The role of affluence, urbanization, and human capital for sustainable forest management in China: Robust findings from a new method of Fourier cointegration

Abstract

Affluence and planned urbanization may have a crucial role in conserving forests and decreasing forest footprint with rising awareness and human development. Productivity rise from technological progress is key to facilitating the underlying mechanisms of theoretically expected changes in all those processes. They are seen as an alternative way to transform the current habits into one that is conservative and respectful to the environment while keeping the economic welfare at the same time. By following the theoretical underpinnings of such expectations, this article investigates how the development changes of China have impacted on the forest footprint. In this frame, the study is an attempt to empirically inquire underlying mechanisms of the forest transition hypothesis, which supports the idea that affluence, urbanization, human capital, and productivity can help to save forests. The transition process is depicted by a hump-shaped curve mostly attributed to the Environmental Kuznets Curve in the literature. The period 1961-2017 is particularly relevant as it precedes and follows the Chinese open-door policy of the 1980s. This study reaches robust findings and new insights for sustainable forest management. Results show that income growth did not contribute to reducing the forest footprint, as the forest footprint has increased with income rises. On the contrary, urbanization, human capital, and total factor productivity have reduced the forest footprint. Based on the evidence provided, policymakers should devote increasing attention to education that serves human capital formation, and efficiency gains for sustainable forestry simultaneously.

Geopolitical risk and tourism in Turkey

“…One of these is the RALS procedure which allows the development of stronger tests with the help of information obtained from high moments when residues do not exhibit normal distribution. Furthermore, it is a simple testing process that does not need the underlying functional form to be specified in advance and to predefine a particular density function or verify the presence of a specific form of non-normality (Oh et al ., 2020; Yilanci et al ., 2023). Finally, the main benefit of RALS is that it is also effective when the errors are non-normal and normal.…”

Towards low‐carbon sustainable development under Industry 4.0: The influence of industrial intelligence on China's carbon mitigation

“…Referring to human capital theory, human capital refers to the capital formed by human investment, mainly through schooling and other expenditures to enhance the ability to benefit people for life (Becker & Barro, 1988). As to the indicator of measuring human capital, some scholars use the secondary school enrollment rate (Arshad et al, 2016), educational level of the population aged 25 and over (Teixeira & Queirós, 2016), human capital index based on average schooling year (Yilanci et al, 2023), and so forth. There is a common consensus that educational attainment is the determiner to measure human capital and previous empirical studies also confirmed that higher educated human capital can effectively contribute to adjust industrial structure, innovative activity, and the carbon reduction target (Bano et al, 2018; Fang & Chang, 2016; Fang & Chen, 2017; Jiang et al, 2023; Khan, 2020).…”

The Impact of Technological Dynamics and Fiscal Decentralization on Forest Resource Efficiency in China: The Mediating Role of Digital Economy

“…Based on the study findings that emphasize the forestry industry structure optimization through the transformation of scientific and technological advancements, green technologies are important for managing natural resources resource [32]. The government must prioritize the development of human capital and the use of technological advancements to enhance efficiency in sustainable forestry practices [33][34][35]. Thus, we can hypothesize the following hypotheses.…”