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PurposeSpatial arrangement of hospital environments has been proven to have impacts on hospital users such as wayfinding, privacy and operational efficiency. Many studies examined the spatial quality of hospitals, but there is a lack of comparative research between Chinese and Australian hospitals. Hospitals in both countries have salient features that are worth to learn and can inform hospital stakeholders internationally on design decisions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare the spatial quality of hospitals from both countries using space syntax approach and field observation.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses space syntax analysis and observation to provide qualitative and quantitative data. Illustrative case studies from both countries are selected for comparison. The main benchmarks involved in measuring the spatial qualities, such as step depth and visual connectivity, are analysed using Depthmap X before comparing with the results from observation.FindingsFor Chinese hospitals to be more human-centred, public space design and facility management need additional attention. Australian hospitals could learn from Hospital D on how to design highly centralised nursing stations that cope with a high patient flow. Global policy and decision-makers should consider the potential inconsistency between initial design intention and practical use.Originality/valuePractical implications were made based on the results for bettering hospital environments. It is hoped that the methodology presented in this research is of significance to the enhancement of global healthcare environment research.

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions. Our inferred measures are small in value, favorably match measured costs of the silver trade derived from contemporary accounts, and fare well in the comparison to estimates of trans-Atlantic gold points. This leads to the conclusion that the degree of Chinese financial market integration was substantial. However, during and immediately after World War I, our estimates of the silver points increased appreciably, foreshadowing the collapse of China's linkages to world financial markets beginning in the 1930s.

Structural transformation is a key feature of economic development. Traditional literature attributes it to changes in the sectoral composition of consumption. Different from it, we argue that the "servici fication" of investment goods, which is induced by investment-specific technological change, becomes an increasingly important reason for structural transformation, particularly for the rise of the services economy. Our study of the input output tables finds that the share of service inputs in investment goods have grown significantly in many countries since the 1980s, especially for investment-intensive economies such as China. To assess if the investment channel is quantitatively significant, we build a standard model with three broad sectors, but instead add an investment production function employing factors from all three sectors. Moreover, we incorporate investment-specific technological change by allowing the productivities of the three sectoral inputs to evolve over time. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy from 1981-2014 and perform counter-factual experiments accordingly. We find that the technological change in the investment sector accounts for 33.1 percent decline in employment share of agriculture, 36.0 percent increase in employment share of manufacturing and 31.5 percent increase in employment share of services over the period. The magnitude of this effect on the share of services keeps growing, particularly after 2000. Our findings are not unique for China, but also apply to other economies experiencing "servici fication" of investment sector.

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.