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Highlights • The internal relationship between decoupling theory and EKC hypothesis was studied. • A two-dimensional decoupling theory was established. • China and US were taken as a case to study. Abstract The current decoupling theory cannot distinguish the decoupling state of a region with different economic development level. To overcome this problem, this paper first studies the internal relationship between decoupling theory and EKC hypothesis. Furthermore, we establish a two-dimensional decoupling theory of economic development and CO 2 emissions. Finally, taking China and US as a case, this theory is used to explore the decoupling relationship between economic development and CO 2 emissions over the period 1965–2016. If the EKC curve satisfies the inverted U type characteristic, the critical point between strong decoupling and weak decoupling can be approximately obtained at the extreme point of EKC curve. Based on the Tapio decoupling theory and extreme point of EKC curve, the two-dimensional decoupling model with 16 kinds of decoupling sates is established. For China and the United States, the EKC curve of carbon emissions and per capita GDP satisfies the inverted U type characteristic. The threshold value of per capita GDP for China and the United States are $7999.5 and $50980.52, respectively. At present, China's economy is experiencing a low level of economic development. The development of the United States in 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 presented strong decoupling with high level of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Economic contribution rate of education (ECRE) is the key factor of education economics. This article selected China, South Korea, United States and other countries for a total of 15 samples, and put the data of the same period under the framework of soft computing, to simulate the production chain of “education–potential human capital–actual human capital–economic growth”. The basic idea is: Firstly, 15 countries are softly categorized according to the level of science and technology (S&T) progress. Secondly, potential human capital and actual human capital establish the internal correlation (fuzzy mapping) in the same classification, and we conceptualize actual human capital as one production factor, joined with the other two production factors, fixed asset and land, to set up the fuzzy mapping to economic growth., and then calculate economic contribution rate of education of China and foreign by two fuzzy mapping of them. Thirdly, this paper analyzes the present state and differences in the development of education between China and foreign according to different ECRE, and offers proposals for promoting the education in China. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This article investigates agricultural productivity growth over several decades, emphasizing to a great extent the agricultural economic development condition for the nine agricultural divisions of the United States, and China''s 27 provinces in terms of Malmquist productivity growth index. The paper sets up a technique to make use of two-stage linear programming method, based on sequential production technology, to estimate the most fitted and reliable distance functions in relevant agricultural sectors, and thus to compute the Malmquist productivity indexes. Especially, it proposes to decompose the productivity growth index into two major components, technical progress and efficiency improvement, and their sub-components, to study the sources of growth in productivity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The rapid growth of energy consumption in conjunction with economic development during past decades in East Asia, especially China, caused severe air pollution problems at local and regional scales. Understanding of the meteorological conditions for air pollution is essential to the understanding of the formation mechanism of air pollutants and the development of effective emission control strategies to reduce air pollution. In this paper, the Fifth Generation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)/Pennsylvania State University (PSU) Mesoscale Model (MM5) modeling system is applied to simulate meteorological fields during selected six 1-month periods in 2007/2008 over a triple-nested modeling domain covering East Asia, the eastern China, and Shandong Province at horizontal grid resolutions of 36-, 12-, and 4-km, respectively. MM5 generally reproduces well the observations in the eastern China but performs worse in the western China and northeastern China. Largest biases occur in 2-m temperatures (T2) and wind speed and wind direction at 10-m in haze months (i.e., winter) and daily mean precipitation (Precip) in non-haze months (i.e., summer), due to limitations of the model in simulating snow cover and convective precipitation. Meteorological predictions agree more closely with observations at urban sites than those at the coastal and mountain sites where the model performance deteriorates because of complex terrains, influences of urban heat island effect and land/sea breezes, and higher elevations. Model results at 12-km in Shandong Province show an overall better performance than those at 4- or 36-km while the results at 4-km show worst performance due to inaccurate land use and the model’s incapability in simulating meteorological processes at a fine scale. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]