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This article applies heterogeneous firm trade theory, developed for the manufacturing sector, to the hotel and tourism industry to detect expansion among star-rated hotels in the context of inbound tourism development at the macro level. This article adopts both a traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) panel model and a threshold panel model using data from 31 administrative regions (provinces) in China during the 2004-2013 period. The results reveal remarkable and significant nonlinear relationships between star-rated hotel expansion and inbound tourism development, thereby offering sound evidence supporting the research hypotheses. Star-rated hotel expansion in most provinces clusters in the standardized threshold between 0.48 and 0.83, while only a few hotels have realized 'leapfrog development' thus far. In addition, as in the particular case of star-rated hotels, inbound tourism development should be promoted through investments in human resources rather than through the exploitation of natural tourism resource endowments. The implications of our results are that rational development plans can be made according to different expansion levels of star-rated hotels in corresponding regions, when both hotel labour productivity and macro tourism environment are considered.

Achieving synergistic governance of air pollution treatment and greenhouse gas emission reduction is the way for the Chinese government to achieve green transformational development. Against this background, this paper takes the implementation of the carbon emissions trading system (ETS) as the breakthrough point, using the time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to explore the synergistic emission reduction effect of ETS on air pollution and carbon emissions and its mechanism. The results indicate that the implementation of ETS not only significantly reduces CO2 emissions but also synergistically achieves the reduction of air pollutants, and the synergistic emission reduction effect is mainly achieved through the synergistic reduction of SO2. Moreover, the emission reduction effect of ETS has economic and regional heterogeneity. On the one hand, the ETS has a more prominent carbon reduction effect in less developed provinces and cities and has a significant synergistic emission reduction effect on SO2 and PM2.5; on the other hand, the carbon emission reduction effect of ETS is more potent in Beijing, Hubei, and Shanghai, followed by Tianjin and Chongqing, and the weakest in Guangdong. In addition, through the analysis of the mediating effect, this paper finds that reducing energy consumption, optimizing the energy structure, and improving energy efficiency are effective ways for ETS to achieve synergistic emission reduction. This study provides valuable policy enlightenment for promoting the synergistic governance of pollution and carbon reduction.