Reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is one of the biggest challenges for global sustainable development, in which economic growth characterized by industrialization plays a formidable role. We innovatively adopted the input and output (I-O) table of 41 countries released by World I-O Database to determine the industrial structure change and analyze its impact on CO₂ emission evolution by developing a cross-country panel model. The empirical results show that industrial structure change has a significantly negative effect on CO₂ emissions; to be specific, 0.1 unit increase in the linkage of manufacturing sector and service sector will lead to a decrease of 0.94 metric tons per capita CO₂ emissions, indicating that upgrading industrial structure contributes to carbon mitigation and sustainable development. Further, urbanization, technology and trade openness have significantly negative impact on CO₂ emissions, while economy growth and energy use take positive impacts. In particular, a 1% increase in per capita income will contribute to an increase of 8.6 metric tons per capita CO₂ emissions. However, the effect of industrial structure on environment degradation is moderated by technology level. These findings fill the gaps of previous literature and provide valuable references for effective policies to mitigate CO₂ emissions and achieve sustainable development.

Transport infrastructure serves as a critical physical carrier for constructing a unified national market and promoting coordinated regional economic development. Addressing the practical contradiction between rapid transport network expansion and persistent regional development imbalances, this paper constructs a comprehensive transport infrastructure service efficiency index using panel data from 297 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2023. We systematically investigate the nonlinear impact and underlying mechanisms of transport infrastructure on inter-city economic disparities. The findings reveal a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between transport infrastructure construction and regional economic disparity. Specifically, in the early stages of transport development, the dominance of the agglomeration effect leads to widening regional gaps; once a specific threshold is crossed (an index value of approximately 0.274), the diffusion effect emerges, facilitating convergence. This nonlinear relationship exhibits significant regional heterogeneity: the eastern region has largely crossed the inflection point into the convergence phase, while the western region remains in the “climbing” period dominated by polarization effects. Mechanism testing indicates that labor factor allocation is the core driver of this inverted U-shaped evolution. This study not only clarifies the dynamic boundaries of transport infrastructure’s impact on regional economic patterns but also provides empirical evidence for formulating differentiated transport and regional coordination policies for regions at different developmental stages.

In this paper, an evaluation index system for the coordinated development of regional economy was constructed by considering the aspects of regional development coordination, economic development coordination, economic and social coordination, and resource and environment coordination, which is used to perform comprehensive evaluation of the coordinated development of regional economy. On this basis, the impact of the upgrading of industrial structure, scientific and technological innovation, and government intervention on the coordinated development of regional economy were also investigated. According to the findings of our study, the coordinated development of regional economy in the eastern region was obviously better than that in the central region, while the western region had the lowest coordinated development of regional economy; the upgrading of regional industrial structure promoted the coordinated development of regional economy, while the promoting effect of the scientific and technological innovation on the coordinated development of regional economy were partly achieved by its promotion of the upgrading of industrial structure; the effect of government intervention couldn’t be well reflected in the coordination index of regional economy.