micro enterprises (SMEs) make important contributions to economic development, innovation, and employment in every country. The increasingly strict environmental regulations have become a global trend, but the empirical literature that evaluates the impacts of environmental regulations on the SMEs’ growth based on their observational data is extremely rare. This study aims to investigate how city-level environmental regulations in China affect the SMEs’ growth, with a focus on identifying lag effects, heterogeneous impacts across regions/enterprise types, and the mediating roles of technological innovation and policy support, using unbalanced panel data from 2007 to 2016. Using a dynamic panel model and entropy-weighted assessment, the results show the following: (1) Stricter environmental regulations significantly impede SMEs’ growth, with this effect persisting for up to two years. Robustness tests confirm the stability of these findings. (2) Despite the overall negative impact, our analysis reveals that environmental regulations can stimulate SMEs’ growth by promoting technological innovation and increasing policy support. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that the regulatory effects vary by region, ownership structure, and tax status, with the most adverse impacts observed in private firms, small-scale taxpayers, and businesses outside the Yangtze River Economic Belt. These findings highlight the need for differentiated regulatory approaches to balance environmental objectives with SMEs’ growth. The study is limited by its focus on data from 2007 to 2016, not considering recent policy shifts, and may have limited generalizability to economies with decentralized environmental governance.

Globally, the accelerating aging of the rural labor force is profoundly impacting the economic resilience of the labor-intensive forestry sector. However, the intrinsic connection between the two has not been fully understood and requires further exploration. As the most populous nation globally and a top producer, trader, and consumer of forest products, China stands out as a perfect case study for this issue. Based on this, this study utilizes panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2022 and employs a dual machine learning model to empirically examine the impact and mechanisms of rural labor force aging on forestry economic resilience from the perspective of production factors. The findings indicate: (1) overall, the increase in rural labor force aging significantly inhibits forestry economic resilience; (2) rural labor force aging enhances forestry economic resilience by promoting large-scale forest land management, driving forestry technological innovation, and increasing government capital investment; it also inhibits forestry economic resilience by reducing educational human capital and health human capital; (3) the rural force aging exerts a marked adverse effect on the resilience of the forestry economy in the eastern and central regions, major grain-producing areas, and major grain-consuming areas. Based on this, this study proposes policy recommendations in three areas: building a flexible and diversified labor supply and replacement system, exploring a “scale and technology” integration path suited to national conditions, and implementing differentiated regional strategies. The aim is to provide a reference for government departments in formulating strategies to enhance the resilience of the forestry economy in the era of aging.

Inequities caused by a unilateral climate policy may threaten the sustainability of CO₂ emission reduction efforts by countries and firms, thus endangering sustainable development for humans and the eco-environment. However, few studies have conducted ex-post evaluations on whether environmentally regulated firms receive external compensation such as subsidies, tax reductions, and loan support. Thus, this study investigates whether firms experiencing inequitable conditions under China’s Energy-Saving Quota Policy (ESQP) are financially compensated. It develops a balanced panel of data from 6189 ESQP-regulated and 6189 unregulated firms from 2010 to 2013, and combines a probit model with the difference-in-differences method to conduct empirical analysis. The results show that ESQP-regulated firms receive more subsidy income and lower tax rates than unregulated firms. Of the ESQP-regulated firms, companies with higher energy-saving burdens receive larger subsidies and lower financial expense ratios than those with lower burdens. Additionally, firms that complete their energy-saving quotas are compensated with larger subsidies and/or lower financial expense ratios and tax rates than those that fail to complete them. Finally, state-owned firms receive more subsidies than private ones. Unlike the emission trading schemes implemented worldwide that formulate an exemption mechanism (i.e., free or over-allocated allowances), the ESQP does not exempt regulated firms from their energy-saving responsibilities. Rather, regulated firms receive a greater amount of external compensation in exchange for their reductions in energy consumption.

A common challenge faced by global wood-processing enterprises (WPEs) is their frequent exposure to external shocks. The improvement of regional financial development (RFD) may help WPEs enhance their resilience, thereby enabling them to mitigate external shocks. Against this backdrop, it is worth investigating whether RFD’s improvement can enhance WPEs’ resilience. However, the literature that addresses this issue is scarce. Based on the data of WPEs in mainland China from 2008 to 2016, we evaluate RFD’s effect on WPEs’ resilience. The findings are as follows: RFD can positively affect WPEs’ resilience, and multi-dimensional stability tests confirm the robustness of this result. RFD produces indirect positive effects by enhancing WPEs’ financing capacity and reducing their financing costs. Heterogeneity tests reveal that the RFD’s positive effect manifests in three distinct wood-processing sub-sectors. Crucially, its impact proves significantly greater on small and micro WPEs than on medium and large-sized ones. Furthermore, the positive effects are stronger for WPEs located in central and western provinces and non-municipal districts versus those situated in eastern provinces and municipal districts. Compared with technology- and capital-intensive WPEs, labor-intensive ones benefit more from RFD’s improvement.

Improved conservation efforts in China have contributed to the recovery and range expansion of the Asian elephant, increasing spatial overlap between humans and elephants and intensifying the pressure of human–elephant coexistence. Understanding human tolerance toward Asian elephants has therefore become an important pathway for promoting conservation and coexistence. Using survey data from 873 farm households collected in Xishuangbanna Prefecture and Pu’er City in Yunnan Province, this study measures tolerance toward Asian elephants across five dimensions: types of elephant-related damage, economic loss, population size, spatial distance, and activity frequency. Independent-sample t-tests, one-way ANOVA and ANCOVA were used to examine differences in tolerance among different groups of farm households. The results show that: (1) the overall tolerance toward Asian elephants among farm households is relatively low (mean = 2.40); (2) within types of elephant-related damage, tolerance is lowest for crop loss and cash crop loss, followed by loss of working time and risk of human injury, while tolerance is relatively higher for damage to houses and property, loss of stored food, and damage to vehicles; (3) farm households showed low levels of tolerance across the dimensions of economic loss, population size, spatial distance, and activity frequency; (4) higher tolerance is observed among male respondents, Dai farm households, those engaged in wildlife protection-related occupations, and households located in Pu’er City, and tolerance increased as cultivated land area decreased, household income increased, and agricultural dependence declined. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding farm households’ tolerance toward Asian elephants and offer policy insights for improving tolerance, optimizing human–elephant conflict (HEC) management, and promoting the social sustainability of human–elephant coexistence. The study also contributes China-based evidence to discussions on flagship species conservation and community coexistence under the SDG 15 and CBD frameworks.

Environmental regulations serve as a critical determinant of industrial competitiveness in the global market. Recent policy shifts have driven a gradual convergence of rural environmental standards with urban norms, fostering a dynamic landscape of “top-down competition” between urban and rural regulatory frameworks. While the economic consequences of regional regulatory disparities are well-documented, the specific impacts of this regulatory convergence remain insufficiently explored. To address this gap, this study constructs a novel index to measure the convergence of environmental regulations between urban districts and rural counties at the prefecture level. Utilizing an unbalanced panel dataset of 5600 county-level timber processing enterprises, the Heckman two-stage model is employed for empirical analysis. The results demonstrate that the convergence of urban and rural environmental regulations significantly enhances both the export probability and export intensity of county-level firms, with these effects exhibiting persistence and cumulative growth over time. These findings remain robust across a series of validation tests, including instrumental variable estimation, double machine learning, and alternative model specifications. Mechanism analysis reveals that regulatory convergence promotes exports primarily by improving access to green credit and enhancing peer quality within the industry. Furthermore, heterogeneity tests indicate that the positive effects are most pronounced for start-ups and firms in the decline stage, as well as for enterprises located in eastern China, those outside the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and those subject to minimal government intervention. This study provides critical micro-level evidence that helps enterprises navigate the evolving policy landscape and supports the formulation of strategies to boost export trade amidst the integration of environmental regulations.