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This book investigates the industrial agglomeration and dispersion within a country under trade liberalization and interregional integration by considering both economic forces and geographical elements. First, it provides a detailed explanation of Krugman's new economic geography (NEG) model and reviews the subsequent refinements of the original model from mainly geographical viewpoints. It points out that many existing models are isomorphic and their two-region assumptions seem unrealistic. Second, this book extends Krugman's original model to a two-country and three-region case where the domestic regions are fully asymmetrical in terms of their sizes and accessibilities to global markets. By incorporating the geographical elements into the original NEG model, this book explains the increasing industrial agglomeration in countries in the process of international trade liberalization and regional integration. Additionally, the analytical model provides a reasonable explanation for industrial dispersion.

What kinds of images does China want to refashion and project? What is the role of the government vis-à-vis that of other institutional and social actors in these efforts? What kinds of tensions and pressures has China experienced? Where do the programs stand in terms of their impact on the country's image? What do all these efforts mean to the broader discussion on the study and practice of public diplomacy and national image management? This book describes and explains the scope of the country's pursuit of soft power through public diplomacy and international communication

Information technology is changing the way elections are organized. Technology renders the electoral process more efficient, but things could also go wrong: Voting software is complex, it consists of over thousands of lines of code, which makes it error-prone. Technical problems may cause delays at polling stations, or even delay the announcement of the final result. This thesis describes a set of methods to be used, for example, by system developers, administrators, or decision makers to examine election technologies, social choice algorithms and voter experience. Technology: Verifiability refers to voting software producing evidence so that can be retroactively analyzed, in case that something went wrong. There are two possible ways to analyze implementations for verifiability, first statically, i.e. before the technology is deployed, which gives the developers the opportunity to fix issues during development time, or second dynamically, i.e. monitoring while an implementation is used during an election, or after the election is over, for forensic analysis. This thesis contains two chapters on this subject: the chapter Analyzing Implementations of Election Technologies describes a technique for checking verifiability properties directly on the source code of e-voting systems using modern code scanning tools. Verifiability properties are expressed in linear temporal logic, then translated into Büchi automata and checked using off the shelf static analyzers. In the chapter Epistemic Policies for Voting Systems, we turn our attention to the logs generated by e-voting systems for policy compliance checking. The novel contribution is that we use epistemic linear time logic to express properties about distributed e-voting systems that then be checked by model-checkers. Algorithms: The advances in technology open the possibility that the very algorithms we use in elections are going to evolve. Besides first-past-the-post, there are many variants of D'Hondt, Sainte-Laguë and single transferable vote (STV), and these algorithms continue to be adjusted, evolved, and refined. The chapter Verifying Voting Schemes focuses on the use of formal methods to ensure that these algorithms have the intended meaning and conform to the desired democratic principles. As a case study, we define two semantic criteria for STV schemes, formulated in first-order logic over the theories of arrays and integers, and show how bounded model-checking and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers can be used to check these criteria. Voter Experience: Technology profoundly affects the voter experience. These effects need to be measured and the data should be used to make decisions regarding the implementation of the electoral process. The chapter Measuring Voter Lines describes an automated data collection method for measuring voters' waiting time, and discusses statistical models designed to provide an understanding of the voter behavior in polling stations.

This study advances the concept of consumer nationalism in the international marketplace. It examines the complex role of the media in its formation and expressive practices through a case study of an incident involving Toshiba Corporation in China. The concept rests upon three key arguments of self-definition through consumption, globalization, and symbolic national unification. In their encounter with the global brand Toshiba, the Chinese media and consumers re-discovered and evoked a strong nationalistic sentiment underlined by Japan's past aggression and atrocities in China. The media discourse of national pride and dignity in the case study represents the complex confluence of China's continuing ambivalence towards Japan, sponsor activities by key advocacy groups, and the changing Chinese media practices. Further research is called for to consider the concept of consumer nationalism, its processes, participants, and consequences. (Asian J Commun/NIAS)