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This paper examines the digital economy's impact on rural household consumption upgrading. Existing studies remain mainly at the level of rural consumption scale and rarely address the consumption structure. The specific impact of the development of the digital economy on rural consumption upgrading and its mechanisms of action deserves in-depth study and consideration. We analyzed the related content using the fixed-effect model, the instrumental variable method (IV), the mediation effect model, and three-year panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). This study found that, at the scale level, the digital economy contributes to expanding rural household consumption. At the structural level, the digital economy significantly increases the share of enjoyment-oriented household consumption but has no significant effect on development-oriented consumption. Income is an important transmission mechanism for the digital economy to improve rural household consumption. Besides, the impact of the digital economy on the upgrading of rural consumption varies according to income level and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, sustainable economic performance (SEP) has been the foremost requirement due to uncertainty of the economy and environment. This issue needs best practices and governance and also needs researchers' focus. Thereby, the paper aims to assess green supply chain (SC) practices, green SC governance and their role in the achievement of SEP in the manufacturing sector of China. The paper also attempts to explore the moderating effect of organizational support in proposed framework. PLS-SEM model was employed to test model's reliability and validity. The very same method has applied to test the linkage among outlined constructs. Obtained results confirms the moderating impact of organizational support among traditional governance, relational governance and the achievement of SEP in the manufacturing industry in China. This article provides guidelines to the regulators in developing policies related to the achievement of SEP using green SC practices and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social sustainability is a global necessity because of environmental and economic uncertainty. This issue needs the foremost solution, and for this purpose, researchers' and policymakers' emphasis is required. Thereby, the present paper investigates sustainable energy technologies such as solar and hydroelectric, eco-innovation and EG and their impact on social sustainability in China. The study also used industrialization and inflation as the control variables in the time span of 1981 to 2020. The present study also applied the Dynamic Auto-regressive Distributed Lags (DARDL) model to evaluate the association between the outlined variables. The results indicated that sustainable energy technologies such as solar and hydroelectric, eco-innovation, economic growth, industrialization and inflation are significantly associated with social sustainability in China. The present paper offers standard policies to regulators in making regulations related to maintaining social sustainability by using effective sustainable energy technologies and eco-innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's constantly rapid economic growth accompanying by a low overall inflation has long been mysterious in macroeconomics. The core purpose of this paper is to solve this puzzle. Therefore, we integrate overdetermined set of equations into a MUCSVO model to explore the volatility mechanism of the overall inflation from a sectoral perspective. Our key findings include: 1) the hedging effect of sectoral inflation fluctuations principally accounts for China's long-run stable overall inflation; 2) the main contradiction of China's inflation has been shifting from high price levels in the traditional food and residence categories to rising prices in the health care category; 3) as the proportions of inflation in the food and residence categories fall steadily, sectoral inflation weights become more evenly distributed. In conclusion, China's overall inflation and deflation will be much less likely to occur, while inflation is still of sectoral imbalance. Unusual price fluctuations in the food and health care categories, which are highly relevant to basic living standards of the low-income group, deserve close attention in particular. Overall, besides solving the puzzle of China's low inflation, our model is applicable to economies that do not publish inflation weights, which is a useful extension of core inflation measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-quality innovation is an inevitable requirement for high-quality economic development, and an accurate grasp of the regional distribution characteristics of the level of highquality innovation development (HQID) can better understand and simulate high-quality innovation. This paper constructs a dataset of high-value inventions based on the Chinese patent database using textual analysis methods and the criteria for High-Quality Inventions proposed by the State Intellectual Property Office, and explores inter-provincial variability and convergence by using the Theil index, α convergence, and β convergence. This paper finds that High-Quality Inventions are significantly and positively correlated with various indicators measuring the quality and value of patents. In general, the overall level of HQID is on an upward trend with clear differences among provinces, which shows a regional unbalanced but overall rapid development. From the regional differences of HQID, the regional differences of HQID have been narrowed, mainly within the region. In terms of the convergence of HQID, α convergence, absolute β convergence, conditional β convergence, and club convergence exist nationally and within each region, which indicates that the gap between the national and regional levels of HQID has been narrowing over time. HQID has a positive promotion effect on the relationship between HQID and economic growth, economic growth rate, and total factor productivity. High-quality innovation can improve the quality of input factors, cultivate new dynamic energy for economic development, and then promote high-quality economic development. In the context of the shift of IP work from pursuing quantity to improving quality, the scientific understanding of high-quality innovation, the development status, and the differences of regional innovation high-quality development is of great significance for improving innovation quality and efficiency, and effectively supporting high-quality economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The superiority of BWM over other weighting methods for obtaining the weight values of the attributes is that it achieves high-confidence results with a reasonable number of pairwise comparisons. Although the best-worst method (BWM) is a well-known multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method that has been successfully utilized in almost all scientific areas to solve challenging real-life problems, no research has comprehensively examined the state-of-the-art in this regard. The present study depicts a detailed overview of publications concerned with BWM during the period 2015–2022. Based on the information obtained from the Scopus database, this work presents a big picture of current research on BWM. In other words, this paper analyzes the existing literature about BWM and identifies thematic contexts, application areas, emerging trends, and remaining research gaps to shed light on future research agendas aligning with those gaps. Further, the most recent BWM research is analyzed in the top ten scientific areas, from engineering to materials science. “Engineering”, “computer science”, and “business, management, and accounting” are the hottest fields of BWM research. China is the most active country regarding “engineering” and “computer science”, whereas India is the leader in “business, management, and accounting”. The study also reveals that there are still many research gaps in BWM research. The big picture taken in this study will not only showcase the current situation of BWM research but will also positively impact the direction and quality of new research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital economy is a great route to promote the efficient utilization of natural resources and promote sustainability due to its high-tech, rapid growth, extensive penetration, deep integration and other characteristics. Existing study on the influencing factors of the digital economy is not deep enough and lacks the analysis on the relationship structure of factors influencing the digital economy, which is not conducive for an overall grasp of the digital economy. To correctly understand how to better develop the digital economy, this paper studies its influencing factors and the relationships between them. Based on the time-series data of China from 2002 to 2018, grey correlation analysis was applied to calculate the correlation between these influencing factors and the digital economy, and determine the major influencing factors of digital economy development in China. The Granger causality test and a review of existing research were used to judge the interrelationship of various factors. The interpretative structure model was utilized to determine the relationship structure of the main factors affecting the development of China's digital economy. The results show that the number of digital talents, state of the technology market, and degree of digitalization are direct influencing factors of the digital economy. The results help to better understand the development of the digital economy and will enable the implementation of policies to improve towards more sustainable cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the policy package pilot implemented in Hubei Province, China, in April 2020 as a natural experiment, we use the synthetic control (SC) and synthetic difference in differences (SDID) methods to estimate the impact of the Chinese government's support policy on the economic resilience and to analyze the mechanisms by which it impacts. This study finds that the policy package has contributed to the growth of economic resilience in the pilot provinces, with the policy package increasing the average economic resilience of the pilot provinces by 0.062 compared to their potential resilience. The validity and robustness of the above conclusions are objectively confirmed by multidimensional quantitative outcomes such as placebo tests, ranking tests, and replacements in calculating resilience. The mechanism analysis shows that the investment in real estate development, the stimulus for consumption, and the core industry development are virtual channels for the policy package to promote economic resilience growth in the pilot provinces. Moreover, traditional investment in transportation fixed assets plays a minor role. This paper quantitatively corroborates the academic idea that government governance capacity affects regional economic resilience (RER), and research can provide empirical support for regional economic recovery and policy support under a major crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism exerts a great effect on the modern economy and relies largely on the flow of people facilitated by high-quality transportation infrastructure. Applying a spatial econometric method, this paper investigates the effect of high-speed rail (HSR) on tourism expansion in China from the view of the spatial spillover effect. Based on a 276 Chinese cities’ panel dataset over 2005–2019, a positive role of HSR in tourism expansion is observed. Compared with cities unconnected to the HSR network, cities accessible by HSR experienced a 22% increase in tourism revenue and a 38% rise in tourist arrivals. In addition, the connection of a city to the HSR network also exerts a great spatial spillover role in the increase of tourism revenue and arrivals in peripheral cities which are not directly connected by HSR. The research findings offer important insights on the relationship between transportation infrastructure and tourism with significant policy implications regarding tourism development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological efficiency (EE) provides much reference for formulating appropriate regional economic, social and environmental policies to promote sustainable development. Interactive subsystems of economy, society and environment within EE system have been considered in this paper. By innovatively integrating the merits of two advanced economic research methods (global super efficiency network data envelopment analysis (GSE-NDEA) and panel vector autoregression (PVAR) and updating the EE evaluation indicator system by following the new features of sustainable development in the recent China, this paper comprehensively evaluates EE by drawing evidence from 3 regions in China during the period of 2011–2020, and further reveals how the three subsystems within EE system interact to achieve EE enhancement. The findings show EE and its three subsystems’ trend, the major constrains of EE development, the regional discrepancies in EE progress, and the interactions among the subsystems of economy-society-environment within the EE system in different regions of China. The policy implications are proposed accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on calculating resilience index of 282 cities in China from 2012 to 2019, to analysis the regional differences and random convergence. We use the entropy method to calculate the urban resilience index, adopt the Dagum Gini coefficient method to analyze the regional differences and the sources, explore the variation coefficients method and beta convergence model to diagnose the convergence mechanism. The conclusions are: (1) The urban resilience in China is at a medium and low level with a stable growth tendency, with a significant regional unbalance of "higher in east, and lower in other regions". As the sub-resilience, there is a big gap in the regional difference of the resilience structure with good performance in social resilience and economic resilience, poor in ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience. (2) The Gini coefficient of urban resilience continuously decreases with the regional unbalance narrowing accordingly. The Gini coefficients in different regions have a phased convergence tendency, and the hypervariable density contribution and intra-regional differences contribution are the main sources of differences in urban resilience. (3) The urban resilience in China and eastern region has s convergence, while China and all regions have significant absolute ß and conditional ß convergence. Therefore, this paper proposes to continuously accelerate the urban resilient construction, make up for the shortcomings, and narrow the regional development gap, to promote the healthy and orderly development of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend of market-oriented land transaction scheme and the optimal allocation of land resources have become two important components of ecological sustainable development. However, the relevance of analyzing effects of land marketization on ecological and environmental development cannot be overemphasized. The ecological and environmental effects of land marketization are the focus of this paper. We begin by developing a theoretical framework to investigate how land marketization affects eco-efficiency. Moreover, we develop a data envelopment analysis model to measure eco-efficiency. We empirically investigate the effect of land marketization on eco-efficiency using a data set of 251 cities in China over the period of 2003 to 2018. Both theoretical and empirical results show that the land marketization exerts positive effects on eco-efficiency. Specifically, a 100% increase in land marketization level leads to a 2.4 percent increase in eco-efficiency. The heterogeneous effects and spatial effects of the land marketization on eco-efficiency are also examined. Besides, the endogeneity issues are also discussed using instrumental variable approach. Finally, the mechanism analysis shows that land marketization improves eco-efficiency primarily through improving efficiency change, best practice change and technology gap change, respectively. The main conclusions are confirmed by several robustness checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current age of enhanced environmental awareness, transformation to sustainable management in the construction sector is needed. China currently produces the largest amount of construction and demolition (C&D) waste around the world, but the average recovery rate of the waste was only about 5% in 2017. In order to investigate problems in current C&D waste management in China, a cross-national comparative analysis is conducted among China and seven selected countries (Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), to compare legal texts of national policies and laws which relate to C&D waste management and are currently being used. Through the comparison, problems in management of C&D waste in China are investigated. The problems could be concluded to: (a) inadequate guidance on recycling, (b) lack of market incentives in utilising recycled materials, (c) incomplete knowledge of stakeholders' responsibilities, (d) lack of penalty for other stakeholders, and (e) inefficient supervision system. By understanding these problems, this paper further provides recommendations to enhance the performance of C&D waste management in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since China is facing a complicated international situation and sustainable development requirement at the same time, this paper examines the effects of external uncertainty, international sanctions, on green innovations by adopting the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation for 30 provinces (autonomous region and municipalities) from 1997 to 2019. We employ green inventions as the dependent variable and 5 indicators of sanctions (including unilateral, plurilateral, multilateral, economic, and intensity) as the main explanatory variables alternately. For further robustness tests, we use substitution variable green utility models, adopt sub-samples in different regions, change the empirical methodology, and add omitted variables. We also examine the mechanism effects of three possible channels. The conclusion is that plurilateral and economic sanctions both present significant negative impacts on green innovations, whereas China was not affected by unilateral or multilateral sanctions during the sample period. GDP, interpersonal globalization, and environment are proved to be the possible channels through which sanctions affect green innovations. Our research findings should assist Chinese-listed companies suffering from sanctions to make better responses on their way to green innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Off-site construction (OSC) is generally propagated as a sustainable and green construction method in the global construction industry. Over the past few decades, OSC has become famous worldwide for its numerous benefits. Technological innovation can speed up the development of OSC and has attracted a lot of attention from stakeholders who are promoting technological innovation by seeking collaborations. OSC is different from traditional manufacturing, and little effort has been spent on how the stakeholder relationship quality affects technological innovation. This study therefore makes efforts to explore the mechanism of how stakeholder relationship quality influences the OSC technological innovation and to explain the stakeholder relationship quality in terms of communication, trust, and commitment. This paper constructs a multidimensional hypothesis model consisting of five concepts: communication, trust, commitment, knowledge sharing, and technological innovation. A valid sample of 125 was collected through a questionnaire survey in mainland China. The sample data were dealt with and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLSSEM) to validate the proposed hypothesis model. The results reveal that trust and knowledge sharing affect technological innovation directly. Communication and commitment are not identified to have statistically significant influences on technological innovation in OSC. Communication, trust, and commitment positively contribute to knowledge sharing. Last, knowledge sharing completely and partially mediates between relationship quality and technological innovation. This study explores the impact of stakeholder relationship quality on OSC technological innovation and verifies the mediating role of knowledge sharing. These findings provide valuable theoretical guidance for OSC technological innovation and practical insights for stakeholders to promote technological innovation by enhancing relationship quality and knowledge sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is a challenge faced by all countries worldwide. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented: the consumption loss of farmer households caused by the fluctuation of rural public expenditure. Based on large-scale micro household data and climate data, the instrumental variable estimation results show that every 1% fluctuation of rural public expenditure will lead to a 0.113% decrease in farm household consumption. In addition, the fluctuation of rural public expenditure is also a main cause of long-term consumption loss of farmer households. Furthermore, it was found that the impact of rural public expenditure fluctuation on consumption loss is of certain spatial heterogeneity. The worse the spatial environment is, the more serious the consumption loss will be. The policy suggestion of this paper is to ensure a stable scale of rural public expenditure through the central transfer payment, so as to improve the ability of local governments to implement counter cyclical public policies, and transform local finance (industrial investment) into public finance (infrastructure and education) to improve the local space environment. Overall, this study reveals the impact of spatial externality on rural poverty from the perspective of public expenditure fluctuation, and at the same time provides empirical evidence for a better evaluation of the relationship between development and poverty and support for rational regional anti-poverty policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban taxi services have been developing year on year, playing an increasingly important role in the economy and the transportation markets of each city. This increases interest in measuring their performance. This paper analysed the relationship among the four stakeholders (including administrative department, operational companies, taxi drivers and customers) for urban taxi passenger transport system in China, and applied System Dynamics (SD) model to explore the dynamic characteristics of urban taxi price system. The main achievements of this paper are as follows, firstly, this paper adopted stakeholder mapping to describe the relationships among the four stakeholders. Then analysed the causal flow diagrams and the different variables of urban taxi passenger transport system operation, and presented the SD model, which considers factors that affect the taxi operation. With the combination of taxi operation data of Harbin city, we simulated eleven urban taxi operation scenarios and proposed kinds of suggestions to improve urban taxi passenger transport system operation, which can provide a good basis for recommending policy decisions for urban taxi market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate analysis of technological innovation mechanism in different regions is the key to promoting China's technological innovation, economic transformation and upgrading. This paper collected statistical data of high-tech enterprises in 27 provinces in China from 2009 to 2016, established a novel PSO-GRNN model, and applied sensitivity analysis to explore the influencing factors and regional differences of enterprise technological innovation in Eastern, Central and Western China. The empirical results showed that the influencing factors were innovation investment, market environment, government support and foreign technology spillover sorting by impact size. Innovation investment was the decisive factor of technological innovation, but innovation resources mainly concentrated on Eastern China, severely insufficient in Central and Western China. Market environment was favorable to Eastern and Central China, but unfavorable to Western China, which restricted greatly the development of Western China. The principalagent problem of state-owned enterprise and the crowding out effect of government research and development funds jointly led to the negative influence of government support on technological innovation. Foreign technology spillover had significant positive effects on technological innovation in Western China. This paper clarifies some disputes about influencing factors of technological innovation and provides a new research perspective for related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to assess the dynamics of the innovation divide between China and the Triad, as well as to determine the factors that influence its evolution. The Triad consists of three economies traditionally dominating the world economy: the United States, the European Union, and Japan. The methodology involves the decomposition of the innovativeness of the economy into innovation capability, innovation position, and the relationship between them, which indicates the efficiency of the innovation system. The analysis of dynamic indexes and σ-convergence in all these components confirms that the global economy has been gradually losing clear polarization into innovation leaders, found among developed countries and innovation followers, which have traditionally been associated with developing nations. In addition to demonstrating fast improvement in the Summary Innovation Index of China towards the Triad, the paper has a clear contribution by showcasing China's improvement through the decomposed factors of the innovativeness of the economy. In comparison with the Triad, China has a proportionally higher innovation position and efficiency of the innovation system and a lower level of innovation capacity. This demonstrates its dependence on external sources of innovation and international technology transfer, e.g. through foreign direct investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of knowledge innovation and technology innovation provides vitality for social science and technology innovation. China leaps into the front ranks of the world in the 2021 Global Innovation Index (GII). Therefore, this research takes China's theoretical-application innovation as the research object and empirically analyzes measure the innovation efficiency of knowledge innovation dominated by universities and technological innovation dominated by enterprises in China, as well as the gravity-center migration trajectory. The results show that the ranking of overall efficiency of theoretical innovation-application innovation is eastern region > central region > western region. Knowledge innovation presents a drag on overall efficiency, while technology innovation offers a contribution to overall efficiency. In the analysis of PIE (R&D personnel of industrial enterprises above a designated size) variables, the efficiency value is relatively low. The peak value of kernel density increases in the eastern, central and western regions, namely the concentration degree of theoretical innovation-application innovation effi- ciency in China has risen. The gravity center of each stage migrates to the eastern region, meaning the efficiency value of China's theoretical innovation and application innovation increases more significantly in the eastern region. From the perspective of knowledge innovation and technology innovation, this paper puts forward suggestions for China and provides some references for other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various construction accidents are proven to be caused by multiple unsafe behaviors (e.g., wrong use of PPE), but the risk transmission among different behaviors remains unclear. This paper provides insight into risk transmission through behavioral risk chain that leads to accidents from a system safety perspective. To better understand the coupling mechanism of various unsafe behaviors, integrate different behavioral risk chains and present the risk transmission process, a directed-weighted complex network (DWCN) method was adopted. Historical urban railway construction accidents in China are investigated to extract behavioral risk chain. A DW-BRCNA is applied to integrated behavioral risk chain and the behavioral risk transmission characteristics are explored and clarified by the five network properties, including degree and degree distribution, node strength and node strength distribution, average path length and diameter, weighted clustering coefficient and betweenness centrality. The results show that DW-BRCNA has the characteristics of a small-world, scale-free and hierarchical network, indicating that some unsafe behaviors are of greater importance in the process of risk transmission through behavioral risk chains. In addition, risk transmission in critical behavioral risk chains is more potentially to lead to accidents. This study proposed a new perspective of accident causation analysis from risk transmission among unsafe behaviors. It explains the risk transmission characteristics by a DWCN method based on behavioral risk chains. The findings also provide a practical guidance for developing control strategies on sites to prevent risk transmission and reduce accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we formulate a cost and safety oriented approach to optimize the motorail transport car loading layout optimization problem. The model has 2 objective functions, one maximizes the wagon loading weight utilization rate, and another minimizes the gravitational center height after loading the cars on the wagons. The calculation results show that: the heaviest cars should be loaded in the middle of the decks, the cars weight loaded on both sides should be gradually reduced; the total weight of cars loaded on lower deck should be larger than the total weight of cars loaded on the upper deck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid energy consumption increase in China's non-ferrous metal industry (NMI), there are inequalities in energy-related CO2 emissions among the sub-sectors. In this paper, a meta-frontier decomposition analysis was proposed for decomposing inter-structural low-carbon economic development inequalities among 29 sub-sectors in China's NMI from 2004 to 2018 into 11 components, including four new factors, i.e., energy- and output-oriented technological gaps and scale economies. In addition, an I(CI) index is constructed to measure the inter-inequalities of low-carbon economic development among NMI and decomposed from the static and dynamic perspectives, respectively. Results show that: (1) I(CI) index was in a downward trend during 2004-2010, while remained stable during 2010-2018; (2) the energy-oriented technological gap (ETG) was the key promoters to increase I(CI); (3) the potential energy intensity (PEI) was the primary inhibiting factor for I(CI); (4) the government can reduce the inter-inequalities by narrowing the technological gap and reducing potential energy intensity in the energy market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high-quality development of regional economic system is inseparable from the collective efforts of multiple economic sectors. Increasing attention has been paid to the environmental performance evaluation of different administrative levels or economic sectors, but integrated research is scarce. Taking the three industries (the primary, secondary and tertiary industries) into account, this paper proposes a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with parallel network structure to assess the environmental performance of 30 provinces in China from integrative perspective of efficiency and productivity. Then, the Tobit model is adopted to investigate the effects of external factors on the environmental performance. The results show that environmental efficiency of Chinese economy is only 0.4436 during 2010-2019 and the performance of the secondary industry is the highest, followed by the tertiary and the primary industries. Moreover, the environmental efficiency of eastern region is far higher than that of the central or western regions. Technological progress is the main driver of environmental productivity improvement for China's economic system. Most of the external factors such as energy structure and technology innovation, have different effects on the environmental performance of different regions. Finally, several targeted policy implications are suggested for improving the environmental performance of China's economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the social welfare effect of China’s largest online ride-sharing platform. Under the plausible assumption that consumers would change from traditional transportation to online ride-sharing when the marginal benefit of saved time outgrows the additional cost, we calculate the distribution of implied wage rate of passengers. We then use the passenger wage rate to calculate the social welfare generated by the decrease in waiting time and the reduction of waiting uncertainty brought about by the ride-sharing platform. Our estimate suggests that the ride-sharing platform created a total of 130.5 billion Yuan of social welfare in the three years between 2016 and 2018, and the consumer surplus and producer surplus created by an average transaction are 5.4 Yuan and 2.5 Yuan, respectively. The robustness test finds that our results were insensitive to the assumed risk aversion coefficient in the model, the subsample number used for each city, and the inclusion of nonlinear terms in the model. Alternative hypotheses, such as learning effect, seem unable to explain our result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to analysing the oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) import and consumption changing trends, the Occurrence Period (OP), Growth Period (GP) and Maturation Period (MP) of oil and LNG import and consumption in China, and studying how the oil and LNG import and consumption changing trends influence the development of China-Pakistan oil and LNG transportation corridor (CPOLTC), in this paper we apply a Growth Curve Model (GCM) based approach to solve the problems mentioned above. First, the Chinese oil and LNG import and consumption changing trends are analysed by applying the GCM. The results show that oil and LNG consumption and import belong to the GP because of the fast industrialization and urbanization development, so the oil and LNG import and consumption demand will increase fast; Then, the External Dependence (ED) is applied to describe the oil and LNG consumption dependence degree in China, the results show that import will remain high ED value, especially for the oil import (over 70%), which means the security of the energy supply chain still remains the central idea of Chin's energy policies. Finally, the challenges and key issues of CPOLTC is analysed. Challenges are: domestic political struggles and institutional defects in Pakistan make the CPOLTC projects lacking of implementation, security along the corridor, influence and competition from external forces, impacts of western project culture, the comprehensive projects establishment ability in Pakistan, etc. The key issues are: Value Engineering (VE) researches for projects, Chinese element such as project construction, management, standards and specifications, assessment of the projects' life cycle and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practice, bridge foundations and pier columns are usually constructed with cast-in-place concrete. Precast columns are currently widely used in highway bridges in China, which can save construction time and improve concrete quality. The connection between precast bridge columns and the foundation can affect how forces transfer from one to the other. This paper investigates using external sockets to form a connection between the bridge column and foundation. This method can accelerate the bridge construction time with the additional advantages of improving the orientation and creating a large erection tolerance. Two types of connections are presented and tested to investigate the behavior of the column-foundation connections and find a more suitable way to use external socket connections. The experimental results show that the column-foundation connection design satisfies the design requirements. The results also show that roughening the column surface within the external socket is more effective at connecting the column to the foundation when using an external socket compared to attaching a steel plate on the column. The experimental results are validated with a finite element analysis, resulting in a proposal regarding the column-foundation connection behavior as well as design recommendations for the external socket connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) as an efficient mode to provide public services through the government and social capital's cooperation has been in China for more than 30 years. In this paper, we propose an approach to evaluate PPP's advancement in different areas based on the subjective and objective information fusion. At first, we establish an index system from the perspective of the stakeholder. Then, considering that double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (DHHFLTS) that has two hierarchies of linguistic term sets can describe the subjective linguistic information more accurately, it is applied in the paper to depict the subjective information. By applying the entropy of the DHHFLTS, a programming model is proposed to derive the attribute weight through combining subjective evaluation with objective data. In addition, we develop the double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic PROMETHEE combining the subjective and objective information (DHHFL-PROMETHEE-S&O) method. At last, we illustrate the index system and the method with the PPP's advancement evaluation problem, and we can find the best choice based on the ranking result. Meanwhile, we also find that the objective information and the subjective information are complementary in the evaluation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to develop models to predict bus arrival time at a target stop using actual multi-route bus arrival time data from previous stop as inputs. In order to mix and fully utilize the multiple routes bus arrival time data, the weighted average travel time and three Forgetting Factor Functions (FFFs) - F1, F2 and F3 - are introduced. Based on different combinations of input variables, five prediction models are proposed. Three widely used algorithms, i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neutral Network (ANN) and Linear Regression (LR), are tested to find the best for arrival time prediction. Bus location data of 11 road segments from Yichun (China), covering 12 bus stops and 16 routes, are collected to evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches. The results show that the newly introduced parameters, the weighted average travel time, can significantly improve the prediction accuracy: the prediction errors reduce by around 20%. The algorithm comparison demonstrates that the SVM and ANN outperform the LR. The FFFs can also affect the performance errors: F1 is more suitable for ANN algorithm, while F3 is better for SVM and LR algorithms. Besides, the virtual road concept in this paper can slightly improve the prediction accuracy and halve the time cost of predicted arrival time calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the phase of 13-th five-year plan in China, natural gas will play an important role in energy revolution. With the growth of consumption, natural gas infrastructures will become hot spots of future investment and pipeline network construction will also usher in a period of rapid development. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study layout methods of transport pipeline network. This paper takes natural gas transport pipeline network as a research object, introduces dominance degree to analyse benefits of pipeline projects. Then, this paper proposes Dominance Degree Model (DDM) of transport pipeline projects based on Potential Model (PM) and Economic Potential Theory (EPT). According to DDM of gas transport pipeline projects, layout methods of pipeline network are put forward, which is simple and easy to obtain the overall optimal solution and ensure maximum comprehensive benefits. What's more, construction sequences of gas transport pipeline projects can be also determined. Finally, the model is applied to a real case of natural gas transport pipeline projects in Zhejiang Province, China. The calculation results suggest that the model should deal with the transport pipeline network layout problem well, which have important implications for other potential pipeline networks not only in the Zhejiang Province but also throughout China and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply an RV coefficient network to investigate the topological structure of China's new energy stock market via daily prices of 60 component stocks of CSI (China Stock Index) New Energy Index spanning the period January 4, 2012 to March 29, 2019. Compared with the Pearson correlation coefficient, RV coefficient can better reflect the similarity between stocks from the perspective of multi-dimensional data. The empirical result indicates that (1) the scale-free characteristics of China's new energy stock market are not significant; (2) the new energy storage is the leading sub-sector of the new energy sector and the new energy interactive equipment plays a connecting role between renewable energy production and new energy storage; (3) the most influential stock in the network is Group DMEGC Magnetics Co., Ltd., Xiamen Tungsten Co., Ltd. and GEM Co., Ltd. play an important role in the network connection. These findings are of great significance to understand the interaction between Chinese new energy stocks and the pricing mechanism of stocks. The authority should pay more attention to the new energy storage industry. Investor's portfolios can be optimized according to the influence assessment of stocks and sub-sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of environmental regulation on regional environmental efficiency convergence using the fixed effects model and threshold regression model. The results show that the differences in environmental efficiency have a convergence trend in China, as well as in the eastern, central and western regions. The effect of environmental regulation on regional environmental efficiency is inhibition first and then promotion, research and development investment and outward foreign direct investment have a positive transmission effect; when environmental regulation intensity exceeds a certain threshold, the growth rate of environmental efficiency in the central and western regions will be significantly higher than that in the eastern regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance evaluation in construction safety is of great importance to further improve upon safety management processes. This paper develops a data envelopment analysis (DEA) based framework to evaluate the construction safety performance at the macro level. The core of the method is to compare the output-input ratio of construction safety. Using the building practitioner, construction machinery and equipment, and construction area as the inputs, and value added of construction and death toll as the outputs, safety performance score is computed for the China's provincial construction industries from 2009 to 2017. The results show that the number of benchmark provinces every year is between five and seven. The gap between the best-performing and underperforming province was relatively small in 2012 and big in 2014. Beijing, Qinghai, Hainan, Fujian, Chongqing, and Tianjin can be utilized as role models for the provinces that need to improve their performance in construction safety. The eastern region has the highest score in construction safety performance, followed by the western and central region. This study provides an effective solution to solve performance issue in regional construction safety and improves the tradition performance evaluation system to a certain extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the Technical Efficiencies (TEs) of a group of airports in East China by applying a threestage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The merit of this method allows us to consider the impact of the environmental factors on measuring airport efficiencies. Three variables, i.e. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the proportion of the tertiary industry, and the number of tourists, are used to represent the environmental factors. The results show that the environmental factors have airport-specific impacts on the value of the efficiencies. Additionally, airport TE are dominated by both Pure Technical Efficiency (PTE) and Scale Efficiency (SE). Based on empirical results, airport specific strategies can be provided to enhance airport efficiency, such as taking the effects of environmental variables and the statistical noise into consideration when analysing the airport efficiency, improving airport efficiencies according to their own conditions and improving the PTE or SE according to their categorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overloading of road freight vehicles accelerates road damage, creates unfair competition in the transport market, and increases safety risk. There is a dearth of research on the mining of data of highway Freight Weight (FW), and this paper therefore aims to discover factors affecting road freight overloading based on highway FW data, with a view of developing strategies to mitigate such occurrences. A comprehensive sampling survey of road freight transportation was conducted in Anhui Province (China). Vehicle Characteristics (VC), Operation Mode (OM), and transportation information from a total of 3248 trucks were collected. In order to take advantage of the strengths associated with both statistical modelling techniques and non-parametric methods, a Classification And Regression Tree (CART) technique was integrated with Binary Logistic Regression (BLR) to reveal the factors affecting road freight overloading. The classification efficacy test shows that the BLR-CART method outperformed the BLR method in term of accuracy. It is also revealed that the factors affecting overloading of freight vehicles are the Type of Transportation (ToT), Rated Load (RL), OM, FW during the investigation period, interaction between RL and FW, and interaction among RL, FW, and Average Haul Distance (AHD). Road transport authorities should pay greater attention to these factors in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of overloading inspection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a generalized form of both intuitionistic fuzzy set and Pythagorean fuzzy sets, the q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) has strong ability to handle uncertain or imprecision decisionmaking problems. This paper aims to introduce a new multiple criteria decision making method based on the original gain and lost dominance score (GLDS) method for investment evaluation. To do so, we first propose a new distance measure of q-rung orthopair fuzzy numbers (q-ROFNs), which takes into account the hesitancy degree of q-ROFNs. Subsequently, two methods are developed to determine the weights of DMs and criteria, respectively. Next, the original GLDS method is improved from the aspects of dominance flows and order scores of alternatives to address the multiple criteria decision making problems with q-ROFS information. Finally, a case study concerning the investment evaluation of the BE angle capital is given to illustrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ridesourcing services market in China has recently experienced significant changes, which stem from its legalization and management policy. These changes impact multiple stakeholders of this market (e.g., drivers, passengers, government, competing services) and present them with new opportunities and challenges. This paper develops an evolutionary game model to analyse the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) between the Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) and drivers. The new model is explored and analysed with simulation experiments to observe the dynamic route of multiple stakeholders. The theoretical research and simulation results indicate that under the authorities' control over the TNCs, when the net income under strict management is higher than that of the loose management for the TNCs, the final ESS is "Legal Operation, Strict Management". When the net income under strict management is less than that of the loose management for the THCs, the strategy of "Illegal Operation, Loose Management" may gain popularity and continue to grow; in this case, the ESS may also not exist. The model indicates the strength of the government's control plays a significant role in leading the achievement of "Legal Operation, Strict Management". As a consequence, to achieve the perfect evolution of "Legal Operation, Strict Management", it is necessary for the government to impose a greater penalty on illegal drivers and ensure appropriate compensation measures. The results of the study provide a useful reference for the sustainable development of the ridesourcing services market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies 20 critical success factors (CSFs) of innovation in China's construction projects through literature review, a case study and expert interviews. Integrated Structural Modeling (ISM) and MICMAC (Impact Matrix Cross-reference Multiplication Applied to a Classification) analysis were used to hierarchically structure CSFs as well as to analyze their inter-relationships. The dependence and driver power of each factor were also analyzed. By doing this, this paper presents structural clarity and establishes a hierarchical order for prioritization for the decision-making. The findings show that most of the CSFs (19 out of 20) have strong inter-relationships. According to the law of vital few and trivial many, 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes for many events. This paper suggests that intensive effort should focus on the root source of CSFs: owner's involvement and leadership, top management commitment, and strategic importance of the innovation project. Besides, external support, which is beyond the innovation project network, plays an important role in the success of innovation in China's construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the last decades, fully erected container cranes have been delivered to a customer site by ships. On one hand, using this method of transportation is very attractive due to its cost and time savings. However, on the other hand, being exposed to cycling loads from the ship motions during the sea voyage, the crane structure accumulates fatigue damage. Using the accumulated fatigue damage parameter, the crane transportation could be associated with the amount of the working cycles the crane could have worked out during its normal operating at the customer site. In the presenting paper the research for the real case of a new crane voyage from China to Ukraine has been done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At an isolated signalized intersection, short left-turn lanes may be provided to enhance intersection capacity and level of service. The capacity of an entire intersection depends not only on the effective green time per phase and the length of each short left-turn lane but also on the selected signal phase plan. This paper enumerates 16 typical signal phase plans for a four-leg intersection with protected left-turn phases. Given the existence of short left-turn lanes and the freedom to select signal phase plans, two optimization models are formulated. Numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the application of these models and show the sensitivity of the outcomes to impact factors. The orthogonal experiments show that the primary factor is whether a short left-turn lane is added on an approach and the demand distribution is the secondary factor in determining an optimal allocation of the time-space resources of an intersection. To analyse traffic flow operations under different signal phase sequences, the simulation tests are fulfilled using VISSIM under the assumption that the components of a signal phase plan and green splits are all identical. The simulated results indicate that the signal phase sequence for a specified approach may greatly affect traffic movements at an approach, and the leading green phasing is better than the lagging one for a specified approach when the left-turn bay length is short at the approach. Finally, two variations of the developed models are recommended for use and the procedure for the model application is provided in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the diversifying means of competitive bidding, where the client plays a critical role in the determination of competition rule. It is widely recognized that the competition rule should be placed on a win-win basis to ensure that both the client and contractors are well considered with respect to their interests. Nevertheless, a vast majority of biddings fail to take account of what contractors really want. Using the methods of literature review and content analysis, 34 tender evaluation factors are proposed to compose the competition rule in China. Contractors' opinions on these factors are collected by virtue of questionnaire survey. Based on the Pareto law, it is found that the competition rule encompasses eleven key factors, and the composition varies slightly between public and private sectors. The Hotelling's T test is conducted on those key factors in common. The implication is that contractors can use indifferent factors (e.g., credit rating, construction plan, completeness of bid components, timely payment to workers) to improve competitiveness, while the client may utilize different factors to diversify the competition rule. This paper probably presents an earliest effort put to examine the acceptability of competition rule in the construction context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a highly competitive market, service quality can be the core competitive advantage for airline’s profitability and sustained development. This paper has investigated the differences in the passengers’ expectations and perceptions of the service quality of China’s four major domestic airlines: Air China, China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, and Hainan Airlines in China’s domestic market. The results will assist airline management to improve service quality by reducing the difference. Surveys were conducted with domestic passengers at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport and Shanghai Pudong Airport in China. The results show that there are significant differences of service quality between passengers’ expectations and perceptions among major Chinese airlines. Passengers consistently rate ‘good safety records’ as the first priority of seven SERVQUAL dimensions, but low price remains the most important factor that passengers consider when choosing a Chinese airline. The conclusions reached in this work suggest that Chinese airlines should consider improving service quality rather than providing cheaper air tickets in order to gain competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the impacts of educational factors on economic growth across 31 provinces during 1996 and 2010 in China. A spatial panel estimation model is applied to study the impacts of education on economic growth taking into account the spatial spillover effects in Feder model and the cumulative effect. The results reveal that (1) educational factors are significantly spatially autocorrelated. Educational factors have spatial spillover effects. Regional differences of education impacts still exist. (2) Average schooling year has a more positive effect on economic output than capital investment and labor force. Basic education might play a more important role in economic growth. (3) Education sector also benefits non-education sectors on economic growth if “spatial effects of economic shocks” are considered. Some policies that may enhance education development and their impacts on economic growth are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Project risks were not properly managed in the many past Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects in China. Although numerous research studies have been conducted on risk management in China's PPP projects, the realization of risk management in China's construction industry especially in PPP projects with high risk exposure and complicated contract structure has hitherto not been well studied. This paper therefore attempted to examine the current use of risk management in China's PPP projects by an empirical survey. The results indicated that the use of risk management was inadequate; qualitative risk analysis methods were preferred to quantitative and semi-quantitative methods; risk management usage in the execution was found to be much higher than in the planning, conceptual or termination stage; interviewees were unfamiliar with most of the risk identification and assessment tools. All above could be partly due to the project nature, but more fundamentally due to the local industrial culture. The absence of risk management culture was found to be the dominant factor which limited the implementation of risk management in practice. Recommendations to alleviate the difficulties of risk management were thereafter provided in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the correlation between fire fighting time and fire loss (burned area of urban building) based on fire statistical data in Jiangxi Province (China) from 2000 to 2010 was studied. The results showed the probability distribution of fire fighting time met lognormal distribution. In the probability density function, the expectation of the distribution represents the average level of fire fighting time. We found the average fighting time of warehouse and workshop fires were higher than the average level of whole building fires. In addition, the probability distribution of the burned area in each fire fighting time interval also followed power function, which was valid in the case of the fire fighting time within 4 hours. Furthermore, the absolute value of the exponent of the function is positively correlated with the small-scale fires and negatively with the large-scale fires. The value decreased with the increase of the fire fighting time, indicating that the fire control ability became poor with longer fire fighting time. Also, the fire control ability in residential waned fastest as the fighting time increased, and the ability in warehouse waned slowest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies focused on the analysis of effect factors contributing to the crashes and development of crash prediction models have resulted in aggregate researches to quantify the safety effects of geometric and traffic variables and environmental concerns on the expected outcome of fatal, injury and/or property damage losses at specific locations. Crash insight regarding different locations, however, has rarely been performed. Such investigations are useful for at least two reasons. First, there is a priori need to identify high risk sites with respect to crash. Second, it is generally believed that different crash types (e.g. rear-end, angle etc.) are associated with road geometry, the environment and traffic condition, and as a result justifying the inside causes of such crashes helps with understanding and improving the specific ability to make effective countermeasures. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to (1) demonstrate that different crash types are associated to intersections in different ways and (2) reveal that the statistics of intersection crashes may lead to greater insights considering crash occurrence and countermeasure effectiveness. This paper first divides crashes into 5 categories or types: pedestrian-involved, rear-end, head-on, angle and sideswipe crash types. Based on 3208 crashes collected on the intersections in the city of Harbin during the period of 1992–2008, distribution, overall count and the occurrence of rate features are estimated resulting in two models. The performed analysis reveals that safety improvement factors such as the presence of a signal light set, a traffic monitoring device and ITS measure have a positive association with intersection crash in different ways, suggesting that different traffic control and management aspects may be helpful in identifying specific countermeasures in the overall safety improvement project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will argue that the continued existence of state-owned enterprises (SOE) soft budget constraints, while adversely affecting SOE performance, reflects wider problems in the regulation of Chinese industry. As such, simple recourse to privatisation will not address the deep structural factors, such as over-politicisation and under-regulation of the private sector, which affect SOE performance. Section I of the paper will discuss the "direct" effects of soft budget constraints on SOE performance in China. Section II will address the "indirect effects" of soft budget constraints through their effects on the competitive environment vis-a-vis private sector firms. Section III will address the issue of privatisation and discuss the broader factors which affect both the extension of soft budget constraints and low SOE performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with a brief review of evidence related to the different types of ‘green’ taxation measures that have been introduced by governments worldwide as a means to lessen the environmental consequences of private car ownership by incentivising the purchase of Low Emission Vehicles (LEV's). An overview is then provided of current understanding of individuals’ car purchasing decisions, highlighting gaps in knowledge that exist with current explanatory models. Based on these gaps in knowledge and to investigate the potential of various taxation measures in influencing individuals’ car purchasing decisions, an online survey was conducted with students from Dalian University of Technology, China. The questionnaire was designed to measure: (1) situational and psychological factors that would be important for their next car purchase; (2) the impacts of adapting current taxation measures to incentivise LEV purchases; (3) the potential role of a range of taxation measures on their decisions on type of future car purchases. K-Cluster means analysis was employed to identify population segments according to their psychological preparedness and importance attached to situational factors in their future decisions to purchase a LEV, or not. This resulted in three distinct segments – Pro-Greens (33.6% of sample), Maybe-Greens (20.2%) and No-Greens (46.2%). Pro-Greens were more psychologically prepared to purchase LEV's than the other two segments, whose future car purchasing decisions were primarily driven by situational factors (vehicle characteristics, performance, etc.). Pro-Greens were also more likely to be influenced by changes in current Chinese taxation measures (VAT and fuel duty), and also significantly more likely to be influenced by the introduction of future measures that would incentivise LEV purchases than the other two segments. In terms of future measures to incentivise future Chinese drivers LEV purchases and use, the introduction of a feebate system, a CO2emissions VAT system, a distance based user charging scheme and annual road tax based on CO2emissions would appear to have the greatest potential overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at developing a fuzzy multiobjective decision support model for urban rail transit projects in China under the background that China is presently experiencing an unprecedented construction of urban rail transit. In this study, an appropriate model using multilevel fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is developed. To do so, detailed description and definition of multilevel fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is displayed. In the decision process, the followings are considered as the influential objectives: traveller attraction, environment protection, project feasibility and operation. In addition, consistent matrix analysis method is used to determine the weights between objectives and the factor weights between factors, which reduce the work caused by repeated establishment of the decision matrix on the basis of ensuring the consistency of decision matrix. An application study is provided as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of this model. The results show that this model is reliable and applicable for decisionmaking in urban rail transit projects. Finally, a decision support system is developed to benefit decisionmakers in optimizing the process of identifying superior urban rail transit projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an improved iterative prediction method for bus arrival time at multiple downstream stops. A multiple-stop prediction model includes two stages. At the first stage, an iterative prediction model is developed, which includes a single stop prediction model for arrival time at the immediate downstream stop and an average bus speed prediction model on further segments. The two prediction models are constructed with a support vector machine (SVM). At the second stage, a dynamic algorithm based on the Kalman filter is developed to enhance prediction accuracy. The proposed model is assessed with reference to data collected on transit route No 23 in Dalian city, China. The obtained results show that the improved iterative prediction model seems to be a powerful tool for predicting multiple stop arrival time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]