The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed our daily life, especially in the food industry. This study aims to examine the sustainable factors that influence the reuse intention in China’s online-to-offline (O2O) food delivery industry, using “Meituan Waimai” app users as the objects of investigation. Meituan had great success in the initial stage of business due to the rapid urbanization of the major Chinese cities, and thus it is planning to enter the second and third level of cities in China. However, this may not be sustainable because beginner’s luck does not hold unless it is supported by sustainable governance. To evaluate the online and offline governance of O2O business, we used five service quality factors (convenience, safety, economy, accuracy, and speed) in a structural equation model. Customer satisfaction and reuse intention are used as mediating and dependent variables, respectively. The main findings are as follows. First, among the service characteristics, economy and speed factors did not perfectly mediate satisfaction, implying that the initial stage of success may not be sustainable. O2O service providers in China should put more effort into customizing economic incentives as well as making an appropriate impression regarding the delivery speed. Second, satisfaction is fully supported by other factors, implying that O2O service providers should take into account feedback from the people in the market and consumers.

In terms of economic development and feeding the world’s populations, the importance of the agricultural sector is well known. However, agriculture and its related sectors are also known for contributing more than one-quarter of the world’s GHG emissions. To address this issue, we evaluate the performance of agriculture and its related firms in India from 2013 to 2019 with its environmental efficiency under the paradigm shift promoted by the National Agroforestry Policy in 2014. To evaluate the feasibility of this paradigm shift in agricultural policy, the non-radial slack-based measure (SBM) is utilized in the first stage, and Tobit regressions are used to assess the determinants of efficiency (or sources of inefficiency) measures at the second stage. The results from non-radial SBM show that Indian agricultural firms (foreign direct investment, private, and public) show huge potential with 32.2% on average to enhance their performance if they move toward the frontier of the production possibility curve. This suggests that Indian policymakers should regulate much stronger regulations for firms, especially for the use of agricultural inputs such as energy (fertilizers), with performance-oriented financial measures for sustainable agriculture. To determine the strategic variables for these firms to enhance their performance, Tobit regressions showed that fertilizers use (−3.350%) appears to have the highest negative impact on environmental efficiency. On the other hand, credit access (2.710%) has the highest positive impact on environmental efficiency, implying that policymakers should provide subsidies to firms in the form of soft loans (or credit access) for the purchase of high-quality fertilizers and to adopt energy-saving equipment/technology to minimize the use of chemical fertilizers in India.

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Regulatory policies are indispensable to efficiently curbing anthropogenic CO2 emissions and sustainably producing emission-intensive goods. Though previous modelling practice has studied the cost and benefit of different regulatory policies, such as command-and-control (CAC) and emission trading scheme (ETS), little is known about that for overlapped emission regulation policies. Here, we built up a Data Envelopment Analysis model to study the losses and gains from the overlapped implementation of CAC and ETS for Korean coal-fired power plants during 2011–2015. We showed that the initial phase of CAC in 2012 caused a sudden loss in power plants’ output, but that the loss was gradually eliminated in 2013 and 2014. Upon promulgation in 2015, ETS is expected to increase only 0.990% of output compared to CAC, yet it largely failed to deliver the potential benefit in its first year. The overlapped implementation of CAC and ETS contributes to a small share (5.567%) of the unrealized benefit. Nonetheless, we showed that implementing CAC and ETS in parallel tends to disproportionately affect less efficient power plants by restricting their strategies to meet regulatory measures. Therefore, we suggest that the integration of CAC and ETS can be a transitory measure as ETS provides only marginal welfare benefits, but ETS must be fully adopted and strengthened in the near future to economically and equitably mitigate CO2 emissions.

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