China has entered a phase of sustained population decline in 2022. In this context, high-quality population development becomes a strategic prerequisite for long-run prosperity and social welfare. The core policy question is therefore clear: How can China rebuild its growth engine as the labour pool shrinks? This study addresses the issue by combining extensive empirical evidence with the quantity–quality trade-off perspective. Three endogenous fertility pressures are highlighted.First, a widespread "fewer-but-better" preference leads families to reduce births and intensify investment per child. Second,rising housing, education and childcare costs impose binding financial constraints on many prospective parents. Third, a structural imbalance emerges, the majority of households struggle with mounting child-rearing stress, whereas a small affluent minority—despite stronger fertility intentions—adds little to national births. The confluence of the above fertility pressures fully explains the sharp fall in China's fertility and the ensuing population contraction.

    Building on these stylized facts, the paper develops a multi-sector endogenous growth model that links household fertility choice, human-capital accumulation and R&D-driven technological progress. The framework allows education quality, innovation incentives, living-cost pressure and income inequality to interact and jointly shape the transformation of population quality. Two key findings emerge: (1) Population decline is not necessarily a drag on economic growth. If the opportunity of population quantity-quality transformation is seized, population decline will facilitate China's economic growth shift toward human capital accumulation and innovation-driven development. (2) Improving education quality and strengthening innovation incentives act as long-run accelerators. They foster a smooth quantity-quality transition without further depressing fertility. In contrast, escalating living costs and widening income gaps erode the conversion mechanism and risk locking the economy into a "low birth—low population quality—low growth" trap.
    Policy implications are straightforward. A four-pillar agenda is proposed: full-cycle fertility support, systemic education upgrading, vigorous innovation incentives and redistributive measures that temper living costs. Implemented together,these tools can unlock population-quality dividends while stabilising the birth rate. In sum, the study clarifies the theoretical link among fertility behaviour, human-capital formation and innovation, and offers a practicable roadmap for recasting China's growth engines in an era of population decline.

    Against the backdrop of frequent global shocks, evaluating the impact of high-standard trade and economic rules in the energy sector on the stability and resilience of energy trade networks holds important theoretical and practical significance. Based on bilateral energy trade data covering 193 countries and regions from 2003 to 2023, this paper constructs a set of energy trade network resilience indicators, encompassing structural resilience, shock resilience, and recovery resilience, to analyze the effects and mechanisms of high-standard trade rules in the energy field. The results show that high-standard trade rules in the energy sector significantly enhance the structural, shock, and recovery resilience of energy trade networks,with particularly strong effects observed in new energy trade networks. Compared with legal obligations, the actual commitments of member countries play a more decisive role in improving network resilience. Moreover, the higher a country's energy import dependence is, the stronger the positive impact of such rules are. The marginal effects of other types of high-standard rules are also heterogeneous across resilience dimensions: innovation policy cooperation exerts positive effects on all three types of resilience, investment facilitation mainly contributes to recovery resilience, while environmental regulations and policy dialogue mechanisms strengthen both recovery and demand resilience. From the perspective of "circle" structures,these rules expand circle size, reinforce circle strength, and promote circle reconfiguration, thereby optimizing the dynamic adaptability of the energy trade network. The structural effects of different international mechanisms vary as follows: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) promotes circle expansion and flexible adjustment, the International Energy Agency (IEA) strengthens intra-circle stability and deep cooperation, while the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) primarily drive circle enlargement and structural reorganization. This study reveals the critical role of high-standard trade and economic rules in the energy sector in enhancing the resilience of global energy trade networks, providing empirical evidence and policy insights for promoting institutional openness and building a secure and inclusive global energy governance framework.

    As today's increasingly weaponized economic tools, how can economic sanctions overflow their direct targets and reshape the global cross-border M&A network? This article uses the Time Exponential Random Graph Model (TERGM) and combines global M&A and economic sanctions data from 2000 to 2021 to evaluate the impact of economic sanctions on cross-border M&A networks. Research has confirmed that although the field of cross-border mergers and acquisitions is not a direct target area of economic sanctions, economic sanctions still have a significant negative impact on the global cross-border merger and acquisition network, and the hypothesis of "unintentional consequences" is valid. The core contribution of this paper lies in revealing the heterogeneous characteristics and operational mechanisms of this effect: among sanction types, financial sanctions and joint U.S.-EU sanctions prove most disruptive; regarding M&A targets, transactions involving upstream industrial chain entities and technology-intensive enterprises suffer the most significant negative impacts. The mechanism operates as follows: economic sanctions disrupt global cross-border M&A networks by undermining the stability of bilateral political relations. Meanwhile, financing substitution, institutional embeddedness, and governance capacity at the national level can effectively buffer external shocks, exerting a negative moderating effect. This study reveals the "unintended consequences" of economic sanctions on cross-border M&A networks from a network perspective, overcoming the limitations of traditional econometric models and enabling us to systematically examine how cross-border M&A networks dynamically evolve under the combined effects of external shocks and internal evolution laws within a more complex and realistic unified framework. It is helpful for China to deeply understand the complex relationship between economic sanctions and cross-border mergers and acquisitions in the context of unprecedented changes, and has important policy reference significance for achieving high-level opening up to the outside world and safeguarding China's overseas interests and security.

Existing literature has universally confirmed the promoting effect of market-based environmental policies on local green and low-carbon development. However, there is still no consensus on their spatial spillover effects of neighboring re⁃gions. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of the Carbon Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), combined with the panel data of 284 prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2021, this paper uses the EBM-GML model to measure the Green Total Factor Productivity(GTFP). It applies the spatial difference-in-differences model to test the impact of the pilot policy on the GTFP of “local-neighboring regions” and its mechanism. The study finds that while the pilot policy improves the local GTFP, it has a negative spatial spillover effect on neighboring pilot and non-pilot regions. The impact on neighboring pilot regions is more significant. However, this negative spatial spillover effect only exists within 200 kilometers and turns into a positive effect beyond 200 kilometers. The mechanism test shows that within 200 kilometers, the pilot policy inhibits the growth of GTFP in neighboring regions by impeding local green R&D and promoting the transfer of polluting industries to the neighboring areas.Beyond 200 kilometers, it improves GTFP in neighboring regions by promoting local green R&D, and the effect of nearby transfer of polluting industries is not verified. The heterogeneous analysis indicates that the Chinese Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) market is exerting its due innovation incentive effect. Moreover, in regions with higher carbon market activity,the effect on improving GTFP is weaker than that in regions with lower activity. Additionally, the higher the level of regional green finance development and the stronger the government's environmental governance capacity, the more obvious the promoting effect of the pilot policy on local GTFP, and the more prominent the restraining effect on the growth of GTFP in neighboring regions. This paper innovatively distinguishes and tests the green R&D effect and the nearby transfer effect of pollution, and systematically analyzes the spatial spillover effect and mechanism of the ETS. The findings have important policy reference value for optimizing China's carbon emission trading market and constructing a spatial pattern of high-quality green and low-carbon development.

    The upgrading of national standards to lead the optimization and upgrading of traditional industries is a concrete measure to promote the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development. At the current stage, it is essential to examine how to more effectively harness the driving effect of ecological and environmental standards on the green transformation of the entire industrial chain. This article analyzes, from the perspective of production networks, the impact of environmental standard upgrading on the production equipment selection of representative enterprises. It constructs a model of production equipment selection under environmental constraints and examines how different equipment updating modes (external purchase or independent innovation) can affect the mode of production of upstream and downstream industries, ultimately leading to the green transformation of the whole industrial chain.

    On this basis, the upgrading of Water Pollutant Emission Standards (WPES) from 2004 to 2014 was empirically tested as a quasi-natural experiment by constructing provincial 4-digit industry-level production networks. The results show that the batch upgrading of WPES promotes pollution reduction in regulated industries and synergistically reduces emissions in upstream and downstream industries within the industrial chain. The upgrading of WPES triggers technological innovation in the regulated industry, leading to updates in production equipment and end-of-pipe treatment equipment, which has asymmetric impacts on upstream and downstream industries. Firstly, equipment updating in the regulated industry stimulates technological innovation in the upstream equipment sector, reducing pollution emissions. Secondly, the pressure to upgrade WPES and the complementary force of knowledge spillovers together drove the downstream industry to realize COD reductions through increased innovation, renewed production equipment, and increased pollution control equipment. Finally, the pressure to upgrade WPES failed to effectively reduce COD emissions from the upstream raw material industry in an average sense, and the abatement effect exists only when the standard upgrading is largest or in the industries facing the joint introduction of national and local standards.

    Furthermore, this paper utilizes the data of listed companies to re-test the effect of the new round of WPES after 2015.It finds that the new round of standards updates has a significant driving effect on the green transformation of related enterprises in different industrial chain positions. This research enriches the empirical evidence on how environmental standards promote the green transformation of industries through industrial chain spillovers, providing a basis for expanding environmental standards regulation targets and selecting appropriate limit value enhancements, and also providing a reference to establish the thinking of industry chain governance.

    The shift from "promoting the deep integration of digital and real economy" to the proposal of "promoting the deep integration of real and digital economy" at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China requires the real economy to play a greater subjective and active role in the integration process. This article takes the active technological integration of digital and real industries (hereafter TIDR for short) by real enterprises as the research object, explores the impact of TIDR on the employment scale of enterprises, and attempts to clarify the interactive effects of new quality productivity and new productive relations. Based on panel data of listed companies, empirical analysis has drawn the following conclusions: Firstly, the TIDR in real enterprises has significantly increased the scale of employee employment,demonstrating a stabilizing effect on employment. Multiple robustness tests have supported this conclusion. Secondly, mechanism tests show that the TIDR has exerted a scale expansion effect by enhancing total factor productivity and promoting diversified operations of enterprises towards the digital industry. Additionally, it has alleviated the substitution effect of machinery and equipment, flexible employment on employees. These two effects jointly increase the employment scale of enterprises.Thirdly, the TIDR can significantly strengthen the long-term value orientation of enterprises, and encourage them to increase their share of labor income and long-term value investment in employees. This study points out the positive impact of real enterprises as innovative entities driving innovation, and also reveals the adaptability and interactive effects between new quality productivity and new productive relations.

    Firms' own climate risks propagate across supply-chain partners, exerting significant shocks on suppliers' labor employment. Using the data of the top five customers' information and climate risk of China's supplier firms, this paper examines the impact of customer climate risk on labor employment of suppliers, and the results find that: (1) The higher the customer climate risk, the supplier enterprises will reduce the number of labor employment, indicating that there is a contagion effect of the customer climate risk in the supply chain; (2) Mechanism testing indicates that customer climate risk reduces the labor employment scale of supplier firms through two aspects of demand and production, as well as risk and return; (3) Heterogeneity testing shows that the above impact is more significant when the supplier firm's social responsibility performance is worse, the scale is smaller, the supplier firm is a non-state-owned enterprise, the industry development prospects of the supplier firm are bleak, belongs to labor-intensive industries, and the supplier firm's supply chain has lower bargaining power,and is closer to the customer; (4) Customer climate risk mainly inhibits the employment of low-skilled labor by supplier firms.The research in this paper not only identifies the causality and mechanism of the impact of customer climate risk on labor employment in supplier firms, but also has important implications for achieving a dynamic balance between managing climate risk and stabilizing employment.

    The potential marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it extends the literature on how climate risk affects firms' production behavior. By employing unique climate risk data, the paper not only confirms that climate risk in the supply chain exerts non-negligible contagion effects, thereby broadening prior research on the transmission of customer characteristics that along the supply chain, which provides important empirical evidence for understanding the economic consequences of climate risk at the supply chain level. Second, existing studies have paid scant attention to how natural factor contagion within the supply chain influences firms' labor-hiring decisions. By closely examining how customers' climate risk affects their suppliers' employment choices, this paper not only expands the supply chain literature on the determinants of corporate labor demand, but also enriches research linking natural environmental factors to firms' production activities. Third,the paper offers theoretical support and policy guidance for active participation in global climate governance and for stabilizing employment. By evaluating the impact of climate risk on micro-level economic agents from the perspective of labor demand, it provides a new theoretical basis for strengthening environmental governance and for building a climate risk prevention and control system that can mitigate employment challenges.