Suchergebnisse

In China's rapid urbanization and industrialization, cities are playing important roles in helping the country reach its climate change mitigation goal of peaking CO2 emissions around 2030, and improving environmental quality. During the 12th Five-Year Plan (12th FYP) period (2011–2015), Chinese cities set ambitious goals and implemented diverse policies aimed at transitioning to a greener economy. The Chinese central government also set targets on a number of indicators, such economic energy intensity and carbon intensity (e.g., CO2 per unit GDP), and air quality (e.g., PM2.5 concentration). These targets are helpful for tracking implementation of individual policies or progress at a sectoral level. However, a more comprehensive and integrated approach is needed to assess progress and capture the multi-dimensional aspects of Chinese cities' transition to a greener economy, an approach that offers comparison with international best practices, as well as working with data availability in China's statistical system. This paper presents the development of a China Green LowCarbon City Index2 (CGLCCI, or City Index) and its application to 115 Chinese cities – the largest assessment of Chinese cities to date. The GCLCCI includes 23 key indicators across seven categories: economy, energy, industry, buildings, transportation, environment and land use, and climate policy and outreach. This paper applied the CGLCCI to benchmark the green and low-carbon development status of 115 Chinese cities in the year 2015. Data for the analysis came from government and publicly available data sources. The CGLCCI methodology provides a standardized method to benchmark each indicator, calculate overall city scores, and rank the cities.3 The results showed that the low-carbon transition in Chinese cities is still in its early stages. Compared to the best practices benchmarks, the 2015 City Index scores ranged from a low of 28 to a high score of 70 in 2015 (maximum score is 100). This paper also presents three top-performing cities in different stages of development and discusses how their scores across the index categories. Creating a green low-carbon index that relies on publicly available data in China, and regularly evaluating city performance, can encourage Chinese cities to learn best practices from each other, and to strengthen their goals and implementation efforts toward a green low-carbon transition.

Corporate governance (CG) has been experiencing a shift from the antecedent shareholder-oriented system toward the recent more popular stakeholder-oriented system. To better serve the aim of sustainable development, more and more companies have initiated stakeholder-oriented practices. Increasing social responsibility behaviours demonstrate the prioritisation of stakeholders' interests. Nevertheless, most extant research on stakeholder-oriented CG focuses on MNEs and large listed companies. Limited attention has been paid to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sector. This study aims to fill this gap by providing empirical evidence of Chinese SME corporate social responsibility (CSR). We develop and test two hypotheses by using samples of 172 Chinese listed SMEs. Our result is distinct from most of the extant SME CG literature, given that the stakeholder-oriented CSR types have a negative impact on short-term operational profitability and expansion over a fixed period. Additionally, the government subsidy, as one of the most significant national institutions, partially moderates the relationship between stakeholder-oriented CSR and firm performance. The outcomes of this research make both theoretical and managerial contributions to SMEs' CG systems. In the context of Chinese SME CSR, managerial stakeholder theory is a more pragmatic means to guide firms toward sustainable development than ethical stakeholder theory.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the ideological connotation and philosophy of dance art in China and Russia. The research is based on the comparison and analysis of the historical and modern contexts of the dance traditions of both countries, their connection with culture and ideology, as well as their influence on the formation of national identity. The results of the analysis will allow a deeper understanding of the role of dance art in society and its reflection of ideological attitudes and philosophical principles in China and Russia.

This paper studies how groups resolve disagreement when they must reach unanimity after submitting individual proposals and exchanging text-form messages via a chat window in lottery choice experiments. We find that the majority proposal does not always prevail. The minority proposal prevails sometimes, especially when it is closer to risk neutrality. About one third of the groups disagrees after communication and would have got zero payoffs if disagreement remains after two more attempts without communication. In these groups, extrovert subjects are more likely to lead the group outcome than confused or conscientious subjects. Overall group choices are more coherent and closer to risk neutrality than individuals'. Checking the recorded messages, we find that the chat activity is intense, growing with the level of disagreement and aims at finding consensus. The amount and timing of chat messages help us to predict which choice prevails in the group.

Nanotechnology drew considerable R&D and research policy attention during the last decade from both developed and emerging developing countries. Nanotechnology is an emerging field where scientists and engineers manipulate matter at the molecular level to create new materials with favourable physical and chemical properties; it is widely acknowledged as a revolutionary technology that will bring path-breaking benefits and profound transformation to human life. Among these developing countries, China has recently emerged as one of the leaders in nanotechnology research. What characterises China's nanotechnology research? Is it different than the nanotechnology research in developed countries? What are the main players and determining factors behind China's fast growth in nanotechnology research? These are the research questions that this article intends to answer.

AbstractThe approach of combining diverse policy instruments is increasingly being applied to address complex environmental and sustainability issues. For such an approach of policy mix to be effective, broader contextual and process factors must be taken into account. In this paper, we identify interdepartmental cooperation within the government as a condition for an effective policy mix, especially for China. Taking domestic waste governance as a case study, we collect policy document data from 32 cities across China in the last decade and verify the influential mechanism between the interdepartmental cooperation network and the policy mix through quantitative methods of social network analysis and regression. The empirical results show that the Chinese government has intensified interdepartmental cooperation over the past decade in the area of domestic waste governance, which has facilitated the increased adoption of policy mixes. In addition, a shift in the policy strategy and policy direction of the Chinese government for domestic waste governance can be traced from the changes in the specific departments involved in the cooperation network.