The Green and Low-Carbon Development Effect of Comprehensive Sports Events: A Quasi-Natural Experiment From China

Abstract

Large-scale sports events can improve public environmental awareness, strengthen urban governance, and push green innovation. However, it may also increase the burden on infrastructure, cause energy consumption, and lead to some pollution. Using the panel data of 278 cities in China from 2006 to 2019, this study systematically discusses how comprehensive sports events affect the green and low-carbon development of Chinese cities. First, the green total factor productivity and carbon emission efficiency calculated by the SBM-DEA model are taken as proxy variables of green and low-carbon development. And then, the spatial difference-in-differences (SDID) model is used to undertake empirical analysis and further test the impact mechanism and heterogeneity. Four main results are derived from this study: 1) the hosting of comprehensive sports events can significantly enhance the green and low-carbon development of cities. This result is still valid after a whole string of robustness tests; 2) comprehensive sports events have a significant positive spatial spillover effect on the green and low-carbon development of adjacent cities; 3) the mechanism analysis shows that comprehensive sports events can encourage green development of cities through technological innovation, sports industry development, and foreign investment, but through foreign investment, sports events cannot significantly affect the green total factor productivity and carbon emission efficiency of host cities; and 4) heterogeneity exists between the city rank and the event level. The promotional effect of comprehensive sports events on cities’ green and low-carbon development is more significant in first-tier cities and for international events.

Systematic evaluation of integration between China’s digital economy and sports industry: Two-stage grey relational analysis and vector autoregressive model

“…Moreover, China has been utilizing its vast expertise to assist in the construction and upgrading of sports venues and digital infrastructures in foreign countries in recent years [ 45 ]. These efforts have led to synergistic green development between sports facilities and urban upgrades [ 46 ], and as a result, we find that the construction of sports facilities (X 11 ’) integrates well with the digital economy.…”

Fiscal Expenditure on Sports and Regional Carbon Emissions: Evidence from China

“…The rationalization of industrial structure is expressed as the degree of coordination between industries and the degree of effective use of resources, and this paper uses the Thiel index as its proxy variable. The calculation formula is as follows [40]:…”

“…On the one hand, the literature has mainly used literature analysis [31][32][33], interviews and questionnaires [34,35], and simulation analysis [36,37] to focus on the study of the sports industry and the development analysis of the sports business itself, and the number of studies using relevant data to construct econometric models is relatively small. On the other hand, some scholars have explored the low-carbon development path of the sports industry itself [38][39][40], and the impact of the sports economy on regional low-carbon development [41], but none of them have considered the effect of governmental actions. Obviously, in promoting regional economic development, the government plays an important role in regional economic and social development through public finance spending [42,43], but there is a lack of studies exploring the effect of government announcement spending on regional low-carbon development from the perspective of the sports economy.…”

The Impact of the Digital Economy on the Carbon Emissions of the Sports Industry – Based on Panel Data on 30 Provinces in China

“…With the continuous expansion of the scale of the sports industry and the development trend of the global lowcarbon economy, the issue of carbon reduction and the green development of the sports industry has been widely considered. More than 280 sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), FIFA and others, have joined the "Race to Zero Carbon" campaign launched by the United Nations, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach zero carbon emissions by 2040 [6]. In 2019, China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment issued a carbon-neutral pilot plan for large-scale events, which included carbon emissions from largescale sports events in the macro management system.…”