The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused huge losses and massive damage to socio-economic development around the globe, which might even potentially evolve into a humanitarian crisis as it continues to spread. In response to the further resulting public threats, collaborative research, rapid production, and efficient and just distribution of vaccines have been given a top priority. However, there exists a serious inefficiency and injustice in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines among different countries, regions, and social classes currently. Richer countries and regions have acquired far more vaccines than needed, further exacerbating the severity of the epidemic in underdeveloped and marginalized countries and regions. From a perspective of critical global justice, we explore the causes of the inefficient and unjust global distribution of vaccines and comprehensively examine the shortcomings of the current distribution frameworks, such as COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX). Then, under the framework of critical global justice, we propose a multi-phase fair priority model that improves the existing proportional distribution mechanism. This solution to the global injustice reoptimizes the cross-border and domestic vaccine distribution and aims to resolve the pandemic more efficiently. The proposed framework and methodology of vaccine distribution could be taken as an opportunity to consistently promote the development of the global socio-economic structure towards global justice more broadly and systematically.

As an important environmental amenity, sunlight brings us a large number of benefits and improves the quality of our daily lives, and its welfare measurement depends on concrete living conditions. The purpose of this article is to empirically document the non-marketed value of sunlight in light of the view orientation of an apartment in the context of the housing market. Using a hedonic pricing model estimated with the real estate transaction data over 40,000 housing units in 2019–2021 in Shanghai, it is found that: (1) homeowners, on average, are willing to pay an extra 7.2% to choose the apartments with a high level of sunshine (facing south), relative to those with no direct access to sunlight (facing north); (2) the value of sunlight shrinks with pollution and becomes larger if living in a higher apartment; (3) residents living in higher units have a larger willingness to pay for the sunlight and environmental quality improvement. These empirical findings shed light on the welfare measurement of sunlight and have profound implications for the capitalization of environmental amenities reflected in housing prices.