Suchergebnisse

Although federal policies regarding energy-efficient product procurement (EEPP) are long-standing and well-established, federal buyers do not typically request energy-efficient products when making purchases. This is a large missed opportunity: full compliance could save the U.S. federal government roughly $500 million in energy cost annually. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) began a new set of program activities to increase federal compliance with these procurement requirements. Program interventions included increased communication with contracting officers during the solicitation process; development of enhanced, targeted training; and collection and dissemination of procurement best practices across the federal sector. We have collected and analyzed ~2,500 solicitations from over 40 different federal agencies to evaluate the influence of these interventions. Compared to pre-intervention years (FY15 and FY11), annual compliance rates for FY16 and FY17 increased by about 10%. This paper provides an overview of the data collection process, analysis framework, intervention method, and results of our analysis. We discuss strategies to increase compliance rates by examining institutional factors that drive procurement behavior. By combining data collection with adjustment to program implementation, we have created an iterative process that is having a demonstrable effect in improving the impact of a long-running program.

In the past decade, collaborations between China and the European Union (EU) have been rapidly expanding. Hitherto, however, little research has been carried out to assess the implementation and impacts of such collaborations. This article presents an in- depth analysis of the scientific collaborations between China and the EU28, focusing on the major research priorities and benefits of these collaborations. To shed light on the initiatives of collaborations, corresponding authors are detected and classified into three categories: Chinese local, Chinese abroad, and non-Chinese. Evidence shows that academic collaborations between China and the EU28 have been mainly set up by Chinese researchers. In the fast- growing China- EU collaborative fields, the revealed comparative advantage scores in China have improved substantially. In the EU28, however, there is no such obvious improvement.

This paper investigates the factors driving nanotechnology development in Chinese regions. Advanced regions of China have spearheaded the country's rapid growth in nanotechnology, aided by substantial support from the government. While this head start could potentially perpetuate regional inequalities through agglomeration economies, the results suggest that knowledge spillovers exert a substantially greater impact in peripheral regions compared with the advanced ones, and may thus be compensating for the limited institutional support they receive and their weak technological capabilities. This research contributes to the regional innovation literature by highlighting that a formal scientific network can counteract the forces of agglomeration economies and spur innovation in peripheral regions