China’s CPI Eases to 4 Percent in October

Premier Wen Jiabao Monday urged local governments not to "waste a single minute" in implementing the 4-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan unveiled. "In expanding investment,     

Procuring Flexibility to Support Germany’s Renewables: Policy Options

To continue balancing supply and demand for power is a growing challenge on Germany’s path to producing 80?% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050. Large-scale investment into a range of technologies will be required to provide the flexibility necessary for balancing. This paper introduces a simple analytical framework to evaluate the German legislator’s numerous efforts to address this challenge. It then proceeds to make two proposals as to how flexibility can be sourced more cheaply. Priority should be given to measures that enable the existing power markets to generate stronger rewards for flexibility. We thus call for financial incentives for variable electricity tariffs to elicit more consumer response and for investment subsidies instead of feed-in tariffs for more demand-oriented renewable power generation. If additional explicit incentives for flexibility are necessary, they can be provided through a market for flexibility.     

Editor’s Letter

It’s drawing to the end of the year, the year when China celebrates its 5th anniversary since its accession to WTO on Dec.11th, 2001, the moment when the president of the Forth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization rapped on the table in the conference hall of Sharaton Hotel, DOHA to announce that historical decision. China’s accession to WTO, referring to its textile industry, indeed brought about a global concern that fermented & sprouted out a “bra war”, mushrooming…     

Peet’s咖啡

在这个日益泛滥的商品世界,Peet’s居然能够如此特立独行,抵制住金钱的诱惑,确实是值得尊敬的。我是去年年底从美国回来的,到现在已经快半年了,可是,至今我还没有从美国的阴影中走出来。其症状,就像《围城》里所讽刺的三闾大学的教务处主任一样,动辄就说"兄弟在牛津的时候"如何如何,     

Editor’s Letter

Dear readers: We are already in the second half of 2006. China, shine or rain, still troubled with many factors devilling its normal course of development. Its textile indus- try seems to have done pretty well in production, domestic market and export in its textile industry. During the first half of 2006, Chinese shipments of textiles and apparel to the EU arrived at $9,822 million, 10.52% higher than its previous correspon- dent time. The ten quota-capped categories out of this total expor…     

OPEC’s Strategies

This paper investigates rationale explanations of OPEC??s strategies. Accounting for market characteristics in particular the sluggishness of demand and supply allows to explain price jumps as rational OPEC strategies from a narrow economic perspective (up and down) as well as from political objectives (at least up) due to the political payoff from standing up against the ??West??. Although the temptation to accrue this political payoff was and remains high, the narrow economic profit motive coupled with an imperfect cooperation among OPEC members explains past price volatility and high prices much better than the usual reference to political events. A more specific prediction is that OPEC will switch back to setting prices since the current quantity strategy encourages oil importing countries to appropriate rents in particular in connection with the need to mitigate global warming.     

Editor’s Letter

Dear readers, When the new year rolled around, the Chinese textile players were gassed withjubilant celebrations over the victory in the global textile trade arena as China really"reaped the dominant benefits from quota-free world", with its textile trade surplusamazingly hitting $100.4billion in a sharp contrast with its nation's total trade surplusof $101.8 billion. China wrought wonders; meanwhile it has also brought forth athickening worry from the rest of world textile suppliers who are k…     

China’s Confidence

With the spread of the global financial turmoil, China is under growing tension from its large population, limited resource, environment problems, and losing its competitive edge in the world as exports are being driven down by shrinking demand abroad as well as higher costs. Despite challenges, China still has a great potential to develop its domestic demand and a solid financial system. Under such circumstance, we should enhance confidence. It is imperative for us to perceive favorable conditions and positive factors for acting against the negative outside environment and promoting development in a scientific way.     

Host Country’s Intellectual Property Rights and Firm’s Equity Participation

There has been an important debate on whether the degree of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in a host country affects the choice of ownership structure of a transnational firm (TNF) for its affiliate. It is argued that a TNF’s equity participation in its affiliate is used to exert control and to protect its assets. Firms with greater equity ownership can control better the extent of the technology spillover, and thus compensate for weaker IPR protection in the host country, than can firms that do not have as large an equity participation in their affiliates. Using a unique data set of a newly developed country’s (South Korea) TNFs, this paper shows that there is a negative relationship between a host country’s standards of IPR protection and a TNF’s equity participation.      

Who’s Navistar?

75年后,这个偏安于北美的巨人加快了其国际化步伐。从北京直飞美国芝加哥,再转机三个小时到亚特兰大,然后坐高速大巴3个小时,这才到达此行的目的地阿拉巴马州的汉斯维尔市,纳威司达(Navistar)集团发动机的另一个新的生产基地坐落于此。一路上,一个问号时不时地在脑海浮现:Who’s Navistar?     

De-constructing technology’s masculinity

Several studies conducted by the European Union (e.g., Eurostat 2004, Implementation of “education & training 2010” work programme) demonstrate that women and girls are consistently significantly underrepresented in technological education, areas, and jobs. This is highlighted in the Joint Interim Report “Education and Training 2010” by the European Commission under the domain of Maths, Science and Technology (MST). The joint report highlights the persistent shortage of women in technical fields and calls on Member States to encourage the development of a technical culture among its citizens. In particular, it was recommended that action be taken to motivate young people, especially girls, to undertake scientific and technical studies and careers. In this paper we will explore issues related to the delivery of technology education in the middle and secondary school sectors. Other papers in this special edition consider various curricula from around Europe and offer an analysis of early years and primary education in this respect. We do not intend to undertake an in-depth analysis of technology education curricula in the secondary sector but will, rather, explore the kinds of perceptions that are held by school students about technology and technology education when they enter into the secondary stages. We will argue that technology education is perceived to be masculine in nature, procedural in delivery and lacking in any conceptual dimension. This, we will claim, serves to restrict female interest in the subject. We will also discuss a case study undertaken in the name of the UPDATE project that attempts to redress this imbalance. It should be noted, however, that whilst the emphasis in this paper is on the female, it must be acknowledged that the same conclusions will also hold for many males.     

I’s My Life’唯一派对

7月13日，以“I＇s My Life，唯1派对”为主题的BMW全新品牌活动——“2012年全新BMW1系城市攻略”上海宝诚中环站在上海国际赛车场8号停车场举行，本次攻略旨在通过试驾活动，     

The Collusive Equilibrium in a Quantity-Setting Supergame: An Application to Taiwan’s Flour Industry

This paper examines the stability of the collusive equilibrium in Friedman’s repeated game through an empirical study of Taiwan’s flour market. We calculate the payoff streams following a deviation or adherence for each firm. The evidence shows that the specified punishment path is credible, and could sustain the collusive allocation.     

Internationalization in Japan’s service industries

The relatively low level of internationalization in Japan’s service industries is a cause of real concern among policy-makers and service industry executives. Explanations have focused on distinctive features of Japan’s culture, particularly its service culture, and idiosyncratically demanding customers. Two additional factors are also of significance: the complexity of the customer interface and process embeddedness in the home country. Mapping service sectors in terms of these two dimensions offers insights into the challenges faced by Japanese service firms, while also providing a framework for assessing home country effects in general.     

Teacher’s Interpretation of Sustainable Development

This paper describes an exploratory research project conducted with forty-five technological studies teachers in Ontario concerning their understanding and perceptions of the concept of sustainable development. The results indicate that pre-service teacher education programs need to spend more.     

Children’s developing understanding of technology

The issue of children’s conceptions of technology and technology education is seen as important by technology educators. While there is a solid body of literature that documents groups of children’s understandings of technology and technology education, this is primarily focused on snapshot studies of children aged 11 and above. There is little literature relating to individual children’s changing conceptions over time, or to children younger than 11. This paper documents and discusses the changing understanding of the meaning of the word ‘technology’ of seven children over their first 6 years of primary school (age 5–10). It seeks to explain the source of the children’s understandings of the word ‘technology’ and to suggest some teaching and planning implications for technology educators.     

Design expert’s participation in elementary students’ collaborative design process

The main goal of the present study was to provide insights into how disciplinary expertise might be infused into Design and Technology classrooms and how authentic processes based on professional design practices might be constructed. We describe elementary students’ collaborative lamp designing process, where the leadership was provided by a professional designer. The video-recorded lessons on lamp designing and the “Lamp Designing” view of the project’s database constituted the data sources of the study. A data-driven qualitative content analysis was conducted for categorizing the scaffolding activities of the designer. The results indicate that the designer’s participation opened up the world of designing for the students. This enabled the students to engage in embodied design practices, and to gain new insights of the professional mechanisms of designing. Having the professional designer working with them, provided students with the opportunity to gain the full potential that solving complex design problems can offer to learning.     

On Relative Advantage of China‘’‘’s Manufacture Industry

The mechanism of relative cost advantage is still playing a role in the contemporary international division and world trade.China‘‘‘‘s relative advantage is rich labor resource.The high growth of China‘‘‘‘s world trade has benefited from its low labor cost since reform and opening to the outside.As dual economic structure and gap between regions are existed,and at the aame time the supply of labor force is larger than the demand,China‘‘‘‘s relatively low labor cost will continue for a long period of time.However,advantage of low labor cost is comparative and is less obvious in the capital and Hi-tech industries.As many enterprises developed all directions and overstaffed largely offset the advantage of low cost of labor.So improving labor productivity must be paid attention to in market economy.Although low labor cost benefits reducing production cost,it has negative influence,on one hand it leads to flow national welfare in world trade;on the other hand,it both restricts purchasing power of the people with low income and domestic demand.We believe increasing wages of workers in manufacture industry is necessary.