With the increasing global concern for the ecological environment and sustainable development, all countries have proposed environmental regulatory policies to improve the quality of their ecological environments. China has also proposed an environmental regulation policy: Leading an officials’ accountability audit of natural resources (AANR). As the main subject of consuming resources, the sustainability of enterprises has become a focus of all parties. The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metric measures corporate sustainability. As a result, companies’ ESG performance has gained the community’s attention. Based on data from Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2011 to 2019, this study investigates the role of AANR on the ESG performance of companies via the difference-in-differences (DID) method. This study found that implementing the AANR pilot significantly negatively impacted corporate ESG performance. This result was found to remain robust after passing parallel trend and robustness tests. Further research found that the AANR differed significantly across corporate ownership and regions in corporate ESG performance. First, pilot implementation had a more significant impact on the ESG performance of non-state enterprises. Second, the differences across regions showed that the central region had the most significant impact, followed by the western region, while the eastern region had the most negligible impact. This study will help government departments improve the AANR system and enable companies to focus on their ESG performance.

Eliminating hunger and ensuring food security is one of the specific goals of sustainable development of the United Nations in 2030, and food production is of great significance to food availability. Based on this, this paper investigates the impact of digital inclusive finance on food security by constructing a fixed effects model using panel data for 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2020. The results found that: (1) Digital inclusive finance significantly and positively affects food security, and the results remain robust after robustness tests and endogeneity tests. (2) The scale of farmland operations plays a positive mediating role in the effect of digital inclusive finance on food security, and the level of agricultural machinery positively moderates the effect of digital inclusive finance on food security. (3) Heterogeneity tests show that there is a positive effect of digital inclusive finance on food security in eastern China, and a non-significant effect of digital inclusive finance on food security in central and western regions;. There is a significant positive effect of digital inclusive finance on food security in China’s main grain marketing areas and balanced production and marketing areas, and a non-significant effect of digital inclusive finance on food security in the main grain producing areas.

Improving the cultural consumption level of rural residents is of great practical significance to help revitalize rural culture and achieve common prosperity. Based on this, this study empirically examines the role and impact mechanism of digital inclusive finance on enhancing the cultural consumption of rural residents using panel data of 30 provinces across China from 2011 to 2020. The results show that: (1) Digital inclusive finance can significantly improve the cultural consumption level of rural residents. After a robustness test and endogenous analysis, this conclusion is still stable. (2) Digital inclusive finance significantly improves the cultural consumption level of rural residents through three paths: raising the income level of farmers, promoting the level of urbanization, and improving the level of financial development. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows that the breadth of digital inclusive financial coverage can significantly improve the cultural consumption level of rural residents, but the depth of digital inclusive financial use and the degree of digitization do not show an enhancing effect; the development of digital inclusive finance in the eastern area has a significant role in promoting the cultural consumption level of rural residents, but the role is not significant in the central and western areas.

No abstract