Market-based grazing land transfers and customary institutions in the management of rangelands: Two case studies on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Beginning in the early 1990’s, grazing lands once held in common were contracted to individual households in the rangeland regions of China. The resulting fragmentation of rangelands has led to ecological and social problems. As China seeks to address intractable poverty and rangeland degradation, attention has turned to rental, or transfer, of contracted grazing land as a market-based approach to re-aggregating grazing land into larger units that support economies of scale. However, given that many pastoral regions still maintain community customary institutions, what the relationship between market mechanisms and local customary institutions should be in rangeland management needs further analysis. This paper applies comparative case studies of two types of relationships between market mechanisms and customary institutions: (1) market mechanisms that replace customary institutions in the case of Axi village, and (2) market mechanisms that are embedded within customary institutions in Xiareer village. This allows contrast of the impacts of differing approaches on livelihoods, livestock production, and wealth differentiation among pastoral households. We found that there is a higher level of livestock mortality, lower livestock productivity, and higher livestock production cost in Axi Village compared to Xiareer Village. In addition, household asset levels are higher and there is less income differentiation in Xiareer Village. It is concluded that embedding market mechanisms within customary institutions has had notable benefits for the herders of Xiareer Village, because it is a better fit to the coupled pastoral social-ecological system. Based on these findings, we argue that in pastoral communities where the rangeland transfer system for contracted grazing land has not yet been implemented, it is critical to reconsider China’s current policy approach to pay greater attention to the innovative management systems being developed in local regions. Instead of considering market-based approaches as oppositional to traditional institutions, options that derive from the interaction of market-based and customary institutions should be considered.     

EPC工程总承包项目“区域分包模式”的管理实践

当前,我国许多传统设计研究院正致力于向国际型工程公司的转型,这一转型过程中的一项重大挑战就是对分包商的管理,本文通过中铝国际"区域分包模式"的管理实践以及效果的分析,对EPC模式下的分包管理模式进行了探讨。     

山西省左权县生态庄园经济的调查分析

山西省左权县利用山区移民搬迁后撂荒的耕地和其他闲置资源，以植树造林为主，开发生态庄园式经济，效果显著。左权经验为北京山区发展沟域经济提供了一个重要思路，即“制度创新，政策整合，机构进山”。     

不同利用方式下草地CH4、CO2及N2O通量研究

目的 在全球气候变化背景下,研究天然草地和人工草地的温室气体通量以及与部分环境因子的相关关系,进而明确不同草地对温室气体通量的影响情况,为当地相关部门合理开发利用草地提供理论依据,推进草业绿色发展、高质量发展。方法 文章以内蒙古自治区的阿鲁科尔沁旗选取退化的天然牧草地、混播型放牧人工草地以及刈割型人工牧草地为研究对象,利用目前较为普遍的箱法进行了野外实验,对比分析不同草地利用类型的主要温室气体CO₂、CH₄和N₂O的通量变化情况,并进一步探讨了温室气体与土壤含 水量、箱内温度、地表温度以及其他土壤养分指标的相关性。结果 （1）不同利用方式下草地的CO₂通量在整个生长季均表现为排放,其中刈割人工草地的CO₂排放量为67.00±9.15 mg/（m²·h）,显著高于放牧人工草地35.50±5.37 mg/（m²·h）和天然草地30.17±4.57 mg/（m²·h）（P<0.05）,且CO₂的通量与土壤含水量和温度呈正相关关系（P<0.05）,此外还与土壤全碳、全氮及有机碳含量呈极显著负相关关系（P<0.01）;（2）3种草地类型的CH₄通量在整个生长季均表现为吸收,放牧人工草地的CH₄吸收量相对较低,为-19.10±4.24 μg/（m²·h）,CH₄通量与土壤含水量和温度均未表现出显著的相关关系;（3）不同草地N₂O通量在整个生长季均表现为排放,退化的天然草地的N₂O通量在整个生长季表现最低,为11.62±5.96 μg/（m²·h）,刈割人工草地的N₂O通量与箱内温度和土壤温度呈显著正相关关系（P<0.05）。结论 可见人工草地的建立以及补播放牧等行为由于土壤含水量、箱内温度、地表温度以及土壤养分指标受到影响,进而不同程度上影响温室气体通量变化,人工草地的建立及放牧补播人工灌溉等人为干预会不同程度上增加CO₂和N₂O的排放量,此外,放牧会降低草地CH₄汇的功能。     

中小企业信用担保体系的发展方向与政府角色

文章分析了我国信用担保体系的发展与变革问题。综合西方学者的理论观点,认为信贷市场需要信用担保的原因,主要是信用担保可以有效缓解信贷市场信息不对称困境,保障贷款者的利益不受或少受损失;可以缓解信贷市场的信贷配给问题;信用担保能够传递借款者的信息;信用担保可以强化债务信用。我国从上世纪９０年代初期开始启动了信用担保体系建设,形成了“一体两翼三层”的格局,目前却陷入了发展困境。研究认为,从我国中小企业的特色出发,应大力发展互助式信用担保机构,减少政策性担保机构的市场份额,建立以互助式信用担保为主体的新体系。政府应选择适当的方式重点扶持互助式担保机构的发展。     

北京市政策性农业保险巨灾风险防范机制探索

北京市政策性农业保险制度建立两年来已取得了初步成效,但如何化解面临的巨灾风险已成为促进北京市政策性农业保险制度持续健康发展面临的重要问题。无论是从制度要求、现实需求还是从政策需求来看,北京市建立政策性农业保险巨灾风险防范机制都是十分必要的。设立农业保险巨灾风险保障基金、建立农业再保险制度、发行农业保险巨灾风险证券等政策性农业保险巨灾风险的分散途径各有利弊。应构建多层次的农业保险巨灾风险防范机制。     

MIAC: A mobility intention auto-completion model for location prediction

Location prediction is essential to many commercial applications and enables appealing experience for business and governments. Many research work show that human mobility is highly predictable. However, existing work on location prediction reported limited improvements in using generalized spatio-temporal features and unsatisfactory prediction accuracy for complex human mobility. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a Mobility Intention and Auto-Completion (MIAC) model. We extract those mobility patterns that generalize common spatio-temporal features of all users, and use the mobility intentions as the hidden states from mobility dataset. A new predicting algorithm based on auto-completion is then proposed. The experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed MIAC model can properly capture the regularity of a user's mobility by simultaneously considering the spatial and temporal features. The comparison results also indicate that MIAC model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art location prediction methods, and also can predicts long range locations.     

Who offers tax-based business development incentives?

Many American communities seek to attract or retain businesses with tax abatements, tax credits, or tax increment financing of infrastructure projects (TIFs). The evidence for 1999 indicates that communities are most likely to offer one or more of these business development incentives if their residents have low incomes, if they are located close to state borders, and if their states have troubled political cultures. Ten percent greater median household income is associated with a 3.2% lower probability of offering incentives; 10% greater distance from a state border is associated with a 1.0% lower probability of offering incentives; and a 10% higher rate at which government officials are convicted of federal corruption crimes is associated with a 1.2% greater probability of offering business incentives. TIFs are the preferred incentive of communities whose residents have household incomes between $25,000 and $75,000; whereas TIFs are much less commonly offered by communities whose residents have household incomes below $25,000. The need to finance TIFs out of incremental tax revenues may make it infeasible for many of the poorest of communities to use TIFs for local business development.     

农村人身保险在京郊养老体系中的发展探析

随着我国人口老龄化情况的不断加剧，养老问题解决已经迫在眉睫，而我国六成以上的老年人口分布在农村，所以农民养老问题尤显艰巨。随着计划生育政策的推行、经济社会结构的转型，家庭养老、土地养老的传统养老模式已经根本无法满足农村老年人口养老的需求，迫切需要发展农村养老保险，建立农村养老保障体系。虽然北京农村地区经济基础较为发达，但仅依靠政府财政也难以建立起较为完善的农村养老保险体系，需要商业人身保险发挥重要的补充作用，扩大覆盖面，提供多层次养老保障。     

Orienting rocky desertification towards sustainable land use: An advanced remote sensing tool to guide the conservation policy

Due to non-sustainable land management, desertification has been occurring widely across the world and continues to be a global land use problem. In this context, appropriate methodological tools, which can provide a biased estimation of desertification, are critical for learning from past failures and local successes in orienting desertification towards sustainable land use. This paper proposes a locally adaptive multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) algorithm to extract the rocky desertification information from medium resolution images at subpixel level and applies it to the case of Danjiangkou reservoir region (DRR), China. Quantitative comparisons show that the locally adaptive MESMA has achieved more accurate and reliable estimations of rocky desertification information in DRR than the traditional MESMA. An inversed U-shaped trend is observed for desertified land with different severity levels from 1987 and 2013 in DRR. In particular, the inflection point roughly emerged in period 2000–2005. Casual mechanism-based regressions demonstrate that such dynamics of rocky desertification are closely coupled with socioeconomic, biophysical, and policy factors. More specifically, we identify a significantly positive role of land conservation policy in combating and relieving rocky desertification in DRR. Positive effects are observed particularly through afforestation, investment, and professionals input. Based on the conclusions and lessons of DRR, I finally make relevant recommendations for formulating policies and strategies that attempt to orient desertification towards sustainable land use. The proposed locally adaptive MESMA can act as an advanced remote sensing tool to guide the conservation policy.