China has entered a deeply aging society, and the aging population poses a significant public risk to fiscal sustainability. In this regard, researchers have conducted a large number of studies, but the fiscal sustainability indicators used in the existing literature are not scientific enough, the sample data are too macro, and the heterogeneity analysis is not comprehensive enough. This paper innovatively constructs fiscal sustainability indicators based on data from 4 municipalities directly under the central government, 8 provincial capitals, and 88 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010–2019, and analyzes the impact of population aging on fiscal sustainability in eastern, central, western, and multi-level cities in China, using methods such as two-way fixed-effects models. The study finds that (1) fiscal sustainability is significantly hampered by population aging; that is, the more aging there is, the less fiscal sustainability there is. (2) The inhibitory effect of population aging on fiscal sustainability is greater in developed regions compared to backward regions. Compared to prefecture-level cities, provincial cities (including municipalities and provincial capitals) are much more negatively impacted by population aging on fiscal sustainability. (3) The paths through which population aging inhibits fiscal sustainability are healthcare expenditures and social security employment expenditures. The policy recommendations put forward in this paper are to raise the fertility rate, protect the fiscal expenditures of developed regions and provincial capitals to deal with population aging, and increase the effectiveness of the use of funds for medical and health expenditures and social security employment expenditures. The conclusions and policy recommendations drawn in this paper have a positive effect on China’s response to the fiscal sustainability problems caused by an aging population.
Carbon emissions reduction is crucial to global climate governance and sustainable development. By 2060, China envisioned being carbon-neutral, and it has adopted a series of policies and measures for environmental management, especially in the main stream of Yangtze River basin, where China’s carbon emissions are centered. The spatial distribution characteristics and agglomeration effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the main stream of Yangtze River basin are analyzed from 2010 to 2019 based on the perspective of local (city and state) administrative regions, and uses the spatial Durbin model to examine the influencing factors and spatial spillover effects of carbon emissions. The findings discovered from the extensive research are as follows: First, carbon emissions in the main stream of Yangtze River basin present a fluctuating upward trend, and CO2 emissions in the lower reaches are significantly higher than those in the middle and upper reaches, which are closely related to the economic volume. Secondly, carbon emissions have a significant positive spatial correlation among prefecture-level cities, and carbon emissions show a high-high concentration in downstream regions and low-low concentration in upstream regions. Thirdly, regional economic development level, secondary industry development level, and population density have considerable influence on CO2 emissions, among which the Kuznets hypothesis is evidenced by the interaction between economic progress and carbon emissions. Therefore, strengthening regional cooperation efforts and collaborating to promote low-carbon development are the vital ways to achieve carbon emissions reduction.
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