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PM(2.5) pollution has produced adverse effects all over the world, especially in fast-developing China. PM(2.5) pollution in China is widespread and serious, which has aroused widespread concern of the government, the public and scholars. This paper evaluates the evolution trend and spatial pattern of PM(2.5) pollution in China based on the data of 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2017, and reveals the pollution situation of PM(2.5) and its relationship with industrial restructuring and technological progress by using spatial dynamic panel model. The results show that China's PM(2.5) pollution has significant path dependence and spatial correlation, and the industrial restructuring and technological progress have significant positive effects on alleviating PM(2.5) pollution. As a decomposition item of technological progress, technical change effectively alleviates PM(2.5) pollution. Another important discovery is that the interaction between industrial restructuring and technological progress will aggravate PM(2.5) pollution. Finally, in order to effectively improve China's air quality, while advocating the Chinese government to pursue high-quality development, this paper puts forward a regional joint prevention mechanism.

Maintaining workplace diversity is an important legal and ethical issue in modern organizations. However, demographic heterogeneity might discourage the development of shared leadership in work teams as individuals are inherently not inclined to share leadership roles with dissimilar others. The present study is designed to investigate how political skill assists team members to overcome interpersonal dissimilarities and become engaged in mutual influence with their peers. By studying 63 student project teams using multiwave, multisource surveys, we find that team demographic faultlines on gender and race are negatively associated with shared leadership magnitude and therefore discourage team task performance. However, such destructive direct (on shared leadership magnitude) and indirect (on team performance) effects of team demographic faultlines can be mitigated when the team is staffed with many politically skilled members. Our findings bring important implications for organizations in building and encouraging shared leadership, especially in newly formed professional work teams.

© 2019, This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply. Urbanization has led to changes in urban morphology and climate, while urban open space has become an important ecological factor for evaluating the performance of urban development. This study presents an optimization approach using computational performance simulation. With a genetic algorithm using the Grasshopper tool, this study analyzed the layout and configuration of urban open space and its impact on the urban micro-climate under summer and winter conditions. The outdoor mean Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) was applied as the performance indicator for evaluating the quality of the urban micro-climate. Two cases—one testbed and one real urban block in Nanjing, China—were used to validate the computer-aided simulation process. The optimization results in the testbed showed UTCI values varied from 36.5 to 37.3 °C in summer and from −4.9 to −1.9 °C in winter. In the case of the real urban block, optimization results show, for summer, although the average UTCI value increased by 0.6 °C, the average air velocity increased by 0.2 m/s; while in winter, the average UTCI value increased by 1.7 °C and the average air velocity decreased by 0.2 m/s. These results demonstrate that the proposed computer-aided optimization process can improve the thermal comfort conditions of open space in urban blocks. Finally, this study discusses strategies and guidelines for the layout design of urban open space to improve urban environment comfort.

Despite Small and Medium-size Enterprises' (SMEs) significant contribution to China's social and economic development very little has been written about the influence that public policies (i.e. public funding priorities and regulatory measures) may have on the first stage of international expansion of Chinese SMEs. To help to fill this gap, this article analyses five main factors related to public policies and services affecting Chinese SMEs' internationalization: access to public financial resources; participation of the government in ownership; access to public procurement contracts; adverse regulatory and inconsistent legal frameworks, and public assistance on information and knowledge about markets. The main conclusion is that SMEs appear to base their international expansion on private capabilities, rather than on support from the government; in addition, the perceived barriers for the international expansion of these firms may be mainly internal, rather than institutional.