ALBERT

Beschreibung: Construction accidents are a significant hazard to the community, affecting sustainable development. This paper summarizes the safety situation of the construction industry in China over the past ten years. Detailed analysis is performed on fatal accidents that occurred in 2018 to reveal the spatiotemporal distribution pattern and characters of construction safety accidents. The construction failures are mainly attributed to management aspects rather than technical aspects. A case involving a major accident during shield tunnel construction in Foshan, Guangdong, in 2018 is investigated in detail. Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is used to analyze the management issues of the Foshan metro project during planning, geological investigation, design, and implementation of construction works. The SEA result shows that the safety risk was very high with a low total SEA score. Based on the analysis, a guideline for safety construction management for sustainability is proposed.

Beschreibung: The Yi ethnic group in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province in Southwest China have cultivated Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum) for at least a thousand years. Tartary buckwheat landraces are maintained through their traditional seed system. Field work and social network methodologies were used to analyze the seed sources and their flows, and to create a seed network map. Self-saving, exchanging with neighbors and relatives, and purchasing from the market were the main means farmers used to save and exchange Tartary buckwheat seeds. The flow of seed within villages was higher than between villages. Wedding dowry was an important pathway for seed flow among all of the villages. Of the 13 Tartary buckwheat landraces maintained, four landraces were exchanged frequently. The seed exchange network structure was affected by the number of Tartary buckwheat landraces, the age of nodal households, geographic environment, culture, and cultural groups. Nodal households play an important role in the conservation and on-farm management of Tartary buckwheat landraces.

Beschreibung: Photovoltaic (PV) modules convert renewable and sustainable solar energy into electricity. However, the uncertainty of PV power production brings challenges for the grid operation. To facilitate the management and scheduling of PV power plants, forecasting is an essential technique. In this paper, a robust multilayer perception (MLP) neural network was developed for day-ahead forecasting of hourly PV power. A generic MLP is usually trained by minimizing the mean squared loss. The mean squared error is sensitive to a few particularly large errors that can lead to a poor estimator. To tackle the problem, the pseudo-Huber loss function, which combines the best properties of squared loss and absolute loss, was adopted in this paper. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method was verified by benchmarking against a generic MLP network with real PV data. Numerical experiments illustrated that the proposed method performed better than the generic MLP network in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE).

Beschreibung: Agricultural sectors play an important role in the process of economic development of a country, especially in developing ones. Vietnam is known as an emerging market, which depends directly on agriculture-related activities for their livelihood, in which the issue of rural credit access still remains a confounding problem. The paper focuses on the characteristics of rural credit markets, the determinants of farmer access to the markets, the socio-economic impacts of credit access in Vietnam and briefly comparing with those of some developing countries. This question is addressed by reviewing existing literature and empirical evidence, followed by a comprehensive case study in Vietnam. Comprehensive literature review with secondary data collection and key informant interviews are methods that are applied in this research. The results of this analysis indicate the features of Vietnam markets as participated constraints, government intervention, and segmentation. Other results reveal the significant determinants of credit accessibility. Impacts of credit access on output production, household income, and poverty reduction are highlighted in this paper. Some managerial implications are recommended for households through participation in lending networks; for financial institutions relating to expand target clients as well as capital allocation; and, for policy-makers via ensuring market competitiveness and sustainable development in the long run.

Beschreibung: The recent emergence and rapid growth of new financial services by financial technology (Fintech) companies have driven banking institutions towards operational innovation in order to gain sustainable competitive advantage. This study aims to conduct an in-depth investigation of the banking sector in response to the challenges brought by Fintech startups. Based on the service innovation theory, we propose a novel hybrid multiple criteria decision-making method (MCDM) to evaluate service innovation strategies for improving the sustainability of China’s banking industry during the Fintech revolution. A six-dimensional model comprising 20 sub-criteria is constructed and both the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique and DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP) are used to explore interrelationships among the indices and their related weights. Finally, the modified VIšekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje (VIKOR) method is employed to evaluate performance gaps in the four major types of commercial banks in China—state-owned, joint-stock, city commercial banks, and other credit cooperatives—in the field of service innovation. The improvement priorities, ranked from highest to lowest, are new business partners, new service concepts, organizational innovation, technological innovation, new customer interactions, and new revenue models. These results will provide strategies for the sustainable development of China’s banking industry and the implementation of changes in response to the impact of the Fintech revolution.

Beschreibung: Based on the behavioral theory of firm and prospect theory, we investigate how corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities will respond to underperformance in past and in future. Using samples of Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2016, this paper found that CSR increases with the distance by which financial performance in the last year falls below goals and decreases with the distance by which expected financial performance will fall below targets. In addition, the future underperformance will weaken the effect of the past underperformance on CSR. Besides, the value of financial performance in the last year will weaken the impact of underperformance in the last year on CSR and strengthen the impact of underperformance in the next year on CSR. The findings suggest that future studies should take both value of financial performance and performance gaps into consideration to have a better understanding of organizational decisions and behaviors.

Beschreibung: In the backdrop of growing public concerns about climate change and air pollution, and the contribution of petroleum combustion in the transport sector to these issues, China has introduced a range of policy incentives for promoting the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs). These incentives have resulted in a rapid increase in EV stocks since the early 2010s, and this trend is expected to continue, or even accelerate, in the years to come, which would, in turn, lead to a policy-oriented EV market. The primary objective of the project is to develop an understanding of the effect of various policy incentives on EV uptake based on annual data of 43 cities from 2011 to 2017, and these policies mainly refer to those that focus on EV purchasing, registering, driving, and charging stages. The novelty of this paper is that we focused on policy effect on EV adoption behavior, rather than adoption intention which has widely been analyzed in previous studies. Results showed that the abolishment of purchasing and driving restriction, government subsidies, purchase tax exemption, and dedicated license plates significantly promote EV diffusion, and the effect of the two restrictions are more powerful. Thus, this study suggested that abolishment of purchasing and driving restrictions can be insisted to drive EV market share, meanwhile improving policies that can guide consumers through various motivations are also necessary.

Beschreibung: In today’s business world, the environment is changing rapidly. Employers need to rely upon their employees in order to produce long-term competitive advantage and sustainable performance. However, little research has investigated whether sustainable human resource management could prompt change-oriented behaviors in employees. By integrating the job demands–resources (JD-R) model and the proactive motivation model with the existing literature on sustainable human resource management, we explored the relationship between high-commitment work systems (HCWS) and the employees’ taking charge behaviors. Data from 352 employees of 96 organizations provided support for the positive effect of HCWS on the employees’ taking charge behaviors. The results of this study showed that HCWS affect the employees’ taking charge behaviors through their work engagement only when they felt a high level of impact. Based on these results, we not only provide several theoretical contributions to the literature on HCWS and taking charge, but also provide some practical suggestions for how to nurture change-oriented employees using sustainable human resource management within the organizations.

Beschreibung: Since 2013, a series of air pollution prevention and control (APPC) measures have been promulgated in China for reducing the level of air pollution, which can affect regional short-term electricity power demand by changing the behavior of power users electricity consumption. This paper analyzes the policy system of the APPC measures and its impact on regional short-term electricity demand, and determines the regional short-term load impact factors considering the impact of APPC measures. On this basis, this paper proposes a similar day selection method based on the best and worst method and grey relational analysis (BWM-GRA) in order to construct the training sample set, which considers the difference in the influence degree of characteristic indicators on daily power load. Further, a short-term load forecasting method based on least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) optimized by salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is developed. By forecasting the load of a city affected by air pollution in Northern China, and comparing the results with several selected models, it reveals that the impact of APPC measures on regional short-term load is significant. Moreover, by considering the influence of APPC measures and avoiding the subjectivity of model parameter settings, the proposed load forecasting model can improve the accuracy of, and provide an effective tool for short-term load forecasting. Finally, some limitations of this paper are discussed.

Beschreibung: China’s social security expenditure has rapidly grown during the past decade, and concerns about the impact of social security on productivity and sustained economic growth have attracted attention. Based on Chinese provincial panel data over the period 2007–2016, a threshold model analysis found that the impact of social security on productivity has a “double threshold” on human capital. Using dynamic panel data models and system General Moment Method estimators also found the existence of this threshold effect: When the human capital level is low or high, social security is favorable for sustained economic growth. However, if the human capital level is at the intermediate level, the function of social security is weak. The main conclusions were still valid after we examined the robustness of our results with several methods.