The Chinese central government introduced the ‘Chinese Green Building Label’ in 2008, which makes China one of the few developing countries with an official rating system of buildings’ performance in sustainability. This paper investigates the existence and magnitude of the price premium associated with this official green label in the residential sector. Based on a unique data set of green-labelled, newly built housing projects and their non-labelled counterparts from around the country in 2013, an empirical analysis suggests that the labelled housing projects attract a price premium of 6.9% compared with their non-labelled counterparts. Further analysis suggests that this official green label is more effective as a reliable signal of buildings’ energy efficiency in the Chinese context compared with developers’ self-advertised ‘greenness’. These results provide preliminary evidence that with this official rating system, the investment in buildings’ energy-efficiency could be potentially profitable for housing developers in China, and such profitability may herald a rapid development of the green housing market in urban China.

Local governments around mainland China initiated over 14,000 public–private partnership (PPP) projects with a total investment of 18 billion RMB in recent years, but nearly half have been withdrawn since the end of 2017, which raised wide concerns about whether PPP can contribute to the sustainable infrastructure development in urban China. In this study, we empirically investigated major factors affecting local governments’ PPP adoption, especially factors that led local governments to initiate inappropriate PPP projects. Based on a unique panel dataset of 286 Chinese cities between 2014 and 2017, the empirical findings suggested that local governments’ financial pressure was the most important factor and cities with higher off-budgetary debts or lower budgetary deficits tended to initiate more PPP projects. PPP projects initiated under off-budgetary burdens were more likely to be inappropriate and subsequently withdrawn. Based on the empirical results, we provide policy suggestions to promote sustainable PPP developments in China.

Unlike local governments in western countries, local Chinese governments are prevented from directly issuing debt to fund mandated capital projects. As a resul