Rural development through industrial clustering： A case study from China

In recent years, as cluster theory evolves and more countries and regions implement industrial stimulation policies rooted in cluster theory, empirical research on industry clusters has likewise gained momentum. With the spread of clusters and regions instituting cluster policies, cluster formation has come to be seen as a promising tool for regional development. However, compared with industrial clusters in general, rural development clusters exhibit a higher level of diversity, namely in the purposes behind their formation, the parties that participate in or operate them, and the conditions in which they are formed. In terms of China, there is a considerable degree of diversity in clusters related to agriculture and rural communities depending on the particular sub-sector, the leaders of the sector, the socioeconomic conditions of the particular region, and other factors. For this reason, rather than the clusters themselves, in this research, we focused on cluster initiatives （CI）, i.e. the efforts to facilitate regional cluster growth and competitiveness. Firstly, we conducted a brief survey of previous studies of clusters. Secondly, we analyzed the effects of industrial clustering on rural economy in China econometrically. Thirdly, we examined the cases of vegetable cluster in Shanghai and the naturally colored cotton and hops cluster in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. By concluding the above-mentioned analysis, we finally explored the potential and outstanding issues for rural development using cluster initiatives models.     

Clusters Pulled by FDI in China and the Development of the SMEs： Theory and Typical Cases Study

In China, clusters are divided into two categories according to their initial power. One category is the spontaneous and endogenous industrial cluster represented by clusters of a range of small and medium-sized private enterprises such as those in Zhejiang. The other represents those attracted by the foreign direct investment （FDI） such as those in Guangdong and Jiangsu. This paper focuses on the second type. It is an attempt to analyze the role of FDI in the development of industry clusters. It also tries to explain how existing clusters attract new FDI. The factors that constrain the promotion and development of SME clusters are also examined in this research. The countermeasures of promoting the healthy development of clusters and SMEs further are put forward.     

Cluster and Supply System of Generic Technologies

Clusters in China are mostly less developed, whose development is limited by the lack of technologies. It is necessary to build supply system of generic technologies, which provide technical foundation for the following research in clusters. Supply system of generic technology is distinct among different clusters, which will be explained in this paper through a comparison between two cases： Nanhai clusters and Shunde clusters in Guangdong province of southern China.     

Analysis of knowledge investment type and its function in Gannan navel orange characteristic industry clusters

The dominant knowledge is primary, and the recessive knowledge is less in Gannan navel orange characteristic industry clusters （GNOCIC for short）. The increase knowledge is the main; the storage quantity knowledge is less in the dominant knowledge. In the process of formation and development of GNOCIC, the government becomes the main body of knowledge investment in GNOCIC. There are mainly two investment ways of technology of plant and management in navel orange pre-natal, mid-production, post-natal period. Namely, firstly, with the help of the news media; secondly, run training class with the aid of government function department, and the association and so on. Regarding the effective operation and the protection of profession criterion, standard and intellectual property rights, the government mainly adopts administration, law and economical method carrying on investment. The knowledge investment of government accelerates powerfully GNOCIC to form.     

Regional Incentives to Increase the Competitiveness of a Renewable Energy Business Cluster in a Small Island Like Corsica （France）

Renewable energy （RE） has grown to become part of mainstream economics, industry, and energy. The process started in the wake of oil shortages amid the 1970s energy crisis, when the major industrial countries of the world sought out an array of energy security strategies. Diversifying energy import-export trade, restructuring GDP, and increasing and backing home-sourced offers are all basic essential measures that different countries have adopted to different degrees in an effort to reduce dependency on imported oil. The last of these measures counts RE as a vector of local generation. The past decade has seen the RE sector really take off, driven by now well-structured industries starting to mobilize now-mature technologies. This developmental shift towards RE has been framed by different policy measures that nevertheless share the same core rationale climate change. Among the pro-renewables policies adopted by France, the deployment of competitive clusters has proved an effective tool for leveraging the growth of renewables. Business clusters are geographically-concentrated economic structures assuring the often tenuous link between efficient national industrial policy .efforts and regional planning and branding issues. From this perspective, the logic of synergy by connecting global to local issues remains to be created around a new paradigm： regional attractiveness/place branding. In today＇s fast-globalizing world, the much-hyped concept of place branding has become critical for regions in fierce global competition to capture and secure geographically-mobile investment. In this context, promoting and attracting inward investment is a multidimensional challenge where business clusters have a pivotal role to play. Corsica, a small island economy, represents a case-in-point target of analysis through its long-standing plan for the regional and sustainable development of Corsica （French decentralization policy on Corsica under the law dated 22 January 2002） and the CAPENERGIES business cluster a key l     

Lexical Meaning and Discourse Understanding——Make Use of Lexical Contextual Clues to Get a Comprehensive Understanding of Discourses

Discourse teaching is the key point and goal in reading instruction. And vocabulary is the critical element that affects readers’ speed and their comprehension of the reading material. Therefore,less time should be spent in vocabulary teaching,the best learning skills should be employed to achieve better learning effects. So,one of the important issue in English teaching is to foster students’ guess ability of English words. This thesis is aiming to guide the students to find clues in English reading through the analysis of the function of the contextual clues in discourse understanding to improve the comprehensive ability.     

Does Experience Facilitate Entry nto New Export Destinations？

Using a large panel dataset that covers 116 countries and 5013products over the period 1998-2010, this study evaluates the effects of export experience on the geographic expansion of China ＂s exports. The results suggest that past export experience in geographically close and culturally similar markets plays a crucial role in.facilitating new market entry, and the positive spillover effects are more pronounced for incumbent and successful products. The results also indicate that spillovers from export experience are market-specific and product- specific, and they are limited to within the same product class and the same market, with little cross-group effects. Finally, there is no strong evidence that export experience is more important for differentiated products than for homogeneous products, and the positive spillover effects are remarkable for both categories of products.     

Investment and Innovation State Support of Agriculture in Russia as a Condition of WTO

Russian agriculture is one of the industries operating in the unstable economic situation in a developing market taking into account risks of the world economy, economic, political, and climatic factors. The role of agriculture is to provide people＇s needs for food, significant effects on employment, the efficiency of domestic production, and way of life in rural areas by obligatory preserving food security in Russia. One of the major tasks for agriculture is the development of innovations and investments aimed at improving the competitiveness of the domestic agricultural sector. Russia＇s membership in the WTO since 2012 is getting a particular importance in the innovation and investment support of agriculture. The strategy of innovative development of the Russian Federation until 2020 ＂Innovative Russia--2020＂ assumes three possible options for innovative development： inertial （directed on imports）, catch-up development and a local technological competitiveness and a variant of achieving leadership in leading scientific and technical sectors, and fundamental research. A positive point is that the strategy provides an algorithm of state support of the innovation cycle. The innovation cycle is the process associated with the sequence of innovation transformations （scientific or business ideas） in products, technology, business process and launches it on the market for commercial use. A positively developing regional aspect is of great importance.     

Knowledge Economics： Institutional Analysis on Human Capital Property Right Motivation——Theoretical Innovation of China＇s Human Resource Management

Human capital is the main sustentation of economy＇s sustaining development in knowledge economy era. To form, use and collocate human capital will be a determinant factor in a country＇s economy increase. It is the common challenge faced by all countries that how to form ample human capital recourses and how to effectively play the role of human capital in social economic development. Motivation mechanism, especially the motivation function of human capital is a lever for human capital to form and effectively play effects.     

Realized path analysis of spillover effect of industrial cluster

On the basis of integrality model of industrial cluster surplus, this paper uses mlddleman transaction and repeated game models to analyze the cost-surplus realized path of two types of industrial cluster including the vertical and horizontal correlation types which are classified by the industrial links among enterprises, and gives cluster strategic choice to evade risk of transaction. It is suggested that as a regional economic system, enterprise cluster has new functions that its portion and subsystem do not have. In the transactions between enterprises of the horizontal correlation cluster and the supplier, clustering may act upon scale demand effect. With scale transaction by the middleman, the cluster can reduce cost, evade risk and improve efficiency and benefit to realize cost-saving effect. Through repeated games, the upper-tier and lower-tier enterprises of the vertical correlation type can avoid opportunistic behavior and realize the aim of decreasing transaction cost.     

Geographical Distribution of Foreign Investment in China：Industrial Clusters and Their Significance

The incorporation of massive amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been a major motive force behind the high-speed growth of the Chinese economy over the last decade. A high degree of geographical concentration in certain of this country is a salient feature of foreign invested enterprises (FIEs). FIEs in some industries are closely clustered in industrial zones ranging from several kilometers to more than 100 km in diameter. Such industrial clusters are a remarkable phenomenon among FDI industries. High FDI concentration is having a striking impact on the competitiveness of the enterprises involved and the regions where they are located.     

Neighborhood Effects and Regional Poverty Traps in Rural China

The present paper investigates how neighborhood effects are connected to chronic poverty. We examine a large sample of groups of households and find that neighborhood effects are significant in a majority of groups, especially in the poorest groups. People living in poor communities tend to suffer from poverty over time. It is of theoretical and empirical importance to explore how neighborhood effects are interrelated with chronic poverty and the channels through which this occurs. Unlike other econometric analyses, we establish a multilevel econometric model to show that： （i） it is difficult for an individual living in a neighborhood with a high proportion of agricultural labor, low education levels, and poor transport and telecommunication infrastructure to escape from poverty traps; （ii） neighborhood effects dominate in poor communities; and （iii） although poverty is affected by group-level factors, individual factors still play a dominant role in regards to escaping poverty when income surpasses a threshold level Therefore, policy priority should be given to providing social protection and public services, especially in poor rural areas.     

An Examination of Component Returns and Volatility for Country-Specific Equity Funds in Emerging Markets＇ Evidence From Asian Financial Crisis

This research aims to examine the daily return generating processes for country-specific funds in five east-Asian countries for the period 1995-2000. The effects of component returns and their volatility on the dollar denominated returns and volatility of U.S., international investors and the effects of exchange rate regimes on risk and return are also evaluated. The GARCH-M model is adopted, without the restrictive assumptions of linearity, independence, and constant conditional variance. The time frame, 1995-2000 captures a 30 months period prior to these East Asian countries aborting exchange rate stabilization/intermediate exchange rate regimes in response to the currency crisis. The decomposition of returns to holders of country-specific equity funds into the component returns due to changes in the exchange rate and the returns valued in the fund＇s foreign currency during a period of crisis provides additional information. This research provides evidence of the importance of examining component returns. With regards to the effects on volatility, both the conditional variances associated with the exchange rate returns and the returns denominated in the foreign currencies show some importance, especially the conditional variances associated with the returns denominated in the foreign currencies. With regards to the effects of return component, the exchange rate returns have a greater effect on the fund returns than foreign currency dominated returns.     

Effects of Demographic Characteristics of Logistics Firms on Their Performance and Job Satisfaction of Their Employees

This study investigates the effects of demographic factors of the logistics firms＇ employees （gender, age, education level, experience level, and department） on their job satisfaction and the effects of demographic factors of the logistics firms （company type, capital nature, and company experience level） on their performance of logistics activities about information technologies, interior relationship, and transportation based on the scale developed by the same authors and the sample of 39 logistics firms selected randomly in the city of Mersin and Adana in Turkey. According to findings, none of the demographic factors of the employees does aft~ct their job satisfaction. In terms of the demographic factors of the logistics firms, their experience level in the field is found to be significant in their logistics activities about information technology. In general, as the firm＇s experience increases, they perform better on information technology.     

An analytic framework about industrial cluster governance

As a new type of institutional arrangement, industrial cluster governance is the process, as well as benefits, on the part of entrepreneurs, local government, intermediary organizations, scientific institutions and research centers, colleges and universities, and local residents, through communication and negotiation, cooperation and coordination, ＂game-playing＂ and interaction, in the space and community where the IC is deeply rooted, depending on the network constructed with other ICs on the global value chain.     

Nature/Culture Dichotomy in China’s Ecological Resettlement Policy——Research based on Wustu Village,IMAR,PRC

Ecological resettlement,as a subsidiary policy of the Central Government’s environmental policy,is now attracting increasing domestic and international attention.The amount of immigrants involved in the policy serves as one reason to raise concerns about the issue,and its side effects (especially the loss of ethnic cultures and the dilemma of some ethnic minority herders and farmers) gave rise to multi-lateral discussions about the policy.The ecological and economic effects of the policy are the primary focus of present research,while the cultural analysis (esp.concerning the social and political forces that fostered and implemented the policy) of the State’s environmental and ecological resettlement policy is lacking.Based on my field research in Wustu village,IMAR,this paper relates the cultural basis of these policies with China’s desire to establish a harmonious society and argues that respect for minority cultures as well as local participation of immigrants are key to solving China’s environment issues.     

Volatifity spillovers on precious metals markets and the G-7： The effects of the Asian crisis

This paper investigates the nature of volatility spillovers between stock returns and precious metals returns for the G-7 countries over the 1995-2006 period. We divide our sample into a number of sub periods, prior to, during and after the Asian crisis, with the objective to provide a wide analysis of the behaviour of these two markets taking into account the effects of the Asian crisis; We use EGARCH modelling, which takes into account whether bad news has the same impact on volatility as good news. The results show that there is no evidence of volatility persistence from stock returns to precious metals returns, but overall the results are significant in the other way around. In terms of volatility spillovers effects, the main findings are that there is evidence of volatility spill over running in a bidirectional way in almost all the cases. And finally, the results from asymmetric spillovers effects show that negative news has a stronger impact in these financial markets than positive news.     

Past Successes and New Challenges： China＇s Foreign Trade at a Turning Point

Since 1979, China has recorded a remarkable trade performance, which has been driven by international processing and the offshoring strategies of foreign firms. The diversification of Chinese exports and their technological upgrading have been phenomenal However, there is also inertia, illustrated by the persistent dualism of the trade sector, the unrelenting specialization in downmarket products and the deteriorating terms of trade. These weaknesses have helped its partners to adjust to the rise of this new trade power. In the past decade, China＇s economy has faced the adverse effects o fan export-led growth and the global crisis has revealed its vulnerability. China is now forced to rebalance its economy. This will imply major changes in foreign trade, in favor of ordinary trade and away from processing. In the foreseeable future, China is unlikely to become the driver of international demand but will remain the engine of Asian economic integration.     

An Empirical Study on Momentum and Contrarian Effects in Chinese Futures Market

As Chinese futures market is on track of standardized development, its efficiency and related investors＇ strategy have drawn wide attention from scholars worldwide. This paper aims to provide an empirical study on momentum and contrarian effects in Chinese futures market. It investigates how efficient this market has been after decades of development and what investment strategy can be used to obtain significant positive excess return. The analysis is based on weekly and monthly trading data of the major commodity futures listed in three Chinese futures exchanges since January, 1999. By establishing a zero-cost investment trading strategy as testing method, this empirical study shows that contrarian effect is significant in both weekly frequency （short term） and monthly frequency （long term）, and that as the holding period extends, the contrarian effect disappears. It also concludes that the reverse effects in the short term and long term origin from three factors： defective information transfer system, mean reversion in the contrarian effect, and immaturity of investors＇ mentality.     

农民参加新农保的影响因素实证分析——基于重庆市25个区县的调查数据(英文)

Based on survey data from 334 farmers in 25 counties of Chongqing,this thesis analyzes empirically the influencing factors of farmers’participation in New Farmers’Insurance.The result of Probit regression demonstrates that(1)the degree of farmers’understanding of the New Farmers’Insurance is the most significant factor of their participation;(2)area of family plowland and distance to the city exert significant impact:the participation rate is higher when the area of plowland is larger;it is also higher when the village is farther from the city;(3)neighbors’insurance behaviors have important effects on farmers’decisions;(4)whether or not the farmer has joined other insurances has significant effects on his/her participation in New Farmers’Insurance.