Do Honored Cities Achieve a Sustainable Development? A Quasi-Natural Experimental Study Based on “National Civilized City” Campaign in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Introduction, Literature Review, Research method are all good. But for results and discussion, I suggest author to add discussion, because the discussion cannot be seen well. And maybe can compare the NCC and non NCC region.

Author Response

We are grateful for your comments and the suggestion. In Section 5, we added more explanation, discussion and interpretation of the empirical results, especially highlighted the comparison between NCC cities and non-NCC cities.

Reviewer 2 Report

I have no major issues with the paper. PErhaps the section on hypothesis could be shorten. 

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for this comment. To make the hypothesis more concise, we have deleted some repeated expressions and simplified some long sentences. Therefore, the logic and readability of the section of hypothesis are improved.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper tries to assess the effect of city contests on the sustainable development of cities in China.

Although the paper is technically well developed, some severe shortcomings are related to the conceptualization of sustainable development and the indicators used for the sustainable development of cities. The central variable lacks sufficient description for a reproduction of the results. See below.

L1: The title suggests that "sustainable growth" is investigated. The abstract talks about the "sustainability of economic growth". The text and the analysis mainly refer to "sustainable development".  Overall key terms are confusingly and imprecisely used.  Please clarify and improve.

L34-35 „36.2% in 2000 to 64.7% in 2021.“ Please provide a reference supporting your claim.

L149: “the capacity of the sustainable development”. Hypothesis 1 refers to the “capacity of sustainable development”; however, the measurement is an index of sustainable development and not an index of the capacity of sustainable development. In Table 2, the index is called the level of sustainable development. In hypothesis 2, you wrote “capacity of sustainable growth”. Please be consistent in your wording and reasoning.

L234-235: “It can be seen that these five development concepts are essentially consistent with the concept of sustainable development.” I don’t think that this is a valid statement. The five development concepts do not represent the 17 SDGs! Be more precise in the possible link between the different concepts.

L242: Table 1. Please provide the units of measurement and some descriptive statistics of the indicators used. The data sources are missing too.

L292-294: ”This paper follows the principal component analysis method used by Zhao et al. (2020) to synthesize the index of sustainable development ????[42] and its statistics will be reported in the section of data description.” I don’t think that the construction of the index is adequately reported.

L296: “Blue Book of Sustainable Development: China's Sustainable Development Evaluation Report (2021)…” Please add the source to the list of references.

L551-553: “The five major development concepts of "innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing" proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping are consistent with the concept of sustainable development in connotation…” This is a claim that hasn’t been proven.

 

L596: Add a data availability statement.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you very much for revising your paper according to the comments. All issues were adequately addressed.