Emerging economies face the challenge of increasing labor costs but also provide an opportunity to promote environmental governance and green development. Based on the perspectives of impetus and capability, the effects of rising labor costs and market environment on green technological innovation are investigated in this study. The empirical studies used the data of high-pollution firms in China from 2009 to 2018. Results demonstrate that rising labor costs deteriorates high-pollution firm performance, while highly competitive industries are affected more than other industries. Meanwhile, the influence of rising labor costs on green technological innovation has a threshold effect which illustrates an “inversely U-shaped” variation trend with the increase of degree of market monopoly. The labor costs will make biggest impact on the green technological innovation in the moderately concentrated market environment. Basing from these results, this study provides the following suggestions for emerging economies’ green development: Take rising labor cost as an opportunity to advance technological progress to the green direction, establish a sound market competition environment, and develop green finance to reduce the financing constraints of green technological innovation.

After revenue-sharing system reform, the proportion of tax refund in fiscal transfer payments continued to decline, and the proportion of categorical grant and condition grant is increased. The paper studies how transfer payment structure effect fiscal efficiency from the perspective of local financial revenue structure. This paper use the SE-DEA model to measures the financial efficiency, and studies how transfer payment structure effect fiscal efficiency by the quantile regression method. The theoretical and empirical studies indicate that the tax refund is the most effective policy and the categorical grant is more efficient than condition grant. The China’s central government should decrease the condition grant and increases the tax refund or categorical grant in transfer payment.

Background: Existing literature believed that the birth control policy affects energy consumption through the change in population size, but ignored the changes in people's lifestyle. This may mislead the government's policy-making about population and energy consumption. Method: This article proposed a Population-Lifestyle-Energy (PLE) model to provide new insights into how birth control policy affects energy consumption if the changes in people's lifestyle are considered. The ProFamy software is used to forecast the changes in demographic characteristics. The methods of regression analysis and Input-Output Analysis are used to predict the impacts of lifestyle changes on energy consumption. Results: We find that China's two-child policy will result in the total energy consumption increase by 16.2% in 2050, far outpacing the population increase of 9.3% when considering the indirect effect of lifestyle changes. This is significantly different from the optimistic wisdom in the existing literature. We also find the non-linear relationships between fertility rate and energy consumption. Conclusion: Ignoring lifestyle changes will lead to an underestimation of energy consumption. Contrary to conventional optimistic wisdom, we believe that the two-child policy will make it difficult for China to meet promised energy conservation goals.