Suchergebnisse

Economic environment is vital for commercial investment, city planning and company strategy planning in urban areas. Mastering the economical trend may help the entrepreneurs, government officers and individuals in their decision-making process. In this study, we explore multiple geo-economic datasets using visual analytics methods for understanding the economic environment. More specifically, we user time-series Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data as an economic indicator of economic development and land use data to support the spatial analysis at a refined geographic scale. The spatiotemporal patterns of the regional economic environment are revealed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The work has a three-fold contributions: (1) we apply a grid-based spatial interpolation model to derive GDP values at a file granularity based on land use data; (2) we design a novel interactive dashboard for the GDP data exploration, which serves as a visual analytical tool between data and users; (3) we combine quantitative analysis with visualizations to strengthen the qualitative analysis. The feasibility of visual analytics methods and the dashboard design are tested in one of the most developed regions, Jiangsu Province, China. Both expected and unexpected economical patterns were extracted.

Although the Chinese leadership and international observers disagree on many things about China, they share at least one assessment: corruption has penetrated China's public sector, and the state financial system is among the worst examples. In Transparency International'sCorruption Perception Indexreleased annually since the early 1990s, China has been placed either into the bottom group ("the most corrupt") or at the lower tier ("more corrupt than the majority"). During the Asian financial crisisThe Economisteven called the Chinese state banks "the worst banking system in Asia." The Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, when addressing a 1996 general meeting on Party discipline, marked several domains as the "major problem area" where big corruption and crime cases concentrated, and the financial sector topped the list. The Prosecutor General, in his 1998 work report, urged law enforcers to pay special attention to the abuses of power by financial officials.

China's remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable - illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations - though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in China's multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

China's remarkable business expansion abroad since the mid-1980s cannot be explained simply by applying existing theories, which focus on conventional international businesses from capitalist systems. Many puzzling phenomena in Chinese investments abroad become intelligible only when we introduce a key variable–illicit privatization through internationalization. So far only advantageously-placed nomenklatura members and their kin have had access to crossborder ownership, but many of them are accumulating sizeable private wealth at the cost of nationalized property. Contrary to an impression held by many in the West, the Chinese economy under Communist rule experiences spontaneous privatization parallel to what has happened in European postcommunist nations–though with a few Chinese characteristics. An examination of informal privatization in China's multinationals adds a new dimension to our understanding of the shift from state socialism to market capitalism.

Use of the shareholding system to convert small and medium-sized wholly government owned enterprises into mixed public-private companies. Included in a collection of articles under the overall title "Privatization: irregular and stalled". Argues that allowing administrative and managerial cadres to create new property rights arrangements has led to creation of private property for themselves.

In the practice of social science, the most conspicuous recent attempt at theorizing about nonconformity and protest in late communism rests on the conceptual schema of 'civil society versus the state'. Based on a case study of the institutional basis of criticism of, and dissent against, communism in China, I contend that the dichotomous concept 'civil society versus the state'. when used to explain the transition from communism, is applicable only in rare, extreme cases and misleading in most cases. Instead, I introduce the concept of 'institutional amphibiousness', stressing institutional parasitism and institutional manipulation and conversion. In most cases, institutional amphibiousness more adequately accounts for the dynamics of the erosion of communism than the concept of 'civil society versus the state'.

Integrating heterogeneous geospatial data sources is important in various domains like smart cities, urban planning and governance, but remains a challenging research problem. In particular, the production of high-quality integrated data from multiple sources requires an understanding of their respective characteristics and a systematic assessment of the consistency within and between the data sources. In order to perform the assessment, the data has to be placed on a common ground. However, in practice, heterogeneous geodata are often provided in diverse formats and organized in significantly different structures. In this work, we propose a framework that uses an ontology-based approach to overcome the heterogeneity by means of a domain ontology, so that consistency rules can be evaluated at the unified ontological representation of the data sources. In our case study, we use open governmental data from Open Data Portals (ODPs) and volunteered geographic information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as two test data sources in the area of the province of South Tyrol, Italy. Our preliminary experiment shows that the approach is effective in detecting inconsistencies within and between ODP and OSM data. These findings provide valuable insights for a better combined usage of these datasets.