Along with the development of facility agriculture, horticultural agriculture and leisure agriculture, nowadays, the functions of agricultural production in rural areas have been weakened but the functions of consumption have been increased in Beijing. This shows that the commodification of rural space in Beijing has been developed in recent years. Rural tourism, as one of the important forms of the commodification of rural space, has played an important role in increasing farmers' income, preventing rural decline and revitalizing rural economy. Therefore, this paper selects rural tourism as the representative of the commodification to examine the formation and evolution of spatial commodification of rural space in Mayufang village as well as to explore farmers' participation in this process based on the actor network theory. In the process of the transformation, the rural areas being the farmers' producing and living spaces have changed to the urban residents' leisure and consumption spaces in Mayufang village and formed a heterogeneous actor-network, in which Tourism Bureau of Changping District and Changling Travel Company and other human actors and non-human actors have played a focal role. Major actors used the policy and the financial support to enroll farmers and other actors by the top-down executive network. Along with development of promotion, training, supervision and infrastructure, some local farmers started to create the physical and non-physical environments for the urban residents' consumption activities. Thus more and more farmers have been engaged in rural tourism, and the commodification of rural spaces in Mayufang village has been developed. As Mayufang village became the consumption space to the urban residents, the commodification of rural space in Mayufang village started its transformation of actor network. However, with the quit of non-human actors, which is Duijiuyu Natural Beauty and reduction of incentives launched by the original major actors, the representative of market has become the focal actor in the new actor network. More and more farmers, who were against the common purpose of the actor network were excluded, quitted the former actor network, thus commodification in rural space in Mayufang village declined. In the process of the formation of commodification of rural space in Mayufang village, the farmers who had the advantages of location, age and profession have much stronger desire to be involved in rural tourism, unemployed farmers prefer to be involved in rural tourism than farmers who make a living on agriculture. The farmers who worked in township enterprises are more willing to participate in rural tourism than self-employed business persons; villagers employed in the government units have less possibility to take part in rural tourism. While commodification of rural space in Mayufang village has declined, farmers began to transfer the labor force to other professions from rural tourism. When interests of major actors are commonly and inextricably linked with actors in actor network in rural areas, its commodification in rural space is strengthened, and vice versa.

Evolutionary economic geography and institutional economic geography, which emerged in the late 1990s, provides the important perspective to the dynamics and spatial process of industry agglomeration. Based on the evolutionary economic geography and institutional economic geography, an analytical framework, including window of locational opportunity, financial enterprise/institution spinoff, regional branching and institutional thickness, has been proposed, and a particular perspective with respect to the key problem in economic geography of how to explain the rise and dynamics of financial industry agglomeration in inland regional central city has been explained. Accroding to financial statistics during the period 2003-2014, the relative questionnaires and qualitative interviews were conducted in Zhengdong New District. The findings can be summarized as follows: The establishment of Zhengdong New District has opened the window of locational opportunity for the financial industry in its formation stage; the spinoff of financial institution has played an important endogenous dynamic part in financial industry agglomeration in its fast development stage; regional branching laid a solid foundation for the innovation of financial formats and high-end elements agglomeration in the promotion stage; in the entire process of financial industry agglomeration, the continuous improvement of government support and institutional arrangements strengthened the institutional thickness, and the self-reinforcing mechanism made the stickiness of the institutional space continuously improving. However, some differences were found between financial industry and manufacturing industry, the agglomeration of financial industry was lack of the technology-related firms derived from university laboratory, academic institutions and existing industry, which had a stronger dependence on the stickiness of institutional thickness.

Based on the OFDI data of 4616 Chinese companies in America during the period of 2004-2014, the paper analyzed the characteristics of industrial structures and geographical distributions, as well as their changing trends. Then it built an OFDI location decision model combined with the attributive characters of host country and relationship characters of host country-home country. Finally it quantitatively recognized the country determinant and the discrepancy among different industries. The research found the following conclusions. Firstly, the geographic distribution of China's OFDI in America was highly concentrated, with service industry as the main industry. State-owned enterprises were the main investors of OFDI and private companies were not so active in terms of investment. As time went on, the OFDI distribution in different countries tended to be discrete, with an uptrend of manufacture industry and a downtrend of service industry. Besides, the proportion of private companies involved was increasing. Secondly, the main body of China's OFDI in America was domestic manufacturers, and their investment was highly concentrated on the industries of wholesale & retail, commercial service, import & export trading, etc. The above facts indicated their participation in building international value-added chain and globalization, and verified their gradual and continuous course of international expansion. Unlike the extension of manufacturers to service industry, import & export trading companies and commercial service companies mainly focused on further development of their original main business advantage. Thirdly, the introduction of relational variables effectively promoted the depth of the explanation on OFDI country difference. Export had prominently promoted OFDI, which accorded with the performance of complementary model, and showed that China's OFDI in America was still in the initial stage of understanding overseas markets. At the initial stage, good and close political and social relationships could effectively promote OFDI, and private companies were playing a less important role than state-owned companies. Fourthly, the market seeking motivation was the most obvious motivation for China's OFDI in America, while energy access motivation, technology acquisition motivation and production cost reducing motivation were not fully confirmed by the model. Fifthly, unlike wholesale and retail industries, commercial service industry and manufacturing industry which commonly pursued market scale, the industry of geological exploration and development industries, focused more on resources searching, which determined good political relationships and the special importances of state-owned enterprises.

Foreign direct investment in the knowledge-intensive manufacturing industry constitutes the key to industrial upgrading and economic restructuring in China. Present studies on foreign direct investment are still limited in regard to understanding their specific investment behaviors. Entry mode is the key strategy of foreign firms which determines their success in the host countries. Regions, as the basic spatial units with specific economic, social and cultural character, affect the entry mode of foreign firms to a great extent. This paper aims to reveal the geographical mechanism of the entry mode of FDI in the knowledge-intensive manufacturing sector, which advances the understanding of the exogenous-driven mechanism of urban and regional development within the context of economic restructuring in China nowadays. The theoretical framework of this paper proposes two fundamental locational factors influencing the choice of entry mode into the Chinese market: regional institutional environment and regional absorptive capacity. On the one hand, regional institutional environment is expected to influence the transaction cost of doing business in the host countries, in particular within the context of transition economies. When the regional institutional environment is better off, the knowledge-intensive firms tend to choose the wholly-owned entry mode to safeguard the interests of their own technology and reduce the risks of being rapidly imitated by local actors without costs. On the other hand, regional absorptive capacity enhances the willingness of foreign firms to form joint ventures with local firms in order to tap into the local knowledge pool. In regions with low absorptive capacity, foreign investment tends to constrain the scope of knowledge exchange within communities of foreign firms, and show limited willingness to cooperate and interact with local firms. Using the database of German knowledge-intensive FDI in China from 1982 to 2014, the analysis shows that the German FDI has been concentrated in the coastal areas of China. Spatio-temporal statistical analysis demonstrates that the location of German FDI has been spreading from coastal to inland provinces. In coastal provinces, it has been spreading from the central to the peripherial cities. Since 1995, the entry mode of German knowledge-intensive FDI has been shifting from joint ventures to wholly-owned mode. The logit model results further show that the entry mode of German FDI in knowledge-intensive sector is driven by multiple locational factors. On one hand, the decision of FDI firms to take joint ventures as the entry mode in the host country is influenced by the level of urban human capital and the degrees of industrial specialization. This implies that regional knowledge absorptive capacity is essential to the formation of local-global strategic coupling. On the other hand, the FDI stock and the number of authorized patents in the city significantly encourage the entry mode decision of a wholly-owned FDI firm, because the knowledge-intensive firms’ core competence lies in technology. These firms are most concerned about the issues on intellectual right protection. As a result, the regional institutional environment is an important locational determinant for the knowledge-intensive FDI firms.

There is significant spatial stratified heterogeneity in the operating conditions of property insurance industry in China. What is more, China's property insurers have carried out a rapid geographic expansion in recent years, then, how does the geographic expansion affect the profit of property insurers? On the basis of the panel data of China's 64 property insurers during the period from 2006 to 2015, this paper estimates the the profit efficiency for each property insurer using the geographically-weighted method. Moreover, through the regression analysis with five geographical expansion measures, we draw the following conclusions. (1) Geographical expansion is significantly and positively related to the profitability and more than 60% of the positive correlation attribute to the larger possibilities of higher profitability insurers to carry out geographical expansion. (2) Geographical expansion also plays a positive role in property insurers' profitability to some extent. Other things being equal, the number of the provincial-level regions where an insurer operates increases by 10, the premium income share from the provincial-level regions other than its headquarters-located region increases by 10 percentage points, the concentration ratio of the premium income across provincial-level regions decreases by a unit of standard deviation, and the average distance between the headquarters and its branches increases by 1%, the profitability of the property insurer will increase by 2%, 1%, 2% and 1% of a unit of standard deviation in the sample, respectively. (3) It is difficult to reach a conclusion on the positive impact of geographical expansion on profitabilitywhen the profit efficiency is estimated by ordinary methods.

Organized globally and led by trans-national enterprises, global production networks (GPNs) develop rapidly along with the advancement of technology and deepening of trade liberalization. GPN provides great opportunities for developing countries to blend in global economy and realize their technological advance, as well as value chain upgrading. Facing the pressure of shifting model of economic development, China has urgent need of optimizing export trade though she has experienced marvelous success especially on export trade during the past few decades, so that the study on export product upgrading can be particularly important. Based on such consideration, this article focuses on how participating GPN influences China's export product upgrade. This article uses the conception of quality to quantitively describe product upgrade, and we calculate the product quality based on data of customs trade database from 2000 to 2011. The result shows that export product quality presents a declining trend from east to west of China, and the average quality of the whole country fluctuates a lot during 2000-2011 with a slight rising trend showing up recently. We then build several econometric models to examine whether participating in GPN matters, and how exactly this influence works. The results show that participating in GPN has remarkable influence on export product upgrading especially in eastern China, but market dispersion does not help in product upgrading. We also find that R&D investment cannot promote regional position in global value chain in eastern China, forming a typical "Low-end lock-in". Capital- and technology-intensive products benefit a lot from participating in GPN while labour-intensive exports may open markets with low-quality products. Fiscal decentralization is a key determinant in eastern and central provinces, and local governments tend to give more support to technology-intensive product upgrading.

Taking Huainan as an example, the paper, based on the statistical data about national economic development and the urban land-use chart, and with the aid of Arcgis software and SPSS software, builds the coupling evaluation models of the industrial structures and urban spacial forms of the coal resource-based cities from two aspects (coupling coordination degree and spatial responding index), and measures the coupling's process and features of the coal resource-based cities' industrial structure evolution and urban development. The results are as follows: (1) There exists a close interaction between industrial structure and urban spatial form in the developing process of the coal resource-based cities; (2) Industrial structure with essential productive factors play a motivational role in the evolution of urban spatial form. A highly mutual related coupling coordination degree can be found between industrial structure and evolution of urban spatial form. The coupling degrees are between 0.5 and 0.65, showing an increasing tendency, while the coordination degree maintains over 0.99, under a decent coordinating status of moderate coupling. (3) The urban spatial responding degree to industrial structure experiences three stages in the process - rising, descending and ascending - with the high value in the early and final stages and the low value in the middle stage, presenting a "U"-shaped curve. In addition, the study sheds light on the industrial structural evolution of coal-based cities as well as the urban spatial developing coupling mechanism from the perspectives of different life circle stages, distinct spatial and environmental effects of industrial structural productive factors. In our study, it is shown that the spatial development of coal resource-based cities is the result of the rehabilitation of essential productive factors through the spatial effects in the process of industrial structural development.

Optimizing industrial structure is an important research object of human-economic geography, and it is also the object of government departments to strengthen macro-control. This has become even greater problem that China has entered the "new normal" in recent years. The study uses a multi-regional input-output model, with linear programming to build an optimal model of industrial structure as well as a model of optimization degree under the energy constraint. The results show that: (1) Under the constraint of energy conservation, the optimization degree of industrial structure of Anhui province is the highest (0.763), while that of Shanxi is the lowest (0.662). Under the constraint of employment, the optimization degree of industrial structure of Jiangxi is the highest (0.768), while that of Shanxi is the lowest (0.659). (2) Under the constraint of energy conservation, the optimization degree of industrial structure is negatively related to the energy consumption per unit of output value and the proportion of heavy industry. Under the constraint of employment, the optimization degree of industrial structure is negatively related to the proportions of state-owned economy and large enterprises. (3) Considering different orientations of energy conservation and employment, the directions of industrial structure optimization of the six provinces in central China are obviously different. (4) As a whole, central China should maintain or moderately increase the proportion of resource-based industry, greatly raise the proportion of manufacturing including transport equipment and communication equipment, computers and other electronic equipment, moderately reduce the proportion of smelting and pressing of metals and manufacture of non-metallic mineral products. In terms of services, central China should greatly increase the proportions of the production and supply of gas and water industry and tourism, moderately or greatly reduce the proportions of wholesale and retail trade and catering, and maintain or moderately reduce the proportions of transportation and warehousing.

Regional economic development is closely related to its productive structure, which evolves constantly. Economic geographers argue that the evolution of regional productive structure is path-dependent and stress the importance of technological relatedness. However, recent studies also suggest that regional and industrial policies may help create a new path of regional development. This study follows the method proposed by Hidalgo to measure technological relatedness and generate product space of Chinese exports using the trade data of China's 31 provinces during 2001-2013. The results show that China has experienced substantial structural transformation in export products, but there are significant regional differences. The coastal region has shifted from the labor intensive to capital and technology intensive products, the central and northeastern regions have first evolved from the resource intensive to labor intensive products, and then to capital and technology intensive products. The western region has transferred from the resource intensive to labor intensive structures. Econometric analysis reports that the evolution of export products of the four regions was significantly driven by technological relatedness during 2001-2007. Technological relatedness still played its role during 2008-2013 for the eastern, central and northeastern regions. But in the western region, regional and industrial policies support the structural transformation of export products. The significance of technological relatedness implies that the evolution of regional export products in China is path dependent. The role of regional policies suggest that institutions may create a new development path.