Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter --Contents --Acknowledgements --Abbreviations of Political Parties --Introduction --1 The Cultural, Social and Political Fabric of Malaysia --2 Trends in Social Media Use in Malaysian Cyberspace --3 A Political Marketing Tool and a Network of Cyber Battles --4 Psychological Warfare and Leadership Change --5 Negotiating Political Reform and Change --Conclusion --Bibliography --Index --About the Author

Water resources&rsquo ; use efficiency is an important issue under China&rsquo ; s rapid economic growth. This is because some provinces&rsquo ; economic development may be delayed due to lack of adequate water resources. Whereas, high economically developed provinces may overuse water resources in order to achieve their economic goals ; while also creating a large amount of pollutants. To assess water resources&rsquo ; use efficiency from the resampling super data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach, our research comprehensively utilizes the following as inputs and outputs: (1) water resources: supply of water (SW), per capita water consumption (PCWC), and total water resources (TWR) ; (2) economic development: gross domestic product (GDP) ; (3) environmental issues: governance wastewater investment (GWI), wastewater discharge (WD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), and other major pollutants (OMP). The results show that Tibet, Beijing, Guangdong, Qinghai, Shandong, Sichuan, Yunnan, Tianjin, Jiangsu, and Henan have relatively good water resources&rsquo ; use efficiency with efficiency values larger than 1. The best efficiency is in 2015, while the worst is in 2017. Water resources&rsquo ; use efficiency shows significant regional differences in 2013&ndash ; 2017, with the best average efficiency value in southwest China (1.4355) and the worst in north China (0.2987). The results of the Wilcoxon test present that PCWC, GDP, COD, and OMP exhibit very significant differences, PN and WD have significant differences, and SW and TWR have no significant influence. These results imply that China&rsquo ; s regional governments must formulate a better water resource strategy based on the water resource distribution of each region. Lastly, the emissions of environmental pollutants must be strictly monitored.

Existing literature has paid considerable attention to the effects of supporting programmes on the survival and performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but it lacks a deep understanding of the benefits of the use of such assistance and the factors influencing the evaluation of such services from the perspective of SMEs. We examine the factors affecting the propensity to use assistance when SMEs make financial decisions and the usefulness perceived by the users. We examine 2500 UK SMEs and find that the use of assistance and the usefulness of such services, as perceived by SMEs, are much related to: the characteristics of the entrepreneur, the nature of the business, and the financial products used by the business. These empirical results imply that support and advice on financial decision making, available for SMEs, are important for them to better manage and to access finance. Assistance and advice are also very valuable for SMEs and entrepreneurs to compensate for their lack of human capital and thus facilitate overcoming possible problems in managing their businesses.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes new challenges on the capability of governments in intervening with the information dissemination and reducing the risk of infection outbreak. To reveal the complexity behind government intervention decision, we build a bi-layer network diffusion model for the information-disease dynamics that were intervened in and conduct a full space simulation to illustrate the trade-off faced by governments between information disclosing and blocking. The simulation results show that governments prioritize the accuracy of disclosed information over the disclosing speed when there is a high-level medical recognition of the virus and a high public health awareness, while, for the opposite situation, more strict information blocking is preferred. Furthermore, an unaccountable government tends to delay disclosing, a risk-averse government prefers a total blocking, and a low government credibility will discount the effect of information disclosing and aggravate the situation. These findings suggest that information intervention is indispensable for containing the outbreak of infectious disease, but its effectiveness depends on a complicated way on both external social/epidemic factors and the governments' internal preferences and governance capability, for which more thorough investigations are needed in the future.