To achieve the goal of sustainable development, China has implemented the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy. So far, there is still little evidence of the impact of the policiy on corporate behaviour. Therefore, this study collects data on Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2017 and applies the staggered difference-in-differences method to analyse the impact of the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy on the environmental, social and governance performance of companies in China. The result shows that the energy conservation and emission-reduction policy reduces environmental, social and governance performance, and this negative effect increases over time. Meanwhile, a further mechanism analysis confirms that the negative impact on environmental, social and governance performance operates through the incentive effect on environmental performance, the crowding-out effect on social performance and the spillover effect on governance performance. Furthermore, the negative effect is heterogeneous across companies and cities. Overall, our results provide empirical evidence for optimising energy conservation and emission-reduction policies in developing countries.

Total factor productivity (TFP) is considered a source of economic growth, and as the constraints of climate change and energy security gradually increase, green total factor productivity (GTFP) is also included in the meaning of the topic. In this study, we combine the super-SBM model with the GML index and include undesirable outputs to measure the GTFP of 26 manufacturing sub-sectors in China from 2004 to 2017. The results show that in the sample period, the GTFP growth rate of China’s manufacturing continues to accelerate, and the driving force is mainly from green technological progress change (GTC), while the green technical efficiency change (GEC) generally declines. After entering the 13th Five-Year Plan period, GEC also began to show a growth trend. The acceleration of green technological progress and the improvement of green technical efficiency jointly drove the GTFP of China’s manufacturing industry to enter a rapid upward trajectory during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, with an average annual growth rate of 5.16%. In addition, different categories of China’s manufacturing industry have begun to develop in a different manner in recent years, which is mainly caused by the difference in the growth rate of green technological progress in the manufacturing industry. Specifically, the GTFP growth rate of equipment and high-tech manufacturing is the highest, followed by consumer goods manufacturing and energy-intensive manufacturing. Accordingly, this paper suggests that the manufacturing industry should further increase investment in R&D, optimize resource allocation, and formulate differentiated policies for different industries, so as to improve the GTFP of the manufacturing industry and promote the green and low-carbon transformation of China’s manufacturing industry.

Atmospheric environmental quality affects the high quality and sustainable development of the economy. The optimisation and upgrading of the industrial system are important to improve the operation efficiency of the economy and society. Firstly, this paper constructs the theoretical analysis framework of coupling and coordination between the atmospheric environment system and the industrial system and analyses the internal mechanism of the interaction and coordinated development of the two systems. Then, it puts forward the combination of the coupling coordination model and the VAR model (Vector autoregressive model) and presents the analysis and evaluation method of the relationship between them from the two perspectives of “static” and “dynamic”. Finally, the empirical study is conducted in Taiyuan, a resource-based city in China. The results show that: (1) The two systems in Taiyuan have an obvious interaction and develop in the direction of benign coupling. (2) The impact of the two systems on each other is mainly in the medium and long term and dominated by the role of the atmospheric environment system on the industrial system. This study provides a theoretical framework and evaluation methods for evaluating and analysing the relationship between the urban atmospheric environment system and the industrial system in China, and then provides suggestions for policymaking.