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There are significant regional differences in the development of China's insurance industry. An important question is that such regional differences are expanding or shrinking? Based on Barrow's economic growth convergence model, this paper uses the σ convergence model to analyze the differences in the development of China's insurance industry and its trends. It draws on the statistics data from 1990 to 2020. The empirical results show that the convergence of China's insurance development is not obvious before 2006, but it shows a significant convergence after 2006. And, there are some differences between the Eastern, the Central, and the Western. Furthermore, when considering the spatial correlation, the convergence of insurance development among provinces in China is more obvious. This shows that the flowing of capital, technology, and labor force between regions may be beneficial to the balanced development of insurance among the regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inventory control is a key factor for reducing supply chain cost and increasing customer satisfaction. However, prediction of inventory level is a challenging task for managers. As one of the widely used techniques for inventory control, standard BP neural network has such problems as low convergence rate and poor prediction accuracy. Aiming at these problems, a new fast convergent BP neural network model for predicting inventory level is developed in this paper. By adding an error offset, this paper deduces the new chain propagation rule and the new weight formula. This paper also applies the improved BP neural network model to predict the inventory level of an automotive parts company. The results show that the improved algorithm not only significantly exceeds the standard algorithm but also outperforms some other improved BP algorithms both on convergence rate and prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the issue of regional convergence in Greece during the period 1995-2005. Following the theoretical concept of Barro and Salla-i-Martin, 1990 (ß- and c-convergence concepts), several tests are conducted to test for conditional or unconditional convergence across Greek regions including GMM estimation of Barro regressions. The results indicate absence of convergence across NUTS II regions while there is evidence of convergence at prefectural level (NUTS III). The effect of agriculture industry and services sector is examined and services are found to have significant impact on growth and convergence. Finally, we examine the effect of the implementation of the European funding programs in some detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard approach to studying financial industrial agglomeration is to construct measures of the degree of agglomeration within financial industry. But such measures often fail to exploit the convergence or divergence of financial agglomeration. In this paper, we apply Markov chain approach to diagnose the convergence of financial agglomeration in China based on the location quotient coefficients across the provincial regions over 1993-2011. The estimation of Markov transition probability matrix offers more detailed insights into the mechanics of financial agglomeration evolution process in China during the research period. The results show that the spatial evolution of financial agglomeration changes faster in the period of 2003-2011 than that in the period of 1993-2002. Furthermore, there exists a very uneven financial development patterns, but there is regional convergence for financial agglomeration in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that inflation as a monetary phenomenon is determined by money supply changes. In the short run, however, several factors may lead to inflation rate differentials among different regions in the same country or among different countries in a monetary union. This paper examines the mean reversion attitude of food price inflation rates in the Euro zone, borrowing the concepts and developments from the recent growth literature and using panel unit root tests. Additionally, in order to capture sufficiently the evolving distributional dynamics, nonparametric econometric methods are also implemented. Finally, the comovement of the inflation rates among different food subgroups is also explored. The data consist of monthly observations of the EU harmonized consumer price indices of food and three different food subgroups (meat, bread and cereals, and vegetables) for the 12 older member states of the Euro zone, covering the period from 1997 to 2010. The results do not fully support the hypothesis of the food price inflation rates convergence for the whole period under investigation. Mean reversion shows up in different time periods and in different food categories. Moreover, the analysis of distribution dynamics sheds light to different aspects of convergence and highlights processes like club formation and polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict management in Dempster-Shafer theory (D-S theory) is a hot topic in information fusion. In this paper, a new weighted evidence combination on the basis of the distance between evidence and entropy function is presented. The proposed approach is identified as two procedures. First, the weight is determined based on the distance of evidence. Then, the obtained weight value in the first step is modified by making advantage of Deng entropy function. Our proposed method can efficiently cope with high conflicting evidences with better performance of convergence. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate that the proposed method is reasonable and efficient in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]