Bridging the gap: Building environmental, social and governance capabilities in small and medium logistics companies.

Nowadays, the popularity of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance measurement has dramatically increased, particularly to listed companies, for supporting various investment decisions. Companies with high ESG scores imply that their ongoing business development is recognised to be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable. From the current ESG measurement practice, the measurement frameworks are built on rating schemes, such as KLD and ASSET4, so as to derive the ESG scores for listed companies. However, such existing measurement frameworks are difficult to be implemented in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with unstructured and non-standardised business data, especially in logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) practice. In addition, it is inevitable for listed companies to work with SMEs, for example logistics service providers, but they need a systematic framework to source the responsible SMEs to maintain the ESG performance. To address the above industrial pain-points, this study proposes an ESG development prioritisation and performance measurement framework (ESG-DPPMF) by means of the Bayesian best-worst method enabling the group decision-making capability to prioritise the ESG development areas and formulate the performance measurement scheme. Through consolidating the opinions from logistics practitioners, it is found that fair labour practice, reverse logistics and human right in supply chains are the most essential areas to further enhance ESG capabilities in the logistics industry. In addition, the viability of the ESG performance measurement has been validated, and thus the sustainable and human-centric logistics practice can be developed to achieve business sustainability.

Does Giving and Receiving Helping Behavior Fit Matter? The Role of Neighboring Behavior Fit in Working Residents' Mental Health.

Ecological systems theory suggests that for individuals, the three domains of community, family, and work are connected and transfer resources among each other. In the community, residents receive and give helping behavior from and to their neighbors. Neighboring behavior underlies interactions among residents in the community, thereby influencing the work and family domains. Building on ecological systems theory, the authors propose that the compatibility of receiving and giving helping behavior among working residents is related to their mental health. Additionally, the authors propose that this congruence effect functions through work-family interference and meaning in life. Using a two-stage field questionnaire survey, this study collected data from 220 full-time Chinese working residents. Using polynomial regression and response surface analysis, receiving-giving neighboring behavior fit was found to be positively associated with mental health. Furthermore, receiving-giving neighboring behavior fit enhances mental health by decreasing work-family interference and promoting meaning in life. When giving and receiving neighboring behavior are imbalanced, working residents have higher levels of mental health when they received more neighboring behavior than they gave, in comparison to the condition when they gave more neighboring behavior than they received. Work-family interference represents inter-role conflict in which pressures from the family and work domains are mutually incompatible. Including both work to family interference and family to work interference, work-family interferences reflect the stress that working residents experience in their family and work domains. By exploring the mediating role of work-family interference, this study shows how the spillover of the benefits of neighboring behavior into the family and work domains enhances working residents' mental health. This study highlights the importance of balancing receiving and giving neighboring behavior for maintaining mental health, thus contributing both theoretically and practically to ecological systems theory.

Environmental benefits of innovation policy: China's national independent innovation demonstration zone policy and haze control.

In recent years, China has focused its development on technological innovation, trying to achieve a win-win situation between environmental protection and economic growth, and it has formulated a series of policies to promote technological innovation. Taking China's national independent innovation demonstration zone (NIIDZ) policy as an example, this paper empirically investigates the impact of China's innovation policy on haze pollution by using a difference-in-differences (DID) model. The results show that the NIIDZ policy promotes the governance of urban haze pollution and confirms the applicability of the experimentalist governance model in the practice of innovation policy in developing countries. Dynamic analysis shows that the NIIDZ policy has an experience accumulation effect. This policy can continue to promote haze control for at least 6 years, and the policy effect increases year by year. Action mechanism analysis shows that the NIIDZ policy can inhibit urban haze pollution by promoting urban technological innovation and high-tech industrial agglomeration. The estimation results of the spatial DID model show that the NIIDZ policy not only inhibits haze pollution in NIIDZ cities but also has an inhibitory effect on haze pollution in the surrounding non-NIIDZ cities and the NIIDZ cities, which confirms the positive externality characteristics of policy diffusion theory and environmental governance. The conclusions of this paper have important theoretical value for understanding the ecological effect of innovation policy and provide experience for developing countries to implement an experimentalist governance model.

Relationship of economic development, family income and health status in China: The moderating role of environmental pollution perception.

Based on the matched data set of the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey and the gross domestic product per capita data extracted from China Statistical Yearbook 2013, this study used hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation models to examine whether environmental pollution perception would moderate the association between economic development and health status. Results revealed that economic development had a mediating effect via family income on health status. A moderated actor effect showed higher level of pollution perception weakens the relationship between family income and health status. Our findings suggested that appropriate environmental regulations should be implemented to sustain healthy economic growth in China.