Does High-Speed Rail Opening Affect the Health Care Environment?-Evidence From China

The impact of corporate climate risk perception on green outward foreign direct investment

How to address climate risks and achieve green transformation has become a critical issue that businesses urgently need to consider. We apply growth option theory and prospect theory to examine the impact of corporate climate risk perceptions on green outward foreign direct investment (GFDI) using a research sample of heavily polluting listed companies in China from 2009 to 2022. Our findings reveal that companies with higher perceived climate risks tend to increase their inclination towards GFDI, and the informal hierarchy of boards reinforces the positive effect of both. Supplementary analyses indicate that through GFDI, corporations can exert positive effects on their own environmental performance and future green innovations. The positive impact is notably more visible in nonstate-owned companies and sample units from provinces along the Belt and Road. These findings extend the economic consequences of climate risk at the firm level from the perspective of international business research and provide empirical references for firms to promote their own green transformation from a practical perspective.

Regional integration and public healthcare environment: Evidence from China

Introduction

Existing studies have focused on the impact of economic development and urban expansion on public healthcare environment but has ignored the importance of regional integration. Regional integration reflects the spatial distribution of the labor force, which significantly affects healthcare workforce and healthcare infrastructure development.

Methods

Based on panel nested data for 137 cities in 16 major city clusters in China from 2001 to 2019, this paper assesses the impact of regional integration on the public healthcare environment through a hierarchical linear model (HLM).

Results

Our findings indicate that a 1% increase in regional integration leads to a 6.6 and 1.9% improvement in healthcare workforce and healthcare infrastructure. The results of the mechanism analysis indicate that regional integration affects the public healthcare environment through improving transportation infrastructure and industrial upgrading. In addition, regional integration has a stronger effect on cities with lower levels of economic development and healthcare environments. Finally, the endogeneity test based on the difference-in-difference (DID) model and the robustness test based on high-dimensional fixed effects model conduct the consistent conclusions.

Discussion

Policies to improve the public healthcare environment through promoting regional integration are proposed. Government should develop a more comprehensive regional cooperation plan to improve the public healthcare environment. Also, financial spending on improving the healthcare environment in peripheral cities should be increased. In addition, regional integration policy development needs to consider differences across regions.

Can information infrastructure development improve the health care environment? Evidence from China

Existing studies ignore the importance of information infrastructure development in improving regional health care environment. This paper adopts a spatial difference-in-difference (DID) model to assess the impact of information infrastructure development on urban health care environment based on a quasi-natural experiment of the "Broadband China" city pilots (BCCP). A balanced panel of 259 cities from 2010 to 2019 is selected for empirical analysis in this paper. Our findings show that the implementation of BCCP resulted in a 4.1 and 2.9% improvement in local medical workforce and medical infrastructure. In addition, there is significant spatial spillover effects of the implementation of BCCP, with 7.2 and 12.5% improvement in medical workforce and medical infrastructure in the surrounding areas. Our findings also suggest that information infrastructure development enhances the health care environment by driving industrial upgrading and education levels. Further analysis shows that BCCP has the strongest improvement on medical workforce in the eastern region and non-ordinary prefecture-level cities. For medical infrastructure, BCCP has stronger improvement in central region, western region, and non-ordinary prefecture-level cities. Finally, the paper conducts a series of robustness tests to ensure the reliability of the analysis results, including parallel trend tests, placebo tests, and re-estimation with different methods. Policies to improve the health care environment through information infrastructure development are proposed.