China has a large number of gas stations, with which thousands of workers are associated. There is abundant online literature documenting the various occupational health risks these workers face. However, this literature has many flaws to address, and it falls short of suggesting measures to manage these risks. This study strives to fill that gap, and aims to improve the occupational health of gas station workers through comprehensive risk management and performance analysis. To this end, a reasonable volume of reliable data, i.e., 208 completed questionnaires, were analyzed through current statistical routines, viz., fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Importance Performance Analysis (IPA). These methods were employed to hierarchically organize the main factors and sub-factors of physical risk management, chemical risk management, biological risk management, physiological risk management and psychological risk management according to their appraised importance, and screen out the risk management stratagem for priority improvement. Research findings reveal that chemical risk and biological risk response schemes have the lowest performance, and need to be prioritized for improvement. Furthermore, this study argues that we can safeguard the occupational health of gas station workers through appropriate risk management strategies. It also elaborates on implications, limitations and future research directions.

This study seeks to address the question of whether China’s Western Development Strategy (WDS) has affected the carbon emission intensity of the regions it covers. There remains a distinct lack of analysis based on the normative causal inference method regarding the impact of this economic development policy on carbon emissions. Our research contributes to the large body of international literature studying the effects of place-based policy and has implications for place-based policies regarding the impact of carbon emissions. It constructs a duopoly model to illustrate the relationship between lower prices of capital (caused by policies such as tax reduction) and carbon emissions. Using county-level data on both sides of the provincial boundary of the WDS from 1998 to 2007, and applying the difference-in-differences method, our results indicate that the WDS has significantly increased carbon emission intensity of the western counties. Our findings also indicate that while the WDS has had no significant positive effect on counties’ economic growth, no policy trap effect was found. There is also no evidence suggesting that the economic activities attributable to the WDS have brought any negative externalities of carbon emissions to the counties east of the western provincial border.