Suchergebnisse

Asia, mobilities, consumption power and the Arctic / Young-Sook Lee -- A critique on the non-critical application of Veblen's conspicuous consumption : a perspective on Asian mobilities in the Arctic / Young-Sook Lee -- Chinese tourism consumption vis-à-vis tourism development strategies in the Arctic / Emma Björner, Elena Dybtsyna and Erik Lundberg -- Chinese tourism in the Russian Arctic and Far East : implications of a China-Russia political partnership / Mariia Kobzeva -- Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Chinese tourism : sustainable development in the face of otherness, growth, and power / Nathan Reigner, Gestur Hovgaard and Firouz Gaini -- Renewable energy-based cruise tourism for Asians in the Arctic : a perspective from northern Norway / Odin Foldvik Eikeland and Matteo Chiesa -- The Northeast Passage : connecting China and the Arctic through cruise tourism? / Minna-Liina Ojala, Juulia Räikkönen and Tuomas Kiiski -- "When I hear there's going to be an Asian tourist ... " : the role of Asian ethnicity in the planning process of guided tours in Svalbard / Eva Kotašková and Matouš Jelínek -- Thai mobility and consumerism at North Cape, Norway : zooming in on a stone at a tourist site / Line Mathisen and Siri Ulfsdatter Søreng -- Learning from an Arctic adventure tourism guidea: an exploratory study of emotional labour when leading Chinese consumers / Wilson Wai Yin Cheung -- The Chinese riddle : tourism, China and Svalbard / Zdenka Sokolickova -- Embracing Chinese tourists in Iceland : the response of the tourism industry / Vera Vilhjalmsdóttir, Guðrún Þóra Gunnarsdóttir and Rosemary Black -- Designing winter cities : Arctic urbanisation and Asian mobilities consumption / David Chapman, Young-Sook Lee and Agneta Larsson -- Sustainable mobilities consumption and Asia in a global Arctic : observations and ways forward / Young-Sook Lee.

An Economic Philosophy of Production, Work and Consumption presents a new transhistorical framework of defining production, work and consumption. It shows that they all share the common feature of intentional physical transformation of something external to the agent, at some point in time. The book opens with a discussion of various theoretical traditions within economics, spanning mainstream and heterodox perspectives, and problems with production definitions in use today. Next, the author outlines various definitions in a more formal manner and provides a discussion on measurement and the production boundary. Unproductive work is redefined as socially reproductive, i.e. such that would not be performed on a Robinson Crusoe Island. Finally, the volume applies the new conceptual framework to various historical cases and discusses the future of production, work and consumption. This essential volume will be of interest to scholars of economic philosophy and methodology, the history of economic thought, economic history and national accounting.

This book explores the philosophical understanding of the ℓ́ℓenergy consumptionℓ́ℓ in warehousing process that can be found in the literature. It presents known technical solutions that, if they are used in cold storage rooms, can effectively reduce energy consumption: through lower power consumption and/or energy recovery, such as the use of photovoltaic panels. The final part of the book explores the problems discussed on the basis of a concrete example ℓ́ℓ a project involving energy recovery in a refrigerated warehouse. This publication also describes the design of refrigerated warehouses, taking into account their energy intensity. In the case of logistic warehousing systems, the pallets in warehouses can offer a source of energy ℓ́ℓ namely of the potential energy stored in the loads on the shelves. Given that todayℓ́ℓs construction warehouses have heights on the order of several tens of meters, that energy can be considerable. In the case of refrigerated warehouses and cold storage facilities, it is necessary to monitor the stored goods in order to maintain a constant freezing temperature, in keeping with the requirements of the HACCP system. Inevitably, this calls for constant cooling of the air inside the warehouse, and thus produces a fixed, high and constant level of energy usage. And, just as in any other context, it becomes important to identify methods for reducing energy consumption.

We analyze the effects of a generalized class of negative consumption externalities (asymmetric and non-atmospheric) on the structure of effcient commodity tax programs. Households are not only concerned about consumption reference levels - that is, they gain utility from keeping up with the Joneses - they also exhibit altruism. Two sets of efficient tax regimes are compared, based, on a welfarist- and a non-welfarist optimality criterion, respectively. Altruism turns out not to be at odds with the consumption externalities. Rather, altruism implicates a bound on efficient utility allocations. A non-welfarist government tolerates less inequality than a welfarist one. In the welfarist (non-welfarist) case, first-best personalized commodity tax rates respond highly sensitively (barely) to whether or not a consumption externality is asymmetric or non-atmospheric. If personalized commodity tax rates are not available (second-best case), the tax rate on a non- positional good is typically different from zero for corrective reasons. For plausible functional forms and parameter values, numerical simulations suggest that second- best tax rates are rather insensitive with respect to both the optimality criterion and the nature of the consumption externality.

Gathering contributions by leading social development scholars, this report offers a comprehensive description of the national development of cultural consumption in China. By comparing the annual growth of cultural consumption, GDP growth, per-capita income growth and savings growth, the authors reveal the disparity between urban and rural areas in terms of cultural consumption, as well as that between provinces. Based on an analysis of the status quo of cultural consumption in China, the book explores the road to a prosperous society and enhancing China's cultural development.

Consumption forecasting has provided economists with a great challenge. It seems that the models developed cannot predict consumption with any real accuracy. Whether this is due to unreasonably high expectations or extremely poor forecasts, is another matter altogether. The fact remains, that there is much still to learn about consumption. Consumption analysis is vital as an indicator of welfare and a signal of economic health. This implies that accurate consumption forecasts can provide invaluable information to governments, investors and the population more broadly. This has prompted an investigation into the power of an alternative consumption forecasting approach. Specifically, the analysis examines the accuracy of forecasting consumption by disaggregating the measure into durable, non-durable and services components. It is expected that these components are driven by different factors, causing the variability of each to differ. Thus, it is hypothesised that through modelling each of these components separately and combining the estimates, a far more accurate forecast of total consumption can be obtained. This approach to forecasting total consumption has not been found in reviewing the consumption forecasting literature. While components of consumption have been investigated, the intention was not to provide forecasts of total consumption. Consequently, justification for the conclusions of this analysis is drawn from the empirical results obtained. The independent variables used in the analysis are however strongly grounded in economic theory, most notably Keynes' theory of consumption. This has led to the investigation of relationships between durable, non-durable and services consumption based on various measures of wealth, income, consumer sentiment and attitudes toward saving. A multiple regression analysis was undertaken to develop three consumption models for the durable, non-durable and services components. In total, ninety-two independent variables were regressed against non-durable and services consumption, with one-hundred and eighty-four independent variables regressed against durable consumption. The regression analysis produced three highly significant consumption models. Each of the models was tested thoroughly to ensure that they were statistically sound. Having established this, in-sample forecast estimates were obtained over the September 2007 to June 2008 period. These estimates were found to be surprisingly accurate over the first three quarters of the forecast horizon. The fourth quarter estimates were less accurate. However, it is expected that the unusually large decline in consumption for June 2008 is attributable to the anomalous global economic conditions. With this noted, the fourth quarter estimate did identify a turning point in the data from four quarters previous, which is an encouraging result. Following this result, the model was used to form four quarter forecast estimates for September 2008 to June 2009. These forecasts also seem economically plausible, as a further decline is predicted for the September 2008 quarter. Given the economic climate, this seems a likely outcome. Each of the models was also assessed for its economic plausibility. The desired outcome was to provide an intuitively sensible model of total consumption, as opposed to a highly accurate model which is economically irrational. Consequently, each of the final models constructed utilise only plausible relationships in modelling consumption. The empirical analysis identifies that each of the consumption components are in fact driven by different factors, and consequently have differing variability. This outcome substantiates the disaggregated approach taken, as this dissimilarity has allowed for the construction of a highly accurate consumption forecasting model. The only true test will come with the performance of the out-of-sample estimates. However, from the analysis undertaken, the disaggregated forecasting approach has provided solid results. This indicates that the models developed may prove to be a useful tool in producing accurate forecast estimates for use in practical economic analysis.

This dissertation is composed of three unrelated chapters, all of which are theoretical.In Chapter 1, co-authored with Kristóf Madarász, we develop a model in which people experience standard consumption utility as well as anticipatory utility, defined as the weighted sum of independently anticipated consumption "episodes" or "dimensions". The weights on these dimensions correspond to the attention that the person pays to the dimension. We assume attention on a dimension increases when expected consumption utility in the dimension differs from expected consumption utility under the default action or the prior belief. We show that the decision maker will pay more for information about dimensions with high expected consumption utility, and the willingness to pay may be negative when expected consumption utility is low. Additionally, when expected consumption utility is sufficiently low, but not when it is high, the decision maker will follow the default action even if it is suboptimal from a consumption standpoint. Furthermore, given the decision maker's current beliefs and preferences in a dimension, he will consume more in that dimension if he just received information. We then consider an advertisement application in which a monopolist decides whether to certifiably reveal the quality of various exogenous attributes of a good to a consumer who may choose to buy or not. There exists a sequential equilibrium for which the monopolist will not disclose information for attributes in which the consumer's utility with the highest quality good is sufficiently worse than not buying the good. Competition increases disclosure.The purpose of the Chapter 2 is to connect the literature on industrial self-regulation with the literature on political revolutions by showing that these seemingly different situations are, from a strategic perspective, different cases of the same basic game. I construct a simple two-player extensive game of complete information in which two players have preferences over the realization of a policy in one dimension. The first mover has a marginal cost to change the policy and the second player has a fixed cost. The first mover may placate the second mover from taking action or provoke the second mover to take action. In equilibrium, the second mover may benefit from having preferences that diverge more from the first player, and may benefit by having higher fixed costs. The equilibria are robust even when there are multiple first movers. Many applications are discussed and incorporated into the framework.In Chapter 3 I study the interaction where an informed party wants an uninformed party to believe that the state of the world is as high as possible. A fraction of the time the informed party exogenously "leaks" the true state of the world, and a fraction of the time the informed party can strategically choose a "decoy" that is indistinguishable from the exogenous leak. Despite preferences being similar to those in Crawford and Sobel (1982) with maximum bias, strategic senders do not babble. Instead they trade-off exaggeration for credibility. In equilibrium, all messages received below a threshold will be leaks and will be believed by the receiver, while all messages above the threshold will induce an identical expectation. The model applies to many applications. In particular we motivate the model with a political interpretation in which leaks represent transparency within a political administration.

Chow King Mun. ; Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. ; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-144). ; Abstracts in English and Chinese. ; Abstract (in English and Chinese) --- p.iv-v ; Acknowledgements --- p.vi ; Notes --- p.vii ; List of Figures --- p.viii ; List of Diagrams and Tables --- p.viii ; Figures ; Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 ; Chapter 1.1 --- The Aim of the Study ; Chapter 1.2 --- The Road to Chinese Modernity ; Chapter 1.3 --- Modernity and Consumption ; Chapter 1.4 --- Theories of Consumption ; Chapter 1.5 --- Consumption in China ; Chapter 1.6 --- "A Brief Overview of the Tian Village, Zhongshan" ; Chapter 1.7 --- Methodology ; Chapter 1.8 --- Summary of the Chapters Making up the Thesis ; Chapter 1.9 --- Significance of Study ; Chapter 2. --- Tian Village and its Environment --- p.27 ; Chapter 2.1 --- The Xiaolan Town ; Chapter 2.2 --- The Tian Village ; Chapter 2.2.1 --- Background ; Chapter 2.2.2 --- The Dramatic Transformation of the Village ; Chapter 2.2.3 --- The Economic Activities ; Chapter 2.2.4 --- Education Level ; Chapter 2.2.5 --- Migrant Labourers ; Chapter 2.3 --- Summary ; Chapter 3. --- Aspiring to be Modern --- p.52 ; Chapter 3.1 --- What is Modernity? ; Chapter 3.2 --- The Aspirations of Older and Younger Villagers ; Chapter 3.2.1 --- The young generation ; Chapter 3.2.2 --- The old generation ; Chapter 3.3.3 --- The hardships of the older villagers ; Chapter 3.3 --- The Government Initiatives ; Chapter 3.4 --- The Hong Kong Influences ; Chapter 3.5 --- The Discourses of Modernity ; Chapter 3.6 --- Summary ; Chapter 4. --- Striving for a Better Life --- p.78 ; Chapter 4.1 --- Strategies to earn money ; Chapter 4.2 --- Case Study 1: Big Brother ; Chapter 4.3 --- Case Study 2: Ah Ming's mother ; Chapter 4.4 --- Case Study 3: AhYan ; Chapter 4.5 --- Case Study 4: Mr He ; Chapter 4.6 --- Summary ; Chapter 5. --- Consumption and Modernity --- p.92 ; Chapter 5.1 --- Interpreting modernity: Consumption as a strategy ; Chapter 5.1.1 --- Housing ...

A radical critique of contemporary culture-based theories of consumption. A materialist theory of consumption is outlined and its implication for reducing consumption are noted.