China-Africa Trade Enjoys Solid Foundation and Promising Prospect(Ⅱ)

China's exports to Africa have upgraded the value chain China's exports to Africa have undergone a structural change.In 2000,Chinese exports to Africa were almost evenly distributed in textile and garments(accounting for 28%of the country's total exports to Africa),machinery and transport equipment(27%),and other manufactured goods(26%).Since then,the structure of Chinas export     

Application of social media analytics in tourism crisis communication

Given the newly established communication environment of social media and highly unpredictable crisis situations, this study questioned how tourists facing an unexpected crisis situation use social media to communicate and search for information. To this end, this study developed a multi-phased social media analytic framework (data crawling, data processing and text mining, social network analysis, semantic network analysis, and network visualization) to assess the structure of information exchanges between the members of a tourism organization’s social network community and identified influential actors and information content within the social network. This study’s findings suggest genuine ways of relating with and utilizing opinion leaders and influencers in social media marketing communication as well as crisis communication. The authors expect this proposed methodological framework of social media analytics to help other scholars scientifically identify and implement the proper methodologies for utilizing social media data.     

International trade of GMO-related agricultural products

This paper examines the international trade of a variety of genetically modified (GM) food products over a 27-year period (1984–2011) with data from the United Nations using the tools of social network analysis. The results indicate that each of the different crops have a distinctive pattern of trade that has changed over time due to a number of different factors. Also, trade in agricultural commodities became more diversified over time, dominated less by the United States and other nations central in the trade networks and trade in the individual GM crops was stable over time. Countries maintained their trading partners for specific crops, despite the adoption of the genetically modified varieties. The economic implications of these results are discussed for specific countries.     

Switching Costs in Two‐Sided Markets

In many markets, there are switching costs and network effects. Yet the literature generally deals with them separately. This paper bridges the gap by analyzing their interaction (or ‘indirect bargain’) in a dynamic two‐sided market. It shows that in the symmetric equilibrium, the classic result that the first‐period price is U‐shaped in switching costs does not emerge, but instead switching costs always intensify the first‐period price competition. Moreover, an increase in switching costs on one side decreases the first‐period price on the other side. Policies that ignore these effects may overestimate the extent to which switching costs can reduce welfare.     

When I put on my service mask: Determinants and outcomes of emotional labor among hotel service providers according to affective event theory

This article develops and tests a model of emotional labor in the hotel industry using affective event theory. A multiple-wave longitudinal analysis using data from 424 hotel service employees and their immediate supervisors reveals how work contexts (supervisory support) affect work events (interactional justice), and thereby influence the affective (negative emotions), attitudinal (job satisfaction), and behavioral (emotional labor, service quality, and voluntary turnover) reactions of hotel service employees. The results show that (1) supervisory support relates positively to supervisory interactional justice; (2) supervisory interactional justice is negatively associated with negative emotions; (3) negative emotions relate positively to surface acting and negatively to deep acting; (4) surface acting leads to lower job satisfaction, whereas deep acting leads to higher job satisfaction; and (5) job satisfaction leads to higher service quality and lower turnover. The implications suggest important recommendations for hotel managers.     

Towards Assessing the Knowledge Gap in Medical Tourism

The medical tourism industry is a fast growing global niche market that generated $20 billion in income for destinations around the world. This study suggests and tests a mechanism to assess the medical tourism providers’ perceptions about the tourists’ perceived important product attributes when selecting a medical tourism destination. The results indicate that the various medical tourism providers groups do not vary in their perceptions regarding 24 important attributes of the medical tourism product and that they all agree that tourists perceive the medical variables to be more important than the tourism related variables. Using the Korean market for data collection, the study’s additional contribution is providing insights for Korean government agencies, operators of medical tourism hospitals, policymakers, and marketers.     

Testing for the Presence of Moral Hazard Using the Regulatory Reform in the Car Insurance Market: Case of Korea

The aim of this paper is to investigate the presence of the moral hazard phenomenon in the Korean car insurance market. In the context of natural experiment, I examine whether the regulatory reform introduced in 2000 generates significant difference in accident probability between before and after the reform. Further, I analyse the different effects of regulatory reform on different parts of the outcome distribution. In any case, I do not find the significant effects of regulatory reform on accident probability.     

Inventories,inflation dynamics and the New Keynesian Phillips curve

We introduce inventories into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model and study the implications for inflation dynamics. Inventory holdings are motivated as a means to generate sales for demand-constrained firms. We derive various representations of the New Keynesian Phillips curve with inventories and show that one of these specifications is observationally equivalent to the standard model with respect to the behavior of inflation when the model's cross-equation restrictions are imposed. However, the driving variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve – real marginal cost – is unobservable and has to be proxied by, for instance, real unit labor cost. An alternative approach is to impute marginal cost by using the model's optimality conditions. We show that the stock–sales ratio is linked to marginal cost. We also estimate these various specifications of the New Keynesian Phillips curve using GMM. We find that the predictive power of the inventory-specification at best approaches that of the standard model, but does not improve upon it.     

The privatization of Korea’s Incheon International Airport

This study looks at the possible effects of the planned privatization of Incheon International Airport, Korea. To accomplish this, it uses a Delphi analysis involving nearly 50 experts to assess six possible scenarios that, for example, look at airport strategy and planning, financial, operations and approach facilities, and fees.