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Energy transition, including the transition away from fossil fuels, is a difficult and complex process, particularly in emerging and developing economies. One of the key factors determining its effectiveness is the acceptance of its course and consequences by local communities. Taking into account these circumstances, as well as the ongoing period of profound energy sector transformation in Poland, the main objective of this article is to diagnose the perception of energy transition and assess the preparedness of local authorities for its consequences from the perspective of a representative sample of 1863 residents from 19 cities with county rights located in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin. The research was conducted in the second quarter of 2025. In analyzing the survey results, descriptive statistics, identification of interdependencies, and non-parametric statistical tests (Mann–Whitney U, Kruskal–Wallis, and Wilcoxon) were employed. The obtained results indicate relative acceptance of decarbonization; however, there is significantly lower support for closing hard-coal mines. Respondents rate the preparedness of local authorities for the consequences of hard-coal mining liquidation in the region as low. Moreover, they believe that the local labor market is better prepared for restructuring changes than the local governments of Silesian cities. The respondents’ answers differ primarily according to gender and education, although the identified relationships are neither obvious nor linear. Furthermore, the age of respondents only influences the perception of the necessity of closing hard-coal mines and the assessment of city authorities’ preparedness for the consequences of this process. The results of the conducted research contribute to the analysis of socio-economic processes accompanying energy transition and may be useful in conducting social consultations and communication and information activities, as well as in developing regional restructuring strategies.

A mega city region comprises a cluster of highly networked urban settlements anchored by one or more large cities. Substantial studies have been conducted in the 21st century to theorise the development of mega city regions from two perspectives: one focuses on the rationale/challenges of planning and governance while the other focuses on the economic forces that generate the mega city regions. In China, the outstanding position of mega city regions in China’s economic development has been accentuated in both academic research and recent policies. Recent studies have unpacked the political dynamics of mega city regions in China and identified challenges for planning and governance. The present study approaches this issue through another theoretical lens and deciphers the economic process underneath the recent upsurge of Chinese mega city regions. By unfolding the economic transition since the late 1970s to trace the footprints of mega city region development, the paper contributes a discourse of how different waves of economic transition – that is, rural industrialisation, land-centred development and urban tertiarisation – have been steering individual cities towards super mega city regions. The paper also identifies the distinctive challenges confronting the future development of China’s mega city regions, including jurisdictional fragmentation, socio-spatial inequality and environmental externalities, which were created because of the strong bottom-up initiatives in land development during rural industrialisation. New policies and planning are required in response to these challenges as well as to the emerging new industries in the new wave of economic transition (i.e. from labour-intensive industries to the development of high-tech industries). 特大城市区域由一个或多个大城市锚定的高度网络化的城市住区群组成。21世纪的学者们进行了大量研究，从两个角度对特大城市区域的发展进行理论化：一个侧重于规划和治理的理论基础/挑战，另一个侧重于产生特大城市区域的经济力量。在中国，特大城市地区在中国经济发展中的突出地位在学术研究和近期政策中都得到了强调。最近的研究揭示了中国特大城市地区的政策动态，并确定了规划和治理面临的挑战。本研究从另一个理论视角探讨这一问题，解读中国特大城市区域最近的崛起的经济过程。本文呈现了自20世纪70年代末以来的经济转型，从而追踪了特大城市区域发展的足迹。在此基础上，本文探讨了不同的经济转型浪潮—即农村工业化、以土地为中心的开发和城市的第三产业化—如何引导单个城市走向特大城市区域。本文还确定了中国特大城市地区未来发展面临的独特挑战，包括管辖权分散、社会空间不平等和环境外部性，这些挑战是由农村工业化期间强有力的自下而上的土地开发举措造成的。需要新的政策和规划来应对这些挑战以及新一轮经济转型中出现的新产业（即从劳动密集型产业到高技术产业的发展）。

To ameliorate the efficiency of urban green innovation is the key to realizing green economic transition. This paper constructs a Super-NSBM model with green patents as the intermediate output, uses this model to assess and decompose the green innovation efficiency of 284 Chinese cities, and finally analyzes the spatiotemporal characteristics and influential factors. The research result showed the gap of urban green innovation total efficiency among various regions in China is narrowing, while the spatial differentiation of decomposition efficiency is deepening. This means that a spatial collaborative innovation division pattern of “Eastern Region R&D + Southwest and Northeast Region Transformation” has gradually formed. In the meantime, this paper also found that the spillover effects of the urban green innovation total efficiency and phased efficiency all can form a significant demonstration effect on the surrounding areas. Finally, financial agglomeration, industrial structure, knowledge sharing, economic activity, higher education, opening, and environmental regulations may affect urban green innovation total efficiency and phased efficiency, and this effect has regional heterogeneity.

We propose an empirical framework for assessing the vibrancy and trajectory of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems. We apply this framework to study the US National Capital Region's localized cluster of biotechnology-related entrepreneurship by building our analysis around a set of indicators of ecosystem vitality proposed by Stangler and Bell-Masterson (2015). This application constitutes an initial attempt at mapping the dynamics of an industry cluster within the adaptive life cycle of a wider regional ecosystem. We find that the biotechnology cluster in the National Capital Region entered a \"reorientation\" stage in the early 2000s, building up stored energy, capital, and connectedness in non-research-oriented activities. An increasing regional presence of large biotech firms in the past 5 years, a highly active and diverse start-up sector, increasing merger and acquisition activity, and declines in regional public funding for medical and clinical trials all suggest a transition of entrepreneurial activity in the region from a dynamic driven by federal research spillovers to one increasingly driven by private sector actors.

Entrepreneurship has risen to a national development strategy to drive China’s economic transition. Previous regional studies of Chinese entrepreneurship have focused mostly on metropolitan areas or cities. This research contributes to the literature by understanding entrepreneurship in Chinese peripheral regions and meanwhile considering sectoral variations. Based on records of 9.26 million newly registered enterprises, we present the spatial–temporal dynamics of startup activities in China’s peripheral counties from 2004 to 2016. We further conduct panel regressions to explore the geographically bounded influencing factors of total and sectoral entrepreneurship in these peripheral regions. We provide evidence on the positive impacts of macro-economic conditions, industry specialization, county size, and patent knowledge on general entrepreneurship. These findings to some extent vary by sector. We also find positive spillover effects from the nearby large metropolitan center on peripheral entrepreneurship. These findings shed light on the characteristics of sectoral entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurship policy in peripheral regions.

We analyse the regional effects of China’s monetary policy during the economic transition period based on the city classification system under the New Normal. Using panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models, we examine the differences in the influence of a unified monetary policy on four types of Chinese cities: first-tier, quasi-first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier cities, from perspective of economic output. Based on a comparative analysis of the results of impulse response function and variance decomposition, we conclude that whether for quantitative monetary policy or price-based monetary policy, the degree to which economic growth responds to the unified monetary policy varies across the four types of cities in the short and long terms. With reference to China’s economic transition under the New Normal, in the short term, this phenomenon probably relate to the varying degrees of financial marketization among the four city types; in the long run, this phenomenon may be attributed to the difference in the progress of industrial upgrading of these urban areas. Based on the analysis above, we suggest policy implications for Chinese cities based on the structural monetary policy, industrial upgrading, and market-oriented financial sector reforms.

China’s Mid-Yangtze River city region (MYR) has been designated as a national strategic growth region intended to reverse the slow-down in economic transition. However, there has been a lack of attention to the internal spatial organisation of the region’s growth capacity associated with its inter-city relations. This article combines an urban network approach and a spatial econometric framework to not only examine the local contribution to growth of MYR cities’ indigenous factors, cross-territorial flows and positions in the regional capital network, but also to estimate their spatial spillovers. The analysis sheds light on the interplay between spatial proximity and network capital in the regional growth process. Recent growth is found to be significantly influenced by indigenous capital stock, labour cost and technological advances, by commodity and self-investment flows, and by ‘authority’ and ‘hub’ network capital, associated with coexisting endogenous and exogenous spillovers. The findings infer that institutional capacity in organising endowment mobilities will be important for policy to promote coordinated development. 中国长江中游城市地区（MYR）已被指定为国家战略增长区，目的是扭转经济转型的放缓。然而，人们对与城市间关系相关的区域增长能力的内部空间组织缺乏关注。本文将城市网络方法和空间计量经济学框架相结合，不仅考察了MYR城市本土因素、跨地域流动和在区域资本网络中的地位对增长的贡献，还评估了它们的空间溢出效应。我们的分析揭示了空间邻近性和网络资本在区域增长过程中的相互作用。我们发现，最近的增长受到本地资本存量、劳动力成本和技术进步、商品和自我投资流动以及“权威”和“枢纽”网络资本的重大影响，而这些都与内生和外生溢出的共存相关。研究结果推断，组织禀赋流动的制度能力对于促进协调发展的政策而言非常重要。

The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the debate among optimists, pessimists, and centrists about whether the world economic order is undergoing a fundamental change. While optimists foresee the continuation of economic globalization after the pandemic, pessimists expect localization instead of globalization, given the pandemic’s structural negative consequence on the world economy. By contrast, the centrists anticipate a “U-shaped” recovery, where Covid-19 will not kill globalization but slow it down. The three existing perspectives on Covid-19’s impact on the economic globalization are not without merit, but they do not take sufficient temporal distance from the ongoing issue. This article suggests employing the historical perspective to expand the time frame by examining the rise and fall of economic globalization before and after the 2008 global financial crisis. The authors argue that economic globalization has been in transition since the 2008 financial crisis, and one important but not exclusive factor to explain this change is the evolving US–China economic relationship, from symbiotic towards increasingly competitive. The economic restructuring in US and China has begun after both countries weathered the 2008 crisis and gained momentum since the outbreak of trade war and Covid-19. The article investigates this trend by distinguishing different types of production activities, and the empirical results confirm that localization and regionalization have been filling the vacuum of economic globalization in retreat in the last decade.

This paper examines whether corporate environmental responsibility is influenced by regional differences in climate change denial. While there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change is happening, recent surveys still indicate widespread climate change denial across societies. Given that corporate activity causing climate change is fundamentally rooted in individual beliefs and societal institutions, we examine whether local perceptions about climate change matter for firms’ engagement in environmental responsibility. We use climate change perception surveys conducted in the U.S. to compute a novel measure of climate change denial for each U.S. county. We find that firms located in counties with higher levels of climate change denial have weaker environmental performance ratings, are more likely to commit environmental violations, and impose greater environmental costs on society. Regional differences in religiosity, social capital, political leaning, or county-level demographic characteristics cannot explain these results. Furthermore, we document that strong corporate governance mechanisms and corporate culture moderate the negative relationship between climate change denial and corporate environmental responsibility. Overall, our findings offer new insights into how local beliefs and perceptions about climate change may influence firm-level sustainability practices.

The establishment of Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones represents a novel endeavor aimed at paving a “bottom-up” pathway for the advancement of green finance and, consequently, holds immense significance in fostering economic growth that is environmentally sustainable. Drawing on data spanning the years 2013–2019 from 278 prefecture-level cities across China, we delve into the influence of the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot policy on urban Green Total Factor Productivity. We found that: Firstly, the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot policy has demonstrated a discernible enhancement in Green Total Factor Productivity within the designated pilot regions. Secondly, there is heterogeneity in the promotion effect of this pilot policy on Green Total Factor Productivity. As the geographical advantage and economic development level decrease, this promotional effect gradually diminishes. Thirdly, it is evident that the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot policy primarily elevates Green Total Factor Productivity in the pilot regions by improving resource allocation efficiency, fostering innovation in green technologies, and facilitating the upgrading of industrial structures. This research not only underscores the efficacy of green finance in the context of economic transition but also provides empirical substantiation for the strategic utilization of pilot zones to propel nationwide initiatives aimed at sustainable green development.