Collaboration between industry and research institutes/universities on industrial innovation in Beijing, China

Most R&D resources in China were allocated to public research institutes/universities until the economic transition of the mid 1990s. To maximize the return from these resources, it is important to have a healthy collaboration between industry and research institutes/universities on industrial innovation. This paper examines that relationship and discusses some empirical evidence on its efficiency with particular reference to industry in Beijing. Following a survey of 950 industrial enterprises, the influences of the collaboration relationship on industrial innovation were analyzed. The main findings indicate that the technology novelty of industrial innovation is positively related to that relationship, i.e. the more the collaboration, the higher the technology novelty of the innovation. However, the collaboration relationship is less efficient in terms of economic performance indicators such as innovation sales and profit ratios, to measure innovation. Moreover, the collaboration relationship is still far from efficient in stimulating industrial innovation in China. The major barriers to successful collaboration have also been addressed in this paper with the aim of devising policies and suggesting possible improvements to collaboration efficiency.     

Manufacturing and Distribution Strategies,Distribution Channels,and Transaction Costs: The Case of Parallel Imported Automobiles

We examine how constraints on transnational corporations' official distribution channels, asset specificity, and bounded rationality of franchise dealers and parallel traders contribute to the sustainability of the parallel importation of automobiles. The manufacturing and distribution strategies employed by transnational corporations considerably add to the regional differences in the pricing and availability of specific models, as well as vehicle specifications. These necessary conditions enable opportunistic parallel traders to engage in arbitrage. The asset specificity of franchise dealers, bounded rationality, and opportunism of dealers and arbitrageurs sustain the parallel importation of automobiles. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tourist expenditures in Guangzhou, PR China

Tourism took on a new and crucial role in regional development and modernization in PR China with the introduction of the ‘Open Door Policy’ in late 1978. For the first time, the tourist expenditure patterns in the ‘Southern Gateway to China’, Guangzhou, are presented. Per capita tourist expenditure of Hong Kong and Macao Chinese is estimated to be much lower than that of a foreign tourist visiting the region, but the gross contribution is still significant to Guangzhou's tourist industry. Also previous per capita expenditure estimates of Hong Kong residents visiting PR China are suggested to have been overstated by 130% to 300%.     

The challenges of global capitalism: unemployment and state workers' reactions and responses in post-reform China

As China enters the twenty-first year of reform, the success of its economic policies has been widely recognized. But what is also true is that economic reforms initiated in the past decades, particularly the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, have inevitably marginalized state workers - the 'masters of socialist China'. Workers in private and non-state sectors might have benefited from the economic reforms but state workers of most state-owned enterprises feel bitterly left behind. The aim of this article is to examine the perception of state workers of the causes of organizational difficulties, their worries in face of redundancy and their coping strategies. Observations made in this study are based on field interviews and questionnaire survey of 649 state workers in Beijing, Shenyang and Zhejiang from 1996 to 1999.     

Corporate Performance of Mixed Enterprises

We delineate Hong Kong listed corporations into three levels of privatization: the fully privatized blue chips, semi‐privatized red chips and the least privatized H shares. Both H shares and red chips are mixed enterprises that mimic private ownership with joint government and private stock ownership. We find that mixed enterprises are less profitable and lower valued than the fully privatized blue chips, but red chips are more efficient and perform better than blue chips when market confidence swings to their favor. Regression analysis suggests that increased stock ownership by the government and increased emolument incentives are counterproductive to profitability, especially in bad economic times of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis.     

Intelligent product cross-selling system with radio frequency identification technology for retailing

This paper presents a combined use of both RFID technology and product cross-selling system to perform cross- and up-selling for retail industry. In this study, two systems, namely the Smart Dressing System (SDS) enabled by RFID technologies, and Intelligent Product Cross-selling System (IPCS), have been developed. The SDS demonstrates a research endeavor in which, unlike the previous studies focusing on transactional data, customers' in-store data can be collected using RFID-enabled SDS and used for promoting or cross-selling new products to the customers effectively and efficiently. The IPCS, integrating a rule-based expert system and a fuzzy screening technique, can handle the difficulty of processing linguistic and categorical information to simulate fashion designers to recommend appropriate fashion product items for cross-selling effectively. The proposed systems are evaluated to execute the selling strategies more effectively, which in turn improve sales performance in fashion retail industry.