Impact of natural resource mining on sustainable economic development: The role of education and green innovation in China

Abstract

As the extraction and usage of natural resources continue to be a double-edged sword – supporting economic growth but deteriorating the environment- we study the impact of natural resource mining on sustainable economic development in the largest (PPP) economy – China. We use province-level data from 2001 to 2020 and employ econometric panel techniques, such as fixed effects, two-stage least squares, and a battery of robustness tests. We further explore the potential effects of education and green innovation in mitigating/exacerbating the role of natural resources in the Chinese provincial economy. The results show that: (1) Natural resource mining hurts sustainable development, verifying the “resource curse” effect. (2) Green innovation and education restrain the negative impact of resource mining on sustainable development, turning the curse into a blessing. (3) A regional heterogeneity is observed in the impact of resource mining on sustainable development, showing more significant effects in the Western and low-urbanized regions. (4) Green innovation and education can assuage the curse effect of natural resources into gospel effect. Policy implications and recommendations are proposed in light of the findings to promote sustainable economic development in China.

Keywords

Natural resource mining / Sustainable economic growth / Education / Green innovation / Resource curse / China

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lingyu Zhang: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Sampriti Basak: Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. David Zakharov: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Kristoffer Szilas: Conceptualization, Data curation, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ole Christiansen, former CEO for NunaMinerals A/S, for providing us with access to the Storø drill cores. Additionally, we appreciate Torsten Vennemann at the University of Lausanne for providing access to the laser fluorination facility. This study forms part of the PhD-thesis of Lingyu Zhang. The authors acknowledge funding from VILLUM FONDEN Grant VKR18978 to Kristoffer Szilas, and China Scholarship Council (No. 202006170037) to Lingyu Zhang. We thank Vincent van Hinsberg for insightful discussions, and Tod Waight for help with EPMA analyses at the University of Copenhagen. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that greatly helped to improve the manuscript, and Associate Editor Vinod Samuel for professional editorial handling.

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