Special economic zones (SEZs) are important in Laos due to their ability to attract foreign investment, realize industrialization, and promote economic globalization. Based on Laos’ SEZs in operation, this study explored land-use intensity, structural evolution and land-use efficiency in Laos’ SEZs via the land-use dynamic degree, information entropy, super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) and gray relational analysis (GRA). The study determined that the total land-use area in Laos’ SEZs continuously increased from 2014 to 2020. The land-use intensity changes in the SEZs can be divided into three types, i.e., high intensity, medium intensity and low intensity, and most SEZs belonged to the medium-intensity type. The proportion of land used in production systems in Laos’ SEZs increased the most, and the proportion of infrastructure land notably decreased. The overall information entropy of the land-use structure exhibited an initial downward and then an upward trend. In 2018, the land-use efficiency in the Savan-Seno SEZ, Vientiane Industrial and Trade Area, Dongphosy SEZ, and Golden Triangle SEZ was relatively optimal. The basic factors of the industrial space and the factors reflecting international cooperation attributes were highly related to the land-use efficiency in Laos’ SEZs.

As the primary drivers of the chemical industry, chemical industrial parks should be characterized by industrial symbiosis, which is essential for realizing the worldwide transformation from linear to circular economies based on sustainable development. At present, a lack of sufficient attention is paid to analyzing the structural characteristics and interaction patterns of industrial symbiosis networks in chemical industrial parks, especially in large-scale specialized chemical industrial parks on a national scale. In this context, with Nanjing Jiangbei New Materials High-Tech Park as an example, this study applies a social-network analysis to empirically investigate the structural characteristics and interaction patterns of an industrial symbiosis network. The results revealed that the industrial symbiosis network of Nanjing Jiangbei New Materials High-Tech Park is currently in a state of low-level agglomeration with a poor transitivity index and that short-distance straight chains are the main connections between enterprises with few transverse connections. Recycling enterprises occupy the core position in the network, while chemical manufacturing enterprises are mostly located on the periphery of the network and fail to establish sufficient effective connections. In terms of individuals, stakeholders’ understanding and evaluation of industrial symbiosis are insufficient; in terms of enterprises, the obstruction of byproducts and waste information circulation and other factors are the main obstacles restricting the industrial symbiosis activities in Nanjing Jiangbei New Materials High-Tech Park. Some policy recommendations are proposed to improve the industrial symbiosis network in large-scale specialized chemical industrial parks on a national scale, and these include establishing industrial symbiosis information systems for the parks, fostering multiple central nodes, and advancing nested development among industrial chains.

Chinese Overseas Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones (COCZs) under the “One Belt and One Road” initiative are committed to promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization, becoming an important platform for the countries and regions where they are located to achieve the sustainable development goals of the 2030 agenda. The planning of COCZs plays a strategic leading and rigid control role in the sustainable development of parks, and the planning implementation effectiveness evaluation has been a key to the sustainable development of COCZs. From the perspective of sustainable development, we established a rating system depending on the deconstruction “effectiveness = efficiency + effect + benefit + capacity” to measure the planning implementation effectiveness evaluation indexes of COCZs, and conducted empirical research based on the evidence of Longjiang Industrial Park, Vietnam. The research results show that Longjiang Industrial Park has a good planning implementation effectiveness with remarkable comprehensive economic, social, ecological and political benefits. It features a good efficiency, effect and benefit from an excellent production capacity, reflected in the consistency between spatial planning and implementation results and a high satisfaction with planning implementation. However, planning implementation is also faced with problems such as the lag of time, imbalance between profit and loss, uneven achievement of goals, and lack of a refined planning control system. To make COCZs more sustainable in development and planning, the suggestion is, on the one hand, to accelerate the establishment of a regular and institutionalized mechanism for the planning preparation and implementation evaluation of COCZs, and bring sustainable development into the management requirements, and, on the other hand, to promote the transformation of COCZs planning from “Function and Scale Orientation” to “Quality and Effectiveness Orientation”, and guide the creation of a model for sustainable development and the planning of COCZs.

Despite the growing attention on uncontrolled and unprofitable urban sprawling in many African countries, few pragmatic solutions have been raised or effectively implemented. While uncontrolled and unprofitable urban expansions happened primarily due to poor land use management and dysfunctional land market, the cost of land management enforcement and reform is high. This paper suggests that the recently re-emerging special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa could be a practical way of using government intervention to reduce uncontrolled urban expansion and optimize urban land use. By evaluating the spatial impacts of two SEZs on their host cities in Ethiopia and Zambia, this paper demonstrates that SEZs could notably change urban expansion in terms of its speed, direction, and spatial structure. By using SEZs as an experimental area for land policy reform, the government can also effectively unlock a profitable urban development model with the functional primary and secondary land market. However, the diverging results in Ethiopia and Zambia also show that the optimizing effect can be significant only when the government is participatory and can fulfil its public function, including delivering proper planning in advance, lunching land policy reform, and even executing compulsory land acquisition for public interests.

In recent years, manufacturing development has received renewed attention from developing and developed countries alike. As mega-city regions (MCRs) are where manufacturing industries converge, the research on urban networks of MCRs under the dominance of manufacturing transaction linkages is currently insufficient. Based on the buyer–supplier linkages of listed manufacturing firms, this paper investigated the characteristics of the urban network in the Yangtze River Delta region (YRDR) in China using the social network analysis method; explored the determinants of nodal centrality and city dyads of the urban network by the stepwise regression and quadratic assignment procedures, respectively; and proposes a “characteristics-determinants-strategies” technical framework for the analysis and optimization of interurban collaboration in manufacturing transactions within MCRs. The findings were as follows: (1) The characteristics of the urban manufacturing transaction networks differed from those of transaction linkages of advanced producer services (APS) firms, intra-firm organization hierarchies, and innovation cooperation networks; (2) the network and geographical “core-periphery” structure of urban power and the circulation corridor of the urban manufacturing transaction network was formed within the YRDR; (3) cooperation parks, innovation collaboration, high-speed rail (HSR) linkage, and geographical proximity between cities were found to facilitate the formation of urban manufacturing transaction networks, and the similarity of industry structures and driving distance between cities inhibits the network; (4) the number of urban industrial firms, GDP per capita, and city government spending on science and technology contributed to the centrality of a city in urban manufacturing transaction networks, while the urban population in a city had a negative impact. The research provides a complementary perspective to the urban network research of MCRs under the perspective of production factors and product circulation and provides policy and urban planning insights for the synergistic development of interurban manufacturing in MCRs.