Recently, Prof. Zhang Guoxing and his research team has published two papers on Energy Policy and Journal of Cleaner Production (JCR Q1) respectively, titled “The impact of the policy and behavior of public participation on environmental governance performance: Empirical analysis based on provincial panel data in China” and “Which kind of directed technical change does China's economy have? From the perspective of energy-saving and low-carbon”. Prof. Zhang Guoxing is supported by the MOE Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University, and has been engaging on the research of public policies on resources and environment and sustainable development, with more than 40 papers published on SSCI, SCI and CSSCI journals over the past five years.

Here are abstracts of the two papers mentioned above.

1. The impact of the policy and behavior of public participation on environmental governance performance: Empirical analysis based on provincial panel data in China

• Journal: Energy Policy
• Author: Guoxing Zhang, Nana Deng, Haizhen Mou, Zhe George Zhang, Xiaofeng Chen
• Abstract: The problem of environmental pollution becomes serious along with the advancement of urbanization in China. The public is paying more and more attention to environmental governance. The Chinese government has promulgated and implemented policies to ensure public participation in environmental governance. Based on Chinese provincial data from 2006 to 2014, this paper analyzes the problem from the aspect of the public’s own living environment and studies the interaction between public participation behavior and policy. The empirical results show that public environmental participation behavior measured by complaint letters failed to improve the public’s own living environment, while proposals were successful. Moreover, the policy played a significant role in improving environmental governance. In addition, the impact of public participation policy and proposals on environmental governance was mutual replacement. This may be due to the proposals are different from ordinary letters. The government may adopt the proposals from members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) when formulating policies.
•  Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.030

2. Which kind of directed technical change does China's economy have? From the perspective of energy-saving and low-carbon

• Journal: Journal of Cleaner Production
• Author: XIU Jing, ZHANG Guo-xing, HU Yi
• Abstract: Improvements in energy-saving and low-carbon technologies in the economic system are foundations of sustainable economic development. Therefore, measuring the bias of technical change from the perspective of energy-saving and low-carbon is a prerequisite for clarifying whether economic growth is manifested as low-carbon and sustainable. In this paper, the production function from the perspective of energy-saving and low-carbon in China is constructed, and ridge regression is used to estimate it to measure energy and carbon bias in China's technical change. The results indicate that technical change is biased towards energy use and carbon emissions relative to capital and labor, but this bias is weakening. In general, China's economic system has always biased towards carbon emissions, and its carbon-biased technical change has the largest share in directed technical change. However, it is gradually shrinking.
• Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.05.296