The potential effect of implementing environmental regulations on economic growth has been a controversial issue for a long time. Environmental regulations may impact on economic growth by reconstructing the economic structure. With the intention of exploring the nature of this mechanism, it is important to understand the internal inter-relation of the three parties, requiring data from a large economy experiencing the transition in economic structure. This paper selects panel data for 30 provinces in China from 2008–2019, constructs a PVAR model, and empirically examines the dynamic relationship among environmental regulation, economic structure reconstruction, and economic growth. The results demonstrate that there is a two-way effect between environmental regulation and economic growth. In other words, environmental regulation has a “U” shape effect on economic growth, which first inhibits and then promotes economic growth, while economic growth has a strong and then weak promotion effect on environmental regulation. Economic growth has a short-term negative impact on economic structure reconstruction, whereas economic restructuring has a long-term beneficial impact on environmental regulation. Therefore, the government should reasonably set the intensity of regulation and optimize the path of economic restructuring to deal with the relationship between environmental regulation, economic structure reconstruction, and economic growth.

Intra-product international specialization promotes the global diversification of manufacturing industries with various carbon intensities. With the emerging topic of global warming, a new constraint on the use of carbon in international trade is being imposed on developing countries such as China. To explore the potential effects of this constraint on the progress of specialization, a new theoretical framework was proposed with a series of empirical tests derived from detailed panel data built on statistics from 2004 to 2020 from manufacturing industries in China. The test results indicate that carbon emissions and emission levels in manufacturing industries are partially induced by specialization. Industries with various attributes present heterogeneous performances under the carbon effect. Intra-product international specialization has more significant carbon effects on certain industries, such as those with a limited technique, capital-intensive industries, and industries that use a medium to a high level of carbon. Therefore, given the carbon constraints, high-quality development in manufacturing industries may be attained in developing countries such as China through improvements in specialization in the international market and incremental foreign investment in high-value-added and low-carbon production sectors. These improvements could be secured by implementing appropriate industrial policies and constraints on energy consumption.

Because of the great advantages of savings for installation costs and areas of the ground, the ground source heat pump (GSHP) system combined with the ground-coupled heat exchanger with structural member is becoming more and more popular such as energy pile foundation etc.. However, the calculation method especially on the perspective of plate-type ground-coupled heat exchanger (PGHE) has not been established. This paper reports a study on a mathematical model developed to analyze the heat transfer of U-tube plate-type ground-coupled heat exchanger (UPGHE) which combined with structural member and an analytical solution is revealed. The results show that there are clear ‘heat submerge’ for the leg with lower temperature of UPGHE and it is more sensible to arrange one leg apart from another. The results also show that the spacing of pipes have obvious impact on the performance of UPGHE and the temperature difference between two legs have no important effect on the total performance of UPGHE.