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The government has included social media technology applications in the public sector as part of the fifth wave of information and communications technology adoption. Academic interest in social media in the government sector has been increasing. But there has been little empirical research on the assimilation of social media in the local government. To fill this gap, based on technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework, this study aims to investigate the key technological, organizational and environmental factors that affect the assimilation of social media in local government agencies.

To empirically test the model, a survey study was conducted. Data were collected from 150 government employees in the government department of X municipal government in China. The collected data were analysed quantitatively to answer five hypotheses using structural equation model.

The findings suggest that technology competence, top management support, perceived benefits and citizen readiness significantly influence assimilation of social media in local government agencies. Top management support is the strongest predictor of social media assimilation in a government agency.

This study is one of the first attempts that adopted the TOE framework to understand assimilation of social media in the local government. In addition, the effect of the four factors that include one technological factor, two organizational factors and one environmental factor, namely, technology competence, top management support, perceived benefits and citizen readiness, on intention to assimilate social media was investigated.

This study explores the effect of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on corporations' environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and values in the Chinese financial market.

This study collected data covering 158 Chinese listed companies that have successfully completed at least one M&A activity between 2011 and 2020. Fixed effect and random models based on the Hausman test are adopted to mitigate potential heterogeneity issues in the selection.

Results show that acquiring targets with high ESG performance can help increase their own ESG performance, which in turn increases their market values. Heterogeneity and robustness tests also provide consistent results. Findings further confirm the bidirectional correlation between ESG and M&As, and then enrich related literature by suggesting the importance of utilizing M&As as a driver to increase corporate ESG performance.

This study embodies the practical implications of ESG and M&A. Managers, investors and policymakers can highly benefit from the results through practical applications.

Before the turn of the century, taking overseas students was more about a diplomatic issue dominated by the state in China, for which reason this section is relatively independent within the higher education system. However, evidence from a series of new policy documents and their impacts suggests that international student mobility (ISM) has been intensively shaped by the central government in the desire to promote its national strategy, namely the belt and road initiative. ISM policy, although with a significant proportion marketized, was introduced for a clear purpose of cultural diplomacy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Looking beyond the debate of market-driven vs state-dominated, this paper attempts to provide a thorough understanding of this changing pattern based on examination of key changes of policy statements along with official data analysis.

This paper argues that the new pattern must be understood against a context of a hierarchy of higher education institutes in contemporary China: a sector led by a small number of prestigious universities generously funded by the central government with a large number of ordinary universities underfunded and eager to generate income. Prestigious institutes enroll international students to satisfy performance indicators listed by policies like “Double First-rate”; other universities, benefiting from the reputation and momentum generated by the top ones, take self-funded students for profit.

By making good use of both performance indicators and market motives, the country managed to move a state-dominated ISM policy in the twentieth century into the existing state-steering marketization model and made China a major destination for overseas study.

The purpose of this paper is to provide reference for researchers by reviewing the research advances and trend of agricultural product price forecasting methods in recent years.

This paper reviews the main research methods and their application of forecasting of agricultural product prices, summarizes the application examples of common forecasting methods, and prospects the future research directions.

1) It is the trend to use hybrid models to predict agricultural products prices in the future research; 2) the application of the prediction model based on price influencing factors should be further expanded in the future research; 3) the performance of the model should be evaluated based on DS rather than just error-based metrics in the future research; 4) seasonal adjustment models can be applied to the difficult seasonal forecasting tasks in the agriculture product prices in the future research; 5) hybrid optimization algorithm can be used to improve the prediction performance of the model in the future research.

The methods from this paper can provide reference for researchers, and the research trends proposed at the end of this paper can provide solutions or new research directions for relevant researchers.

Tourism is a labor-intensive sector with extensive links to other industries and plays a vital role in creating employment. This study aims to propose a new framework to analyze the intrinsic structure of the employment effects of tourism-related sectors and their drivers.

This study uses input–output and structural decomposition analysis (IO-SDA) to quantify the employment effects of tourism-related sectors and their driving mechanisms based on China’s I-O tables of 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017.

The results show a declining trend in the intensity of direct or indirect employment effects in tourism-related sectors, indicating a decreasing number of jobs directly or indirectly required to create a unit of tourism output. Among tourism-related sectors, catering has the highest intensity of indirect employment effects over the study period. Catering stimulates the indirect employment of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery and food and tobacco manufacturing. The decomposition analysis reveals that final demand is the largest contributor to the increase in tourism employment, while technological progress shifts from an employment-creation effect in 2002–2012 to an employment-destruction effect in 2012–2017.

This study proposes a new analytical framework to investigate the structural proportional relationship between the direct and indirect employment effects of various tourism-related sectors and their dynamic changes. Doing so, it provides valuable references for policymakers to promote tourism employment.

旅游相关部门就业效应的驱动因素：以中国为例

摘要

旅游业是一个劳动密集型部门, 与其他国民经济部门有着广泛的联系, 这在创造就业方面发挥着重要作用。本研究旨在建立一个框架, 分析旅游相关部门就业效应的内在结构及其驱动因素。

本研究基于中国2002年、2007年、2012年和2017年的投入产出表, 引入投入产出和结构分解分析（IO-SDA）法量化了旅游相关行业的就业效应及其变化的驱动机制。

旅游相关部门的直接或间接就业强度呈下降趋势, 可见创造一个单位的旅游产出所需的直接或间接工作数量在减少。在旅游相关部门中, 餐饮部门在研究期内的间接就业效应强度最高, 主要带动了农、林、牧、渔业和食品及烟草制造业的间接就业。旅游就业效应变动的驱动因素中, 最终需求是旅游就业效应增加的最大贡献者, 技术效应从2002-2012年期间的就业创造效应转变为2012-2017年期间的就业破坏效应。

本研究建立了一个全新的分析框架, 可以揭示各个旅游相关部门的直接和间接就业效应之间的结构比例关系及其动态变化。对旅游就业效应的驱动因素分析可以为政策制定者提供针对性的建议, 以促进旅游就业。

Factores que impulsan los efectos del empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo: El caso de China continental

Resumen

El turismo es un sector intensivo en mano de obra con amplios vínculos con otras industrias y desempeña un papel vital en la creación de empleo. Este estudio propone un nuevo marco para analizar la estructura intrínseca de los efectos en el empleo de los sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus impulsores.

Este estudio utiliza el análisis de entrada-salida (input-output) y de descomposición estructural (structural decomposition) (IO-SDA) para cuantificar los efectos sobre el empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus mecanismos impulsores, basándose en las tablas input-output de China de 2002, 2007, 2012 y 2017.

Los resultados muestran una tendencia a la baja en la intensidad de los efectos directos o indirectos del empleo en los sectores relacionados con el turismo, lo que indica un número cada vez menor de puestos de trabajo directos o indirectos necesarios para crear una unidad de producción turística. Entre los sectores relacionados con el turismo, la restauración tiene la mayor intensidad de efectos indirectos sobre el empleo durante el periodo de estudio. La restauración estimula el empleo indirecto de la agricultura, la silvicultura, la ganadería, la pesca y la fabricación de alimentos y tabaco. El análisis de descomposición revela que la demanda final es la que más contribuye al aumento del empleo turístico, mientras que el progreso tecnológico pasa de ser un efecto de creación de empleo en 2002-2012 a un efecto de destrucción de empleo en 2012-2017.

Este estudio propone un nuevo marco analítico para investigar la relación estructural proporcional entre los efectos directos e indirectos del empleo de varios sectores relacionados con el turismo y sus cambios dinámicos. De este modo, proporciona valiosas referencias para que los responsables políticos promuevan el empleo en el sector turístico.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Chaozhou-speaking communities in northeast Guangdong Province dealt with new barriers of border control during the 1950s, and how they circumvented these institutional obstacles to leave China for Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The emigration process was reshaped by new social and political forces in Maoist China. How did the Chaoshan people apply for the travel permit to leave China? How did they enter the hosting countries? How did the emigration experience influence the identity formation of Chaoshan Chinese in the 1950s?

This paper draws on archival sources, memoirs and interviews to demonstrate the ways in which Chaoshan people pursued new strategies of emigration during the 1950s.

In Maoist China, the application for an entry-exit permit was a rather complicated bureaucratic process for ordinary people. One needs to consider the class status, geographical origins and overseas connections of the applicants as well as the changing official policies toward overseas Chinese.

This paper emphasizes on the impacts of emigration experience on the identity formation of Chaoshan people and the incremental transformation of these emigrant communities in Guangdong Province.

This scholarly finding throws light on the transformation of Chaoshan from a fluid, mobile maritime environment to an increasingly state-centric agrarian society during the 1950s.

This paper is an original scholarly study of the history of Chaoshan communities in South China and their emigration to Southeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a common remaining shelf life prediction model that is generally applicable for postharvest table grape using an optimized radial basis function (RBF) neural network to achieve more accurate prediction than the current shelf life (SL) prediction methods.

First, the final indicators (storage temperature, relative humidity, sensory average score, peel hardness, soluble solids content, weight loss rate, rotting rate, fragmentation rate and color difference) affecting SL were determined by the correlation and significance analysis. Then using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate the weight of each indicator and determine the end of SL under different storage conditions. Subsequently, the structure of the RBF network redesigned was 9-11-1. Ultimately, the membership degree of Fuzzy clustering (fuzzy c-means) was adopted to optimize the center and width of the RBF network by using the training data.

The results show that this method has the highest prediction accuracy compared to the current the kinetic–Arrhenius model, back propagation (BP) network and RBF network. The maximum absolute error is 1.877, the maximum relative error (RE) is 0.184, and the adjusted R² is 0.911. The prediction accuracy of the kinetic–Arrhenius model is the worst. The RBF network has a better prediction accuracy than the BP network. For robustness, the adjusted R² are 0.853 and 0.886 of Italian grape and Red Globe grape, respectively, and the fitting degree are the highest among all methods, which proves that the optimized method is applicable for accurate SL prediction of different table grape varieties.

This study not only provides a new way for the prediction of SL of different grape varieties, but also provides a reference for the quality and safety management of table grape during storage. Maybe it has a further research significance for the application of RBF neural network in the SL prediction of other fresh foods.

To gain an in-depth understanding and provide direction to governments on their quality measurement practices related to open government data (OGD), this paper aims to develop a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD.

Qualitative meta-synthesis was used to synthesize previous studies on the quality measurement of OGD. This paper applies a meta-synthesis approach to integrate 10 qualitative studies into a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD.

Based on a seven-step meta-synthesis, the paper proposes a common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD, which includes six indicators, namely, accuracy, accessibility, completeness, timeliness, consistency and understandability.

A common frame of reference for quality assessment of OGD will help researchers better understand the quality assessment of OGD and government agencies to improve the quality of OGD that they publish.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and identify Chinese consumers’ behavior and preference characters toward table grapes, especially to explore the variance of consumption preference in recent five years.

Two representative China-wide questionnaire surveys were conducted by face-to-face and online questionnaire survey, respectively, in 2009 and 2014. Comparative study was adopted to dig the changes of consumers’ preferences and habits. ANOVA was adopted to explore the statistically difference among consumers’ behavior and preferences.

The results indicate that Chinese consumers are rational-motivation-driven grape consumers, they prefer to sweet taste, seedless and medium priced grapes. Safety and quality characters (clean appearance, freshness and taste) were ranked as the most important grape attributes. As a whole, it was found that consumers are more quality-focussed and safety-conscious five years later, so some variances was showed in their purchase habits and preferences, such as the choice of purchase place, attitude to special grapes and willingness to pay to safe and genetically modified grapes.

This research not only indicates some stable preferences of Chinese consumers toward table grape, but also finds out some significant changes in consumers’ behavior before and after five years based on a comparative study in 2009 and 2014.

This study proposes a new model for assessing supply chain sustainability risk integrating subjectivity and objectivity of decision-maker. Research has shown the vacancy of study in dealing with the above issue. To fill this research gap, a new decision support model considering the subjectivity and objectivity of decision-makers in assigning the weight of the supply chain risk reprioritization criteria is presented and demonstrated using a case example.

This study adopts a new decision support model for assessing supply chain sustainability risk based on additional failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) parameters and its integration with preference selection index (PSI) methodology and the Shannon entropy. A case example of the supply chain small and medium enterprise (SME) producing handy crafts has been used in this study.

The result of the study reveals critical sustainability risk dimensions and their risk elements demanding management attention to support realization to a more sustainable business operation.

The use of a single case study is often associated as a limitation in the research studies, and this study is based on findings from SMEs in the handy craft sector in a developing country. Nonetheless, future studies may focus on replicating this study using more samples. This preliminary study provides academics and practitioners with an exemplar of supply chain sustainability risk assessment from the SME in a developing country.

The result of this study is beneficial for practitioners, particularly owner-managers of SMEs who can use this study as guidance on how to identify and select the critical sustainability risks and plan mitigating strategies accordingly.

Scientific effort on appraising criticality of supply chain sustainability risks considering subjectivity and objectivity of decision-maker simultaneously is missing in earlier studies. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper applying the PSI and Shannon entropy method and using it for evaluating the impact of supply chain risk based on five sustainability pillars. The findings and suggestions for future research initiatives will provide new insights for scholars and practitioners in managing SME supply chain sustainability risks.