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'This is an original reading by a Chinese economist on the grand topic of China's urbanisation. Through gathering a vast amount of raw materials available in Chinese, the book deliberately maintains its indigenous flavour and introduces rich and timely information to the outside world, on topical issues such as household registration (hukou) reform, fairness of land acquisition, housing price control, forced demolition, urban poverty, traffic congestion and many other topics. The attempt to consider the implications for the world economy, especially on issues such as energy and material consum

Although the investment-oriented development model for economic growth adopted by Chinese governments has generated spectacular results, the risks of debt-financed urbanization and economic development have recently become evident in mounting local debts that are undermining the financial system, triggering concerns with respect to local governments' indebtedness, financial stability and sovereign risk in China. In this paper, we portray the uneven spatial and temporal dynamics of local government debt in China, and examine the ways in which it is intertwined with institutional, political and economic factors. Our analysis shows that while global and national economic conditions have resulted in a dramatic increase of local government debt, particularly in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the spatial variation of local debt accumulation in China could be partly explained by two institutional factors: land finance and inter-jurisdictional competition. We argue that the behavior of local governments may harm the long-term future of Chinese cities.

Recent empirical studies indicated that using autonomous vehicles (AVs) can reduce commuters' value of time. In this context, this paper investigates how variation in value of time for AVs will reshape the commuting dynamics in the short-run and the implication on AV-related policies in the long run. We find that in the short run, the adoption of AV can create more congestion delays since delay becomes cheaper for commuters. In the long run, a number of external factors such as ownership cost and safety concerns may affect commuters' preference for AVs as against to traditional vehicles (TVs). This will influence the AV penetration, which in turn affects the daily commuting equilibrium. Multiple long-run equilibria with different AV penetrations may exist, depending on the additional cost/benefit of AVs with respect to TVs. Government subsidies may be needed to drive the system from inefficient long-run equilibrium to a more efficient one.

AbstractUnderstanding tourists' perceptions of climate is essential to improving tourist satisfaction and destination marketing. This paper constructs a sentiment analysis framework for tourists' perceptions of climate using not only continuous climate data but also short-term weather data. Based on Sina Weibo, we found that Chinese tourists' perceptions of climate change were at an initial stage of development. The accuracies of word segmentation between sentiment and nonsentiment words using ROST CM, BosonNLP, and GooSeeker were all high, and the three gradually decreased. The positively expressed sentences accounted for 79.80% of the entire text using ROST EA, and the sentiment score was 0.784 at the intermediate level using artificial neural networks. The results indicate that the perceived emotional map is generally consistent with the actual climate and that cognitive evaluation theory is suitable to study text on climate perception.

A review of global and national energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) investments between 2000 and 2018 reveals that global public energy RD&D and cleaner energy RD&D investments dramatically increased, but then plateaued after 2009. In absolute values, nuclear energy has held steady, fossil energy contracted, and clean energy RD&D quadrupled. As a percentage of overall investments, both fossil fuel and nuclear investments contracted during the period. This review compares the energy innovation priorities of the world's largest economies using the metric of public expenditures on energy RD&D. China and India have become important global public investors in energy innovation, now among the top five globally. Priorities set by the Chinese and Indian governments will thus influence new energy technology breakthroughs in the coming years. The US and Chinese governments are now competing for first place in clean energy RD&D, depending on whether or not nuclear and cross-cutting technologies are included. India has dedicated substantial funding to indigenizing nuclear power technologies. Energy RD&D by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in major emerging economies remains skewed toward fossil fuels and nuclear. Reforming SOE expenditures to move away from fossil fuels could have a major impact on global energy technology trajectories, making a material difference in the quest to decarbonize the energy system.