The agricultural economy, as an integral branch of the global economy, covering the whole supply chain of agricultural production including cultivation, processing, distribution and consumption, is of great importance to realizing a sustainable circular economy and ecological development. As a traditional agricultural country, China has experienced a series of problems such as a serious waste of resources and a fragile ecological environment during its agricultural economic development. With the background of “the Belt and Road Initiative”, major progress has been witnessed in both ecological development and agricultural circular economy in China. However, the development of circular agriculture in China has to deal with barriers from different stakeholders. This research identifies critical barriers for the government, farmers, and the enterprises to develop circular agriculture. The causal factors, effect factors, and the center of factors are identified and the correlation between the barriers is described using the Gray-DEMATEL method. Based on the analysis results, several policy suggestions are proposed for the government. This paper provides a feasible framework for decision-making to support the development of a sustainable circular economy in agriculture in China.

To improve low-carbon technology, the government has shifted its strategy from subsidizing low-carbon products (LCP) to low-carbon technology. To analyze the impact of government subsidies based on carbon emission reduction levels on different entities in the low-carbon supply chain (LCSC), game theory is used to model the provision of government subsidies to low-carbon enterprises and retailers. The main findings of the paper are that a government subsidy strategy based on carbon emission reduction levels can effectively drive low-carbon enterprises to further reduce the carbon emissions. The government’s choice of subsidy has the same effect on the LCP retail price per unit, the sales volume, and the revenue of low-carbon products per unit. When the government subsidizes the retailer, the low-carbon product wholesale price per unit is the highest. That is, low-carbon enterprises use up part of the government subsidies by increasing the wholesale price of low-carbon products. The retail price of low-carbon products per unit is lower than the retail price of low-carbon products in the context of decentralized decision making, but the sales volume and revenue of low-carbon products are greater in the centralized decision-making. The cost–benefit-sharing contract could enable the decentralized decision model to achieve the same level of profit as the centralized decision model.

With growing economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the importance of protecting the natural environment worldwide, the relationship between EPU and carbon emissions should be investigated further. However, conclusions in the existing literature on the relationship between EPU and carbon emission are inconclusive. This paper aims to examine the influence of EPU on carbon emissions according to the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) model. To investigate such essential issues, we conduct GMM estimations by utilizing cross-country data covering 137 countries during the period 1970–2018, obtained from World Bank and OECD statistics. Our empirical estimations support that EPU would bring about more carbon emissions, while we conduct empirical analysis by changing the system of measurement, employing alternative estimation and constructing new samples. Our study provides substantial policy implications for government participation in international treaties on environmental protection to mitigate environmental degradation.

This study aims to examine the impact of globalization on environmental performance by employing panel data for 148 countries from 2001 to 2018, via the indicator of Environmental Performance Index to capture the overall environmental quality and KOF index to measure the multi dimensions of globalization. The empirical results suggest that globalization is critical to environmental performance, which is reliable while we conduct several robustness tests. Furthermore, if globalization increases, it would be beneficial for the environmental performance; moreover, among specific dimensions of globalization, economic globalization, social globalization and political globalization would bring about better environmental performance. Besides, the improvement of globalization, social globalization and political globalization would bring about better environmental performance, while that of economic globalization cannot change the overall environmental performance. Our study offers more insight into the relationship between globalization and environmental performance.