Study on the clustering of a typical industry：a case of apple industry in Shaanxi Province, China

The apple industry in Shaanxi Province is a resource-based industry; compared to the best productiveregions at home and abroad, it is advantageous in high quality as well as geographical and natural resources. Currently,big changes have occurred in the apple market supply-demand relations; long-term and comprehensive shortage haspassed; the buyer＇s market has come into being; competitions in the domestic market are fierce. At the same time, theforeign apple will impact on the domestic market, increasing competitive pressure. Foreign anti-dumping measures,green barriers and technologies restrict the exportation of the domestic apple. Based on successful experience of otherindustrial clusters, this paper analyzes the existing problems in the development of Shaanxi apple industrial cluster,combining empirical analysis, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, proposes specific policy recommendationsand get the conclusions. First, the characteristics of the agricultural industrial cluster are analyzed; Shaanxi appleindustry is characterized by cluster. Second, the rapid development of Shaanxi apple industrial cluster exposes someproblems. Third, we need the government to control the disorderly competition of Shaanxi apple industry.     

Recalculating the agricultural labor force in China

In this study, we use a hypothetical method to recalculate the agricultural labor force based on statistical data on the labor force in China. We confirm the revised agricultural labor force data by estimating the agricultural production function. Through comparing the marginal labor productivity with the subsistence level of wages in the agricultural sector, we find that the overstated figures of agricultural labor force not only result in the underestimation of agricultural labor productivity but also are misleading by indicating that China reaches the Lewis turning point later than in actuality. The process of labor transfer in China, a large part of which is through rural migrant workers, has been much faster than expected.     

Ecological footprint analysis on the traditional rice-fish agricultural area： a case study of Qingtian County, Zhejiang Province, China

Qingtian County of Zhejiang Province, China has maintained the traditional rice-fish agriculture for about 2,000 years and formed exceptional cultural heritage based on this kind of production mode, so it was ed by FAO as a pilot site for the rice-fish agricultural heritage systems in 2005. This research has applied the indicators of ecological footprint and biocapacity to monitor the environmental conditions of Qingtian County, aiming to find the impact that the traditional agricultural production mode and the local inhabitants lifestyle have placed on the local environmental conditions as well as the role they have played in maintaining ecological balance, cultural inheritance and regional sustainable development. Results show that Qingtian County is characterized by a nearly breakeven total ecological balance, as opposed to Zhejiang Province, the world and other agricultural regions. However, compared with another rice-fish agricultural region, Congjiang County which enjoys a considerable ecological reserve, Qingtian County has consumed a greater amount of environmental resources. Specifically, about half of the ecological footprint of Qingtian County can be attributed to the cropland （50.8%） while the CO2 area only accounts for 11.2%, which is dramatically different from that of the modern industrialized regions. And a vast of percentage of energy is caused by the combustion of fuelwood which not only requires the land to absorb the CO2 emission it has generated but also occupies the forest where it has been chopped.     

西部地理环境对当地媒介政策的影响研究——以我国西部地区新闻阅评制度调查研究为例

在媒介地理学的视野下，新闻媒介政策在一定意义上可以被看做地理环境造就的延伸物。通过东西部地区新闻阅评制度的调查对比分析，本文认为，西部地区新闻阅评制度的现状更显示出地理环境的影响力。     

海南省绿色GDP核算框架的初步研究

文章通过文献综述,从生态环境保护和资源可持续利用的角度,提出核算海南绿色GDP应考虑的要素及其计算方法,初步探讨了核算绿色GDP的框架.以海南省为例,计算出2003年海南绿色GDP为537.22亿元,占当年海南GDP的76.9%.其资源损耗和生态环境降级损失占GDP的23.1%,是当年海南GDP增长率的两倍多.这说明2003年的经济增长还不抵自然环境的损失.经修正后,2003年海南GDP增长率实为-14.0%.此外,本文还讨论了将绿色GDP作为地方政府政绩考核的可能性.     

Capacity,sustainability, and the community benefits of municipal utility ownership in the United States

ABSTRACT

Most literature on utility sustainability focuses on internal operations; this misses the role that utilities could play within a community. This study measures the impact of municipal ownership of water and electric utilities on the sustainability policymaking of local governments. I find that municipalities with government-owned water utilities adopt more sustainability measures than those with investor-owned service. Similarly, municipally-owned electric utilities have higher levels of energy sustainability in the community, but not in government operations. The utilities provide fiscal and technical capacity to municipalities. Interdepartmental coordination also strongly predicts sustainability policymaking. This study brings potential community benefits to the discussion of private investment in public service delivery.     

Regional diversity of agricultural labor productivity and its driving force in east China

China＇s eastern area is at middle and later stage of industrialization during which the relation between urban and rural areas, industry, and agriculture appears maladjusted. The main problems are shrinkage in agricultural comparative earning and lack of driving force of agricultural development. Based on calculating agricultural labor productivity in east China from 1996 to 2005, this paper analyzes contributing degree of motive forces of agriculture develop in ten provinces and cities of east China applying GCA （Grey correlative analysis）. The results show that there is no absolute correspondence between the level of industrialization and agricultural labor productivity in China＇s eastern area. There is no synchronous development between industry and agricultural labor productiviry in some areas. Fertilizer and agricultural machinery input had high contributing degree for ten years; however; contributing degree in land and irrigation work input was low. Non-materialization inputs became the leading role in most provinces and cities＇ increase of agricultural labor productivity. Modern agricultural development need non-materialization inputs as primary motive force, at the same time, direct material input and facility input as guaranteed function. For some reasons, agricultural development is characterized by ＂more direct material input, less facility input ＂ in east China now. Optimal driving.force model of future agricultural development in east China is that non-materialization inputs are dominant, that perfected facility input arc guarantee, and that certain substance inputs are necessary     

Jobs,Production Linkages,and the Environment

Received April 29, 2002; revised version received July 12, 2002 Published online: April 30, 2003 We are indebted to two anonymous referees for useful comments. The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Research Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CUHK 4032/98H) and the Research Center for International Economics of the City University of Hong Kong. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Comparative analyses of fiscal sustainability of the budgetary policy rules

We construct a continuous-time overlapping generations model with an endogenous growth structure and consider fiscal sustainability under two fiscal rules: (i) the government fixes the budget deficit-to-GDP ratio and (ii) the government fixes the primary balance-to-GDP ratio. Under the constant budget deficit-to-GDP rule, fiscal sustainability is ensured when the initial public debt-to-GDP and budget deficit-to-GDP ratios are sufficiently small. Under the constant primary balance-to-GDP rule, it is difficult to ensure fiscal sustainability when the primary balance is in deficit or zero. However, fiscal sustainability is ensured when the primary balance is in surplus and the initial government debt-to-GDP ratio is sufficiently small.     

Regional sustainability: How useful are current tools of sustainability assessment at the regional scale?

Sustainability assessment methods are primarily aimed at global, national or state scales. However, modelling sustainability at finer spatial scales, such as the region, is essential for understanding and achieving sustainability. Regions are emerging as an essential focus for sustainability researchers, natural resource managers and strategic planners working to develop and implement sustainability goals. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of current sustainability assessment methods - ecological footprint, wellbeing assessment, ecosystem health assessment, quality of life and natural resource availability - at the regional scale. Each of these assessment methods are tested using South East Queensland (SEQ) as a case study. It was selected because of its ecological and demographic diversity, its combination of coastal and land management issues, and its urban metropolitan and rural farm and non-farm communities. The applicability of each of these methods to regional assessment was examined using an evaluation criteria matrix, which describes the attributes of an effective method and the characteristics that make these methods useful for regional management and building community capacity to progress sustainability. We found that the methods tested failed to effectively measure progress toward sustainability at the regional scale, demonstrating the need for a new method for assessing regional sustainability.     

Financialization of agricultural commodities: Evidence from China

Speculation in the commodity futures market distorts commodity prices, driving them away from rational levels. This phenomenon, which is known as the financialization of commodities, has raised significant concerns in recent years. Particularly, in the agricultural market, ‘financialized’ commodities have been blamed for high world food prices. In this paper, we examine the financialization of agricultural commodities in China. To do so, a time-varying copula is employed to investigate the dependence structure between commodities and stock markets. Four insightful results are obtained. First, positive correlations between agricultural commodities and stock markets demonstrate the financialization of agricultural commodities. Second, the identified correlations are time-varying and idiosyncratic with respect to products. Third, the agricultural commodity market is more closely correlated with the domestic stock market than with the overseas market. Fourth, a growing dependence between commodities and the stock markets is detected and the co-movement became stronger after the global financial crisis.     

Model for evaluating the environmental sustainability of energy projects

This article focuses on the problem of assessing the environmental sustainability of energy projects. For this purpose an original model, which is based on various indicators that measure the environmental sustainability of energy projects, has been developed. This model, so called index of environmental sustainability of energy projects (IESEP), can be used in scenario comparison, while measuring the effectiveness of the proposed alternatives. Finally, an example of how to use this model is provided by analyzing alternatives to ameliorate the environmental sustainability of a hydroelectric project. In doing so, it is possible to show the usefulness of this model when used as a decision making tool for energy planners.     

Trends affecting the next generation of U.S. agricultural biotechnology: Politics, policy, and plant-made pharmaceuticals

This paper analyzes the structure and history of regulatory policies in the United States, focusing on recent regulatory changes due to the promise and threat posed by plant-made pharmaceuticals (PMPs). PMPs are the latest advance in the genetic engineering of plants and promise to produce medicines inexpensively and abundantly by using a range of different plants as factories to express active medicinal ingredients; however, PMPs may pose a risk to the public's health if they enter the food supply. How the benefits and risks of PMPs are addressed by the respective government's regulation and how this will affect what, if any, products make it to the marketplace and their ultimate success are of great concern to many different parties, ranging from consumers and farmers to health and food production industries. As a result, this paper addresses the history of agricultural biotechnology regulatory policy since 1972, arguing that three distinct periods may be identified: (1) from 1972 to 1986 when the new biotechnology was focused on scientific self-regulation in the laboratory; (2) from 1987 to 2002, as the technology was being developed and widespread release of certain technologies became more common and was not perceived as an environmental threat, regulations became increasingly laxer; and finally, (3) we argue that we are entering a third phase with a series of controversies over regulatory infractions involving genetically engineered (GE) plants and the potential threats posed by PMPs.     

The pace of fiscal consolidations,fiscal sustainability,and welfare: An overlapping generations approach

This study investigates expenditure- and tax-based consolidations under the rule of reductions in debt-to-GDP ratios to the target level and the effects of these consolidations on fiscal sustainability and welfare, using an overlapping generations model with exogenous growth settings. We derive (i) a threshold (ceiling) of public debt to ensure fiscal sustainability, (ii) sustainable paces of these consolidations, and (iii) the optimal pace of consolidations under both expenditure- and tax-based consolidations, examining whether these consolidations are effective in the sense that they are sustainable, increase welfare, and induce fairness of welfare distribution across generations (lower intergenerational conflicts over welfare). We find that the pace of tax-based consolidation required to ensure fiscal sustainability is higher than that required for expenditure-based consolidation. As for welfare, countries may differ in their choice of the type of consolidation, which depends on the size of outstanding debts relative to capital, the economy’s productivity, tax rate levels, and the extent of utility derived by individuals from public goods and services. More importantly, it may also depend on whether policymakers emphasize social welfare or fairness of welfare distribution between generations. By contrast, a common result from the viewpoints of both social welfare and fair distribution of welfare across generations is that fiscal consolidation cannot persist much longer than 30 years (one period in the model). This result will support the pace of consolidation in the EU: the Stability and Growth Pact.     

农产品加工业对推进新农村建设的启示——以广东省湛江市菠萝加工业的发展为例

“生产发展”是社会主义新农村建设的首要任务。本文通过分析湛江市菠萝种植、加工及贸易的发展状况，认为大力发展地方特色的农产品加工业，对推进社会主义新农村建设和实现湛江“工业立市”战略目标提供有力支持。     

Regime changes and the sustainability of fiscal imbalance in East Asian countries

The main purpose of this paper is to assess empirically the fiscal policy regimes in five Asian countries using a formal framework based on the government's intertemporal budget constraints (GIBC). To this end, we relied on an array of time-series methods and quarterly data of nearly three decades. Our conclusions are; first, the evidence indicates that the fiscal stance in Thailand and South Korea are on their sustainable path while the Philippines and Malaysia demonstrate only ‘weak sustainability’. Second, revenues are growing at a rate faster than government spending for Singapore, a country that has recorded large surpluses for most of the sample period. Third, the results show a one-way causation from expenditure to revenue for Korea, Singapore and Thailand. This finding indicates that reducing the size of government spending may improve fiscal budget deficits without having to undergo changes in the overall strategy. Fourth, we observed a long-run feedback causality in the revenue–expenditure nexus for the case of Malaysia and the Philippines, which may require fiscal synchronization instrument policies to moderate the post-crisis fiscal imbalances. Together, the results demonstrate diverse fiscal patterns but they should be useful to understand the complexities of economic integration in the region.     

铺设跨国输油气管道的战略思考

根据我国现有能源资源尚不能满足国民经济发展需求的国情,中央提出要充分利用国内外两种资源。其中,筹建铺设跨国输油气管道,积极引进周边国家油气资源．逐步改善我国不合理的能源结构,是实施国民经济可持续发展战略的重要举措。本文从战略高度阐明了铺设跨国输油气管道的目的意义,国外油气供应国目标的选择,以及尚需解决的几个主要问题。     

Fiscal sustainability and dollarization: the case of Ecuador

This article tries to disentangle the dynamic relationships between fiscal variables and economic activity in a small emerging economy characterized by full dollarization, namely, Ecuador. We find that fiscal policy in Ecuador seems to be sustainable, explained by its policy of debt payment through oil revenues, rather than by a fiscal discipline that dollarization is supposed to encourage. The non-oil tax revenues variable is a purely adjusting variable. This result suggests that in a dollarized country that cannot benefit from the ‘seignorage’ revenues, the reliance on volatile oil revenues and on smoothing tax revenues leaves the economy’s fiscal sustainability vulnerable.     

Institutional Resource Regimes: Towards sustainability through the combination of property-rights theory and policy analysis

Although the concept of sustainable development is gaining increasing political acknowledgement, despite the implementation of environmental policies specifically intended to solve problems in this area, environmental degradation resulting from the recurrent problems associated with the over-exploitation of natural resources remains an important concern for most countries. How can this situation be explained? This article postulates that a combination of approaches from the political sciences (in particular policy analysis) and institutional economics would enable the identification of the most relevant regulatory dimensions which can explain the (un)sustainable uses of resources. Based on this starting point, it develops an innovative theoretical framework, i.e. that of the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR).The adopted approach facilitates the analysis of the regulatory measures and resource management practices associated with complex and competitive heterogeneous use situations from a perspective of sustainability. Indeed, the two dimensions of “extent” and “coherence” enable the definition and categorization of the IRR of a given resource. The extent of an IRR refers to the total number of goods and services in use that are actually regulated by the regime at a given time, while the coherence measures the degree of coordination of the various user-actors within the regime. One of the major contributions of the IRR framework is its ability to describe the different configurations of regimes, both theoretically and empirically, and to predict their effect on the sustainability of a resource based on the hypothesis that high levels of regime extent and coherence are necessary preconditions for sustainability.By doing this, the IRR framework also enables the analysis of the actual use rights to the goods and services provided by resources as the result of the political strategies of actors who mobilize different legal provisions, which stem either from formal property rights to resources or from policies that regulate the use and protection of these resources.Having developed the central research hypotheses and the empirical research procedure, we present the lessons drawn from the first campaign of field research which was mainly conducted in Switzerland from 1999. Based on the evidence from these initial findings, it is suggested that the scope of the IRR framework could be far broader than evidenced by its application in the case of Switzerland where it was initially developed.     

Sustainability of nations by indices: Comparative study between environmental sustainability index, ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices

The present work makes a comparison between the two most used environmental sustainability indices of nations: “ecological footprint” and “environmental sustainability index”, with two emergy ratios (renewability and emergy sustainability index). All of them are gaining space within the scientific community and government officials. Despite the efforts for obtaining an index that adequately represents the sustainability of a region, according to the result of this research, nowadays there is not yet a completely satisfactory index. We consider that all of them need to be improved, but the results point out the possibility of obtaining one better index of sustainability through the junction of ecological footprint with renewability emergy index.