Natural Quality, Environmental Resources and Global Value Chain

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, with the worsening of global environmental quality, environmental protection has gradually become the focus of the world. Many polluting industries in developed countries have also been transferred to developing countries, forming a global value chain (GVC) of pollution transfer (Li & Zhou, 2017). Although developing countries participate in the division of global value chains and gain considerable economic and employment gains (Kee & Tang, 2016), they also undertake a considerable part of the pollution industry transfer from developed countries. Li & Zhou (2017) have demonstrated that when developed countries outsource 10% of polluting industries to developing countries, it will reduce their domestic pollution emissions by 6-7%. Therefore, developed countries tend to import pollution-intensive products from developing countries (Chichilnisky, 1994; Copeland & Taylor, 1994). Environmental regulations have become the comparative advantage of enterprises’ offshore outsourcing strategies, and such a "race to the bottom line" often leads to the collapse of the country's environment. With the process of economic globalization, environmental pollution in many local areas has evolved into global environmental pollution through trade, FDI, technology transfer, and other media, and has become a fundamental threat to human survival and sustainable development. Increasingly smoggy weather is also becoming a major obstacle to the quality of life of residents.

According to the World Health Organization's assessment of the disease burden caused by air pollution, more than two million premature deaths a year may be caused by both outdoor and indoor air pollution in cities, and more than half the population of the developing world suffers from this environmental threat. At a time when global resources are running out and environmental quality is declining, it is not enough to consider only economic benefits. If the unrestrained consumption of resources and pollution of the environment exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, it will cause irreversible damage to the environment. With the improvement of living standards, people pay more and more attention to comfort of life and the sustainable development of the environment.

We want to incorporate environmental factors into GVC measurements, and if the quality of an emerging markets environment is damaged by being embedded in GVCs, then the quality of people's lives will not improve as a result. Some scholars have also begun to study the environmental impact of global value chains. For example, Wang et al. (2022) studied the real benefit of enterprises after they join GVCs; Liu et al. (2020) studied the relationship between value chain embedding degree and trade embodied carbon between 14 industrial sectors in China and some major countries; Ye et al. (2019) verified the impact of value chain embedding degree on technological progress and environmental pollution. Therefore, it is timely to link environmental quality and natural resources with GVC.

We invite policy contributions exploring contemporary issues for this Special Issue. We also encourage submissions on technological progress, biodiversity resource change, and diffusion. This Topical Collection invites scholars and experts to a systematic and in-depth discussion on environmental quality, natural resources, and Global Value Chains. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: industrial intelligence and GVC in the digital era; trade barriers, industrial pollution emissions, and enterprises’ benefits; climate change, carbon emissions, and GVC; government efficiency, biodiversity loss, and joining GVC in emerging markets; sustainability and biology resource and planning; environmental quality and labour efficiency; environmental quality, carbon emissions, and transfer; environmental quality, economic growth, and natural resources governance; review of environmental quality, natural resources, and GVC; resource abundance; green economic growth in developing countries; factor market distortion, technological innovation, and environmental pollution; global value chain embeddedness in emissions embodied in trade; industrial agglomeration, technological progress, and embodied species loss in export trade.

Prof. Dr. Shuhong Wang
Guest Editor

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• natural quality
• environmental resources
• global value chain
• biodiversity loss
• green technology