Suchergebnisse

Multiple state functional disability models do not generally include systematic trend and uncertainty. We develop and estimate a multistate latent factor intensity model with transition and recovery rates depending on a stochastic frailty factor to capture trend and uncertainty.We estimate the model parameters using U.S. Health and Retirement Study data between 1998 and 2012 with Monte Carlo maximum likelihood estimation method. The model shows significant reductions in disability and mortality rates during this period and allows us to quantify uncertainty in transition rates arising from the stochastic frailty factor. Recovery rates are very sensitive to the stochastic frailty. There is an increase in expected future lifetimes as well as an increase in future healthy life expectancy. The proportion of lifetime spent in disability on average remains stable with no strong support in the data for either morbidity compression or expansion. The model has widespread application in costing of government-funded aged care and pricing and risk management of long-term-care insurance products.

This study explores the influence of political risk on firms in the tourism industry. It addresses a research gap regarding the impact of political risk on firm-level performance and failure and uncovers the role of organizational slack in this relationship. Firm-level political risk is estimated from 2002 to 2019 financial data for firms across six tourism sectors in a developed economy, the United States. Such risk is found to be significantly associated with firm performance and business failure. From the perspectives of the resource-based view and the threat-rigidity hypothesis, the results support the moderating effects of absorbed and unabsorbed slack on links between risk, performance, and business failure. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the tourism industry's vulnerability, this study will be of interest to tourism firms seeking to improve business sustainability and resilience.

The appeal system for Chinese university students is created and implemented by the state. But not a single system launched «from above» will function without being demanded by society. And in order to identify a particular demand, it is necessary to make empirical investigations (especially in-depth interviews) and to carefully analyze the first-hand data obtained. Such studies revealed the social demand for protecting the students' rights; for controlling the actions of higher educational institutions' administration; for reducing the burden on the courts forced to participate in resolving conflicts between the university and its students. It was due to this demand that the state developed a system of appeals for university students and made it come from paper to practice. Thus, the results of our analyzing the stage-by-stage creation, implementation, and improvement of the appeal system for university students in China, as presented in this research article, not only reflect the advantages of grass-roots promoting state policy, but also indicate the importance for the Chinese government to take into account social needs and respond to them. ; Система апелляции студентов китайских вузов создана государством и энергично претворяется им в жизнь. Но ни одна спущенная сверху система не будет функционировать, если на нее нет запроса общества. А для того чтобы тот или иной запрос выявить, необходимо проводить эмпирические исследования (особенно глубинные интервью) и тщательно анализировать полученные из первых рук данные. Благодаря таким исследованиям и была зафиксирована социальная потребность в защите прав студентов; в контроле действий административного аппарата высших учебных заведений; в снижении нагрузки на суды, вынужденные участвовать в разрешении конфликтов между вузом и обучающимися в нем лицами. Эта потребность побудила государство разработать систему апелляции студентов вузов и превратить ее из системы «на бумаге» в систему, действующую на практике. Таким образом, приведенные в данной исследовательской статье результаты анализа поэтапного создания в Китае системы апелляции студентов вузов, ее претворения в жизнь и совершенствования не только отображают преимущества продвижения политики государства сверху вниз, но и свидетельствуют о важности для правительством КНР учета социальных потребностей и отклика на них.

This is a conference paper. ; One of the major challenges for scaling up sustainable sanitation (SuSan) technologies and services is the sources of finances. Perceptions of stakeholders and communities may trigger them to overcome this challenge by exploring viable financing mechanisms and sources for widespread replication of SuSan technologies and services from the local to the global scale. This approach was studied through household surveys combined with semi-structured key informant interviews among various SuSan users and institutional stakeholders in the peri-urban Ger areas of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The results showed that the existing technologies and services are highly subsidized and still partly shared by the households. Micro-finance organizations (including banks), government subsidies, private companies and community fundraising through building social capital may be considered as potential sources of finance for SuSan projects in Mongolia. A re-invented idea of 'Corporate Responsibility' is an interesting direction in which to explore possible financial sources and an effective mechanism for sustainability in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector.

Purpose: Innovation is becoming the key approach for firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether government public R&D subsidies have a positive impact on firms' private R&D investment (RDI) under globalization; this paper also investigates the impact of international trade on firms' private RDI in China. Design/methodology/approach: The paper empirically tests the government support and international trade on firms' private RDI. An online survey was conducted as well as collaborated with the Department of Science and Technology of Zhejiang Province in 2006. The sample was obtained from more than 1,000 firms in high-tech industries in Zhejiang province, and covers the year 2003-2005. Linear regression was used for the firm-level estimations. Findings: The empirical results indicate that public R&D subsidies and disembodied technology imports positively and significantly impact on firms' private RDI, while non-high-tech product exports and embodied technology imports do not have positive effects. Moreover, the results show that high-tech product exports are positively associated with firms' private RDI but not significantly. Originality/value: The paper's findings extend the existing understanding of the determinants of firms' RDI in less developed countries, such as China. Moreover, unlike most extant studies, the authors investigate different types of exports and imports and their impacts on firms' RDI, respectively. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

In 1985 China began its reform on the Science & Technology (S&T) sector which was inherited from a planned economy. The reform over the past 20 years is deemed to be a decisive factor in China's science and technology progress. The paper first argues that two fundamental tasks of China's S&T sector reform are to enhance scientific productivity and strengthen the industry-academic relationships. Subsequently, the reform policies are outlined within three categories: 1) reforming the funding system, 2) improving R&D management 3) strengthening industry-academic relationships. The evolution of S&T institutes such as the Chinese Academy of Science is examined to provide micro-level evidence of policy impacts. The scientific output of China's S&T sector did achieve the remarkable improvement in the reform period, but we also observe the rapidly growing investment from the governments flew into the sector. The evaluation of the performance of the reform needs to examine the scientific productivity of the sector. Therefore, we proceed to measure the scientific productivity of China's S&T institutes based on the R&D input and output data in the aggregate and provincial level. The Polynomial Distributed Lag model is utilized to uncover the structure of the lag between R&D input and output. The findings based on the aggregate data and provincial data confirm that the scientific productivity of China's S&T institutes has been decreasing since 1990s. These results call for the future actions that can contribute to enhancing the scientific productivity of China's S&T institutes.

The gob-side entry layout is popular at two-entry longwall mine sites in China for the benefit of improving the coal recovery rate. Currently, two methods have been widely used to develop gob-side entries, including gob-side entry retaining and gob-side entry driving. Gob-side entry retaining maximizes the recovery rate by pillarless mining but increases the difficulty in gob-side entry support. Also, this method has limited applications in hard roof conditions. The gob-side entry driving mine site uses the rib pillar to separate the gob entry and the gob area of the previous panel, which leads to additional coal losses. The waste is more intolerable in large-cutting-height panels and longwall top coal caving panels as the Chinese government limits the minimum recovery rate of longwall panels using these mining methods. In this paper, a new gob-side entry layout method, termed gob-side pre-backfill driving, is established to overcome the shortcomings of the existing methods. The new method eliminates rib pillar losses and enhances gob-side entry stability. The feasibility of gob-side pre-backfill driving is studied by numerical modelling and a field trial at Changcun Mine in China. The results indicate that gob-side pre-backfill driving is an alternative for gob-side entry development. This method is practical and also has the potential to bring significant economic benefits to the mining industry.

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The evolution of cooperation on interdependent networks is arousing increasing concern based on the fact that more and more complex systems in the real-world have been proven to be organized in the form of multi-layer networks rather than single-layer networks. In this study, we examine the effects of self-organized interdependence on the evolution and stabilization of cooperation with social dilemmas depicted by the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) and the Public Goods Game (PGG) in which agents with the most common strategy have the chance to be rewarded proportionally to the fitness of corresponding agents belonging to the other network. We show that such a type-free rewarding rule, independent of game strategy, establishes a time-varying interdependence between two initially independent populations whereby cooperation is highly promoted as well as stabilized both in the two-player PDG and in the multi-player PGG. Majority-pressure based interdependence at stake has proven pretty neutral in regard to game strategy because it is contingent on strategy configuration rather than strategy itself, which thus gives birth to homologous communities, including cooperative as well as non-cooperative, and thereby an enhanced spatial reciprocity between non-identical networks is triggered. Of particular interest is the double-edged sword effect of network interdependence on cooperation although in most instances the heavier the interdependence, the better the evolution of cooperation. Furthermore, interpretations of the nontrivial relationship between cooperation and benchmark threshold measuring the strategy's local popularity highlight that rewarding the minimum majority is optimal for the evolution of cooperation in such scenario. Finally, we claim our observations are also quite robust with respect to mutation.

© 2016 by the authors. This study analyzes the economic system dynamics of investment in real estate from mainly four participants in China. Local governments limit the supply of commercial and residential land to raise fiscal revenue, and expand debts by land mortgage to develop industrial zones and parks. Led by local government, banks and real estate development enterprises forge a coalition on real estate investment and facilitate real estate price appreciation. The above theoretical model is empirically evidenced with VAR (Vector Auto Regression) methodology. A panel VAR model shows that land leasing and real estate price appreciation positively affect local government general fiscal revenue. Additional VAR models find that bank credit in addition to private and foreign funds respectively have strong positive dynamic effects on housing prices. Housing prices also have a strong positive impact on speculation from private funds and hot money.