The equipment manufacturing industry is the strategic industry which relates to the national economy development, especially in the old Northeast China industrial base including Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning provinces. In this paper, we study models of regional specialization composed of location quotient model, probability distribution and ergodic probabilities model, transition matrix and correlation coefficient model. We calculate the location quotients that can evaluate the level of the specialization of equipment manufacturing industry. Then we adopt discrete-time Markov chain to simulate the probability distribution of location quotient and obtain the transition matrix. We calculate the ergodic probabilities that are used to estimate whether the specialization of regional industry has converged to the steady states and invoke the correlation coeffecient to see the potential of the three provinces in regional specialization division. Based on the analyses of all the indexes of equipment manufacturing industry from 1993 to 2006 in the three provinces, we find that the development of equipment manufacturing industry in the region is not balanced, the grades exist and the gap will be widened. The regional specialization is emerging. Overall, Liaoning is better than Jilin and Heilongjiang, transportation equipment manufacturing industry in Jilin is dominant in the region, even in the whole country. Generally, as a traditional industrial base, Northeast China is unstable in equipment manufacturing industry, and great mobility still exists.
This paper presents an approach for spatially explicit assessment of food security in consideration of a combination of the biophysical, social and economic factors of food security. To do that, two indicators, i.e., per capita food availability and per capita GDP, were used to cover the four dimensions of food security as many as possible. These two indicators were then linked to three models, i.e., spatial EPIC model, crop choice model and IFPSIM model. This proposed approach was applied to assess food security at a global scale over a period of approximately 20 years, starting with the year 2000. The results show that some regions such as southern Asia and most African countries will likely remain hotspots of food insecurity in the future. Both the per capita food availability and the capacity of being able to import food will decrease between 2000 and 2020. Low food production associated with poverty is thus the determining factor to starvation in these regions, and more efforts are needed to combat hunger in terms of future actions. Other regions such as China, most eastern European countries and most southern American countries where there is an increase in per capita food availability or an increase in the capacity to import food between 2000 and 2020 might be able to improve their food security situation.
Improving energy efficiency is an essential way for Jiangsu to break out energy predicament. This paper adopts DEA model to measure the CRS technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of energy utilization of 13 cities in Jiangsu in the year of 2007, under the framework of total factors productivity analysis. Then, this paper analyzes the regional differentiation and the spatial pattern of the CRS technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of energy utilization in Jiangsu, and divides 13 cities into 4 regional types of energy efficiency according to the incidence relation of these three types of energy efficiency. The causes of energy efficiency differentiation in Jiangsu are analyzed with coefficient of variation (CV), energy consumption per unit GDP and the large-and-medium-size enterprises concentration index, as well as the characteristics of industrial structure of each city.Finally, target values of input/output obtained through DEA model are used to discuss the strategies for promoting energy efficiency of each city. The results show that, the spatial distribution of energy efficiency in Jiangsu is characterized by high-value in the south and low-value in the north, as well as west-east differentiation, and that there is a light manufacturing DEA effectiveness pole in North Jiangsu and a heavy manufacturing DEA effectiveness pole in South Jiangsu respectively. It is scale energy efficiency that mainly determines the CRS technical efficiency as well as its spatial patterns in Jiangsu. Energy consumption per unit GDP could be a general indicator to reflect regional pure technical energy efficiency, and the large- and medium-sized enterprises concentration index could be a general indicator to reflect regional scale energy efficiency. The pure technical energy efficiency of cities with high proportion of heavy manufacturing is relatively low, and the scale energy efficiency of cities lying in the transition zones or the edge areas is also relatively low; input redundancy is relatively ubiquity in Jiangsu, and regional energy efficiency could be promoted by the approach of optimizing investment environment, advancing industrial structure adjustment, highlighting the unique feature of industrial development, promoting the quality of human resources or increasing the concentration degree of industrial development, and so on.
In recent years, actively promoting international economic cooperation is not only a new trend in regional economic development, but also an important part of China's opening up to the world. Chinese Xinjiang and the West Siberia of Russia are contiguous. Extensive inter-regional economic cooperation between them will be conducive not only to promote the common prosperity and development of China and Russia, but also to consolidate the security and stability of the Central Asian region--the geographical hub of Eurasia. According to the regional economic development stage and infrastructure conditions, this paper utilizes pole-axis theory, adopts the models of urban primacy ratio and gravitation, and other methods of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis in research on economic functions of the different central cities and transportation infrastructure in the region. Some suggestions are put forward as follows: taking the first and second Eurasian Continental Bridge as the major economic development zone; opening up the direct land access between Novosibirsk and Urumqi; establishing a Novosibirsk-Urumqi economic development axis; and cultivating the shape "工" of "one axis with two belts" spatial development structure between Xinjiang and West Siberia. And then, the appropriate co-op modes and corresponding fields and mechanism of cooperation should be established. Only in this way can the cross-border regional resources be integrated and the regional socio-economic development of Xinjiang and West Siberian region would be promoted effectively, so a geographical economic zone will be formed in Asian inland.
Since the 1990s, cities in China have experienced a period of rapid growth. In face of the increasing complexity of the urban sprawl, many big cities are planning to build new towns to avoid over-intensive population and infrastructure construction and to ease the pressure on urban centers. In fact, commerce is one of the most important functions in a city. There is a both-way choice process between the commerce and residence, and the interaction of the two is the foundation of the multi-center structure in metropolitan areas. This paper builds a deductive economic model of spatial structure of metropolitan commerce in two-region scenario based on monopolistic competition, scale economy, spatial cost, preference for variety, and product/service differentiations. However, this kind of traditional mathematic model is based on over-simplifying assumptions, such as heterogeneity irrelevant, fully-rational agents, no interactions among economic agents, unable to adapt and evolve. In addition, the equilibrium analysis is not adapted for dynamic research. To overcome the weakness of traditional deductive model and equilibrium analysis, the paper puts forward a research approach to integrate economic deductive model with agent-based computational experiments for better understanding the evolutional process of metropolitan commerce. By using agent-based modeling and simulation, the spatial structure of metropolitan commerce can be observed dynamically in different scenarios. Therefore, instead of making nonlinear systems tractable by modeling complex building blocks with few interactions, we can make them understandable by modeling simple building blocks with many interactions among different agents in different districts based on our deductive economic model. Dynamic simulations show that (1) With fixed substitution of goods and services and the shopping transport cost, the greater the gap of commercial fixed input between the new and old urban areas is, the more imbalanced commercial space distribution would be, and more easily to form the core-periphery structure. (2) Because of the diversified consumption preferences, to strengthen contribution of inter-regional differences to changes in business market share. (3) Commerce tends to gather in the place with location, population and fixed cost advantages, and improvements in traffic condition will accelerate the commercial spatial concentration. The related methodological issue such as integrating traditional economic model with agent-based geographical computation as well as empirical analysis and econometric test is also discussed.
Market competition mechanism and bureaucracy distribution system are the two main channels for China's urban residents to obtain individual housing. To some extent, the differences of channels and opportunities for different types of households to obtain rare housing resources reflect housing inequality and social division in urban China. Institutional factors, market factors and household factors have interacted to shape individual's housing choice in transitional urban China. Using China's General Social Survey (CGSS 2005) (urban part) which covers 88 cities across the country, this paper analyzes housing type variation and its influencing factors in transitional urban China. It is found that house-ownership rate increases more quickly since the reform in 1978 and its main causes have transformed from public housing reform policy to housing commercialisation policy prior to and after 1998. Housing commercialisation has been enhanced gradually, and diversity characterizes housing tenure structure in transitional urban China. The findings demonstrate that household life cycle change, income, hukou, types of work units and occupation have significant impacts on housing choice which manifests the dual significant effect on housing distribution system from institutional and market force. The findings also reveal that types of work units, hukou and life cycle variables have more significant effects on housing choice in more developed areas when housing sources tend to be rare resources and house prices go high and there exists a great gap of housing affordability among residents. With future development of housing commercialisation and housing system reform, local government should gradually relax the constraints for social housing, especially the hukou constraints. Real estate developers should concern more about household structure change and its impacts on the residential preferences in the context of rapid socio-economic transformation.
The power law is a phenomenon that can be widely observed in both natural and social environments, and is evident in the urban settlement systems. Previous studies successfully observed and identified the power law phenomenon, but have not given a complete explanation about how the power law forms. Viewing cities as complex systems, this research attempts to explore why power law emerges from the increasing-returns to urban scale in the complexity theory by designing and implementing computer experiments based on the Microsoft Visual Basic software to simulate the growth of urban settlements and observing the relationship between increasing returns and power law. Three basic patterns of urban growth are simulated in this research: neighborhood attraction, scale attraction, and mixed attraction. The results of the computer experiments suggest that (1) the scale-attraction and mixed-attraction patterns explain better the growth of urban settlements than the neighborhood-attraction pattern; and (2) a close relationship exists between the emergent power law phenomenon and the urban systems that are formed through the three simulation patterns under the increasing returns assumption. In addition, the mathematical simulation implies that power law is a universal phenomenon in statistics, and the formation of urban settlement systems is driven by economic factors, such as increasing returns. Therefore, we argue that increasing returns would be one of the underlying mechanisms through which the power law phenomenon emerges in the real world.
With the development of modern service industry and information economy in the transformation period, economy of producer service has gradually become one of the symbols of urban civilization and economic development. And it has exerted a significant impact on urban spatial structure. Making use of spatial density analysis, location entropy and spatial autocorrelation analysis, this paper analyzes the spatial distribution characteristics of office buildings in Hangzhou and their revolution mechanism. The result shows that the spatial density of the office buildings gradually decreases from center to periphery, and it also presents a spatial pattern of multi-center clustering. The office space of the office buildings shows a significant difference between the inner district and the outer district. And the density of office buildings distribution is higher in the inner district than that in the outer district, but the construction intensity shows the opposite feature. The hierarchical structure of the capacity size is not reasonable, which is mainly reflected in the insufficient development scale of third-level districts; the dependence industries show more discrete, and the producer services shows more concentrated; the location entropy of internal corporations in the office buildings show a significant spatial difference, this means that the office buildings is characterized by regional specialization; the mature districts generally have high integrated service capacity, while the function pattern of developing districts show singleness. Overall, politics, economy and micro-enterprises and various elements, through the combined effect of cross-cutting mechanism, effectively promoted the spatial evolution process of office buildings and producer services in the city. And the main mechanism significantly is reflected in the transformation of urban economy, suburbanization, urban spatial restructuring, policy and government action.
With the economic development and increasing emissions of CO2, the study has become one of hotspots in the developing model of Chinese cities in order to slow down CO2 emissions. Using the STIRPAT model, this paper analyzed the impact of population, affluence, urbanization and technology on the total CO2 emissions, and the results showed that 1% change of population, per capita GDP, urbanization and technology would cause a corresponding occurrence of 0.618%, (0.178+0.009lnA)%, 0.816% and 0.264% change in the total CO2 emissions. Based on this study, taking Shanghai as an example, it set 10 developing scenarios and analyzed the best model of reducing CO2 emissions. Results show that under the scenario of economy, population in mid-speed, low urbanization and high technology, it would be best for Shanghai to reduce CO2 emissions, and the emissions of CO2 in 2010, 2015, 2020 would be 17053.57, 19286.64, 20885.69 ten thousands tons, respectively.
The perception of tourism image has been a research hotspot at home and abroad. The perspective of relevant research is becoming more diverse under the influence of New Cultural Geography ideas since the 1990s. However, most studies focus more on the aspect of visual and sensory than on hearing. The combination of music and tourism is getting more and more closely as the development of communication technology and convenient audio equipment. There is an urgent need to analyze how the music influences the perception of destination image and how the music constructs the destination image, which can make up the vacancy for the study of hearing. This article discusses the impact of songs on the perception of tourism destination image of Tibet from two dimensions through the case of Tibet and research object of popular Tibetan songs, and demonstrates the correlation between the Tibetan songs and travel decision-making. At the same time, this study also discusses the validity of communication-circulation of Tibetan songs and the perception diversity of tourists from aspects of gender, age and education. The result shows that the tourism image of Tibet has a characteristic of diversity. And Tibetan songs can affect tourists on image perception of Tibet and strengthen the desire of Tibet. It is a continuous process for tourists to perceive and construct the destination image. Songs play a different role in the whole process. The annotation for Tibetan songs to Tibet destination gives first priority to natural landscape and second priority to human information and is less involved in religious culture. Furthermore, the achievement of music spreading destination image depends on the music spreading itself successfully rather than the effect of "movement of songs making", but the Tibetan songs which break through the restriction of language show a special characteristic of taking Chinese as the perception medium. In addition, songs are of great significance to tourists to get a better understanding of tourism destinations and touch the reality of tourism destination.
By using the data envelopment analysis and through measuring the technical efficiency, scale efficiency as well as the total factor productivity, this paper analyzes the efficiency characteristics of the tourism industry development in China from 1999 to 2006. Some conclusions can be drawn as follows. (1) As the overall efficiency of tourism industry development in China from 1999 to 2006 is low, China's tourism industry fails to fully exploit the potential of the existing resources so that the total tourism input is maintained in a diseconomical status. (2) The mean value of pure technical efficiency in tourism industry is 0.658 from 1999 to 2006,which means the effective use of existing technology is lower and the potential of the technical progress is larger. (3) Tourism development in China's western provinces enjoys the advantage of late-development, and the technical progress efficiency increases faster in the provinces with lower technological efficiency. (4) The TFP growth rate varies remarkably in different provinces, which manifests the lower pattern in turn from east to west and central China. Moreover, this gap of TFP growth between regions still shows a trend of further expansion in regional tourism development efficiencies. Finally, in order to promote the transformation of growth mode and propel the high efficiency and sustainable development of the tourism industry in China, this paper puts forward the following suggestions based on the analysis results, i.e., to optimize the ratio of the input factors, integrate the industrial chain of tourism, perfect the innovation system of tourism industry, accelerate technological progress, and make preferential policies for regional development, etc.
Tourist flows could be taken as inherent relations among destinations. It is necessary and feasible to analyze the inbound tourist flows from the view of network, and that would be more theoretical and practical significance to tourist flow study. This paper not only defines the notion of tourist flows network in theory, discusses its significance, but constructs an assessment model of tourist flows network, and uses characterization, density, E-I indictor, centralization, cohesive subgroup and core-periphery, which are from the Social Network Analysis, into the analysis of Chinese inbound tourist flow network as well. Then this paper tries to find out the dynamical factors on tourist flows among provinces by using QAP regression and correlation, which are stemmed from SNA too and better than OLS analysis to some extent in matrix analysis. It is concluded that the inbound tourist flow scale presents a decreasing trend from the Eastern, the Western, the Northeast, to the Midland of China. The whole network is loosely organized and unbalanced. Some eastern provinces not only possess higher centralization and structural dominance, but also closely connect with each other. Furthermore some western provinces have become more important in network, and the regional imbalance of inbound tourist flow network has been narrowing. The natural tourism resource, provincial economic position, foreign relation and spatial distance are major constraints to inbound tourist flows, and the numbers of international travel agencies and flights which are representatives of high quality service and top grade, whether they are in the same region or not, contribute to the tourist flow. By doing all of these, this paper aims at offering a new method for inbound tourist flow research and assisting the formulation of tourism policies at national and provincial levels.
