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The purpose of this paper is to study key economic strategies in Asia laid out by the Chinese Government since Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The paper is composed of six parts. The first part analyzes China’s Asian trade strategy with a focus on the free-trade agreement. The second part elaborates the Asian finance and currency strategy with the core being the regionalization of RMB. The third part introduces China’s newly proposed Belt and Road Initiative (B&R). The fourth part deals with the China–USA economic relationship with a view to China’s economic strategy in Asia. The fifth part explains China’s domestic economic policy which forms the basis of the Asian Economic Strategy.

A marked change has taken place in China’s economic strategy in Asia, namely, giving more consideration to how to offer more public goods to the region. This is natural as China’s economic power is developed to a certain level and it is highly related to China’s attempt to growing its economic influence in this region. China believes that the B&R Initiative and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are both public goods China has provided to Asia. China’s economic strategy in Asia demonstrates that China, as a rising power, though faced with domination of established power and the original regional economic rule system, still promotes the cooperation, integration, participation and development of this region. In general, China’s economic strategy in Asia offers an alternative for countries in this region so that Asian countries can better safeguard their rights amid China–America competition, and a new Asian economic order can be better built.

The paper contributes to the researched area of China’s economic strategy in Asia by comprehensively elaborating its trade, money, B&R Initiative and so on. This paper also shows the major challenges of China’s economic strategy in Asia and therefore is helpful to fully understand China’s economic statecraft.

Prior research on green innovation has shown that institutional pressure stimulates enterprises to adopt green innovation. However, an institutional perspective does not explain why firms that face the same amount of institutional pressure execute different environmental practices and innovations. To address this research gap, the authors linked institutional theory with upper echelons theory and organization performance to build a comprehensive research model.

A total of 800 questionnaires were issued. The final usable questionnaires were 195, yielding a response rate of 24.38%. AMOS 23.0 was used to analyze the data and examine the relationships between the constructs in our model.

Institutional pressures affected both green innovation adoption (GIA) and the top management team's (TMT's) response. TMT's response influenced GIA. GIA was an important factor affecting firm performance. Furthermore, TMT's response mediated the relationship between institutional pressure and GIA. Institutional pressures indirectly affected green innovation performance but did not influence economic performance through GIA. Finally, TMT's response indirectly impacted firm performance through GIA.

The authors draw on institutional theory, upper echelons theory, and a performance-oriented perspective to explore the antecedents and consequences of GIA. This study has interesting implications for leaders and managers looking to implement green innovation and leverage it for firm performance to out compete with market rivals as well as to make the changes in collaboration with many other companies including market rivals to gain success in green innovation.

Environmental sustainability has become a primary factor for organisations to compete globally. Stakeholders' involvement with necessary commitment at the right stage of supply chain management (SCM) plays a vital role in development of green supply chain. This paper aims to explore the involvement aspect of stakeholders towards greening of the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors for stakeholder involvement in development of green supply chain and develop use cases for managers and practitioners planning to implement recent technologies to support stakeholders' involvement.

After a thorough literature survey and interviews with experts from industry and academia, the factors for involvement of stakeholders for greening the supply chain were identified. A survey-based research has been used to collect primary data for effective people involvement in development of green supply chain. The decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used for ranking the critical success factors. Effective implementation of success factors using merits of blockchain and internet of things (IoT) technologies are discussed. Use cases are developed for practitioners for using a blockchain IoT-integrated architecture.

The results show that criterion C21 (cooperation with buyer for green initiatives) is the most important for green supply chain, and criterion C5 (global customers) has least effect on greening the supply chain. Involving stakeholders in the green product design ensures improved efficiency of the supply chain. Merits of technologies like blockchain and IoT may be reaped successfully for incorporating critical success factors to develop green supply chain.

The research can further be extended by developing the research model with hypothesis and conducting a survey for validation. Automobile industry use cases are considered for this research, and it may be further developed for different industry sectors like process industries, service, etc.

Managers can make use of these 22 critical success factors and capabilities of the blockchain IoT-integrated architecture to successfully involve stakeholders. Practitioners/managers can dramatically change SCM with respect to the response speed, accuracy of decision-making, data acquisition, data storage and data accessibility, transparency, trust-building, opportunity of participation, communication quality, freedom in payment based on blockchain IoT-integrated architecture. Preventing pollution and converting the enterprises into green and sustainable organisations have created lot of concerns worldwide. This research addresses the issue of green initiatives and the role of stakeholders in improving the green status of industry.

Though there is research on involving suppliers and customers in the supply chain activities, there is a significant delay in integrating human resource management in the supply chain. This research proposes integration of stakeholders using recent technologies for green supply chain. Use cases developed for the automobile industry gives path to future research in this domain.

This study aims to examine the corporate donations in response to the intensive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China in 2020 and proposes that the local spread of COVID-19 is negatively associated with corporate donations due to the non-trivial costs, but meanwhile, strong institutional pressures based on institutional theory are put on firms to donate, which thus creates a dilemma for firms. This study further argues that the dilemma is heterogeneous across different institutional fields.

Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during the intensive outbreak of this pandemic, a two-stage Heckman selection model is conducted to address the potential sample selection bias.

This study reveals a negative relationship between the local spread of COVID-19 and corporate donations, confirms the driving effect of various types of institutional pressure and finds that the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic strengthens the effect of coercive pressure and mimetic pressure on philanthropic giving but weakens the effect of normative pressure.

This study extends the knowledge on firms’ philanthropic response to natural crises, as the COVID-19 pandemic has not only led to a public health crisis but also to a global economic crisis, and how the effects of institutional pressures are affected by a situational crisis. This work enriches the literature on corporate philanthropy and crisis management and has some implications for both policymakers and business practitioners.

There have been several reviews of green, ecological and sustainable innovations, but a thorough assessment of green innovation (GI)'s mechanisms in a supply chain setting has not been attempted yet. The purpose of this paper is to review how GI was investigated in supply chains through the lens of a multilevel framework of innovation mechanisms.

The authors provide a comprehensive assessment of prior studies using a systematic literature review approach and content analysis of 136 papers identified from the Web of Science Core Collection database.

Current literature on green innovation supply chains (GISC) has been categorized according to three main causal mechanisms: situational, action-formation and transformational mechanisms. Three different levels of analysis were considered for the three mechanisms: macro, meso and micro. In addition, the authors have also assessed the value creation and appropriation outcomes of GI. The authors identified relevant research gaps in the extant literature and a set of propositions that may guide future research in this area.

This review provides a novel perspective on GISC based on a multilevel theoretical framework of mechanisms.

The causal mechanisms assessment of GISC can be adopted by organizations to convince their SC partners to engage in collaborative and more ambitious initiatives in the field.

The findings of this review could serve as an argument for more encompassing and ambitious GISC initiatives which can be of benefit to society.

A thorough assessment of the interacting mechanisms in GISC has not been attempted before. The authors identify gaps in current literature and provide several propositions for further research avenues based on causal mechanisms framework.

This study aims to examine the influence of organizational flexibility (OF) and shared vision (SV) on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) with the mediation role of responsible innovation (RI) in the manufacturing industry of a developing country. Furthermore, big data analytics capability (BDAC) serves as a moderator between RI and SCA.

The study's hypotheses are investigated using the structural equation modeling (SEM) method. Through simple random sampling, information was gathered from 247 owners/managers of manufacturing SMEs.

The results elucidate that OF and SV significantly determine RI and SCA. Moreover, RI significantly mediates between SV, OF and SCA. Besides, RI significantly determines SCA. BDAC significantly leads to SCA. Finally, BDAC significantly moderates between RI and SCA.

RI is crucial for manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to gain SCA and BDAC is important to address the changing demands of consumers for environment-friendly products. This study gives the public an overview of the different degrees to which SMEs are embracing RI and BDAC; with more environment-friendly initiatives, the natural environment will become more sustainable. Environmental sustainability will benefit each individual living in society.

This study adds value to the existing literature by focusing on predictors that affect SCA. Using dynamic capability theory, this initial study examines the influence of SV and OF on SCA and RI as mediators. Furthermore, BDAC is used as a moderating variable between RI and SCA. Managers, students and researchers can benefit from this study.

This study examines the effect of supply chain (SC) learning (i.e. supplier and customer learnings) on green innovation (i.e. green product and process innovations) and investigates the moderating role of green transformational leadership in the SC learning-green innovation linkage in the construction industry.

Data are gathered from construction firms in Vietnam by a questionnaire survey. Hypotheses of the study framework are tested by hierarchical regression analysis.

Both supplier and customer learnings have positive effects on green innovation (both green process and product innovations). Furthermore, green transformational leadership moderates the linkage between supplier learning and green innovation but does not moderate the linkage between customer learning and green innovation.

Construction firms need to constantly develop capabilities of SC learning for promoting their green innovation.

The present study is one of the first attempts in construction that investigates the importance of SC learning to achieving green innovation as well as the role of green transformational leadership for strengthening the effect of green learning on green innovation.

This study attempts to document the impact of financial leverage on corporate innovation in the Chinese nonfinancial public firms listed on Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges.

The firm-level data are collected from CSMAR database for ten years, ranging from 2007 to 2016. The authors have employed the panel fixed effects model and further system GMM approach for analysis. The sample is segregated on the basis of state (SOE) and nonstate ownership (NSOE) to check for the diverse effects. In total, three different proxies of financial leverage are used to unearth the varying impact of short-time and long-term leverage separately. Further, corporate innovation is divided into input innovation (R&D/Sales and R&D/Assets) and output innovation (patents and inventions).

The results suggest that financial leverage is detrimental to the input innovation while conducive for the output innovation when measured by the number of patents. Contrarily, leverage has a negative influence over the output innovation when measured by the number of inventions. This implies that leverage is more damaging for the highest form of innovativeness (inventions) in China. Input innovation is more sensitive to the changes in long-term leverage versus short-term leverage. Further, the authors find that innovation in SOEs is more sensitive to the changes in the leverage as compared to the NSOEs. The results are free from the threat of endogeneity and identification problems, as reported by the system GMM model.

The authors did not segregate the sample on the basis of industry/sector.

The firms pursuing a strategy of radical innovation should try to keep their debt levels lower in order to achieve a higher innovation performance. Although, a rise in the leverage may mean an increased access to finance for a firm but such an access comes at a cost in the form of damage to the corporate innovation. However, increased debt financing may not be so bad for the firms that want to achieve a moderate and not the highest level of innovation. Such firms can produce recurring and synergic effects with debt financing and moderate innovation, once they achieve a level of innovation performance that satisfies their financiers.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is probably the first study to check the impact of firm-level financial leverage on both input and output innovation in the Chinese public-listed nonfinancial firms' panel data perspective till now.

The purpose of this paper is to threefold. The first purpose is to review and critically analyze corporate sustainability development (CSD) research in China. Second, the paper extracts a unified theoretical framework among CSD drivers, CSD practices, and corporate performance in China. Finally, it seeks to identify links between CSD and industrial management and data systems (IMDS) topics.

A comprehensive and structured review of the research literature investigating CSD in China was completed. Categorizations and classifications of the literature were summarized. A critical analysis of the literature resulted in a generic theoretical framework that can be used for evaluation of the literature and further investigation.

The literature review found over 189 papers on CSD in China published from 1997 to 2013. The framework developed focussed on relationships among drivers, practices, and performance within a CSD in China context. The framework provides useful insights into the implementation of CSD practices. The integration of the three dimensions of sustainability and decision-making methodology are still rare. Specific features of CSD are also reviewed with a linkage to IMDS research around information technology, business process modeling, and supply chain management.

This is one of the first works to provide a comprehensive focus on CSD in China. The theoretical framework was developed for CSD in China to clarify the relationships between the drivers, the corporation’s characteristics, CSD practices, and corporation performance and will prove useful for future research development and investigation. The linkage to IMDS topics is novel and will help further research related to CSD in China for this journal.