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The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.

The study adopts the system-generalized methods of moments (sys-GMM) technique for data analysis and hypothesis testing on a sample of 34 African emerging economies (340 observations) from 2010 to 2019.

The results show that there is significant positive correlation between financial support, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Moreover, entrepreneurship served as a partial mediator between financial support and economic growth in African emerging economies.

This research suggests that African governments should focus on entrepreneurial systems, which are essentially networks driven by the pursuit of individual opportunities and the promotion of new business creation; and introduce other forms of financial assistance, such as loans, loan guarantees, interest subsidies, technical assistance, insurance, etc.

The main novelty of the paper is that the authors empirically investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the association between financial support and economic growth in 34 African emerging economies.

The major challenge for the peri-urban agriculture in the South is to maintain the food supply of cities because the food chains are often local and made up of a number of humble actors: Families seek out their living from small parcels of land, farmers sell directly to consumers, on street markets, or deliver their crops to small collectors who in turn sell to retailers. This differs greatly with the North where food chains provision societies through hyper- and supermarkets and are linked to large producers. Moreover, such chains use modern transportation and preservation systems and they are global. Similar technological and social advancement can also be observed today in the South. Consequently, a social turmoil forces out rural growers from the traditional chains can be observed; as a result, they become city dwellers and engage in urban food production.

This article deals with the significant transformations of agriculture observed in cities of the South, namely: i) changes in the organisation of the food industry in relation to the scale of transactions ii) the role of agriculture in the process of becoming a city-dweller and iii) the emergence of the multi-functionality of agriculture based on a new city-agriculture relationship. Observations are based on the doctoral dissertations of Ba (2007) and To (2008).

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the dynamic linkages between the US and the national securitized real estate markets of each of the nine Asian-Pacific (APAC) economies in time-frequency domain.

Wavelet decomposition via multi-resolution analysis is employed as an empirical methodology to consider time-scale issue in studying the dynamic changes of the US–APAC cross-real estate interdependence.

The strength and direction of return correlation, return exogeneity, shock impulse response, market connectivity and causality interactions change when specific time-scales are involved. The US market correlates with the APAC markets weakly or moderately in the three investment horizons with increasing strength of lead-lag interdependence in the long-run. Moreover, there are shifts in the net total directional volatility connectivity effects at the five scales among the markets.

Given the focus of the five approaches and associated indicators, the picture that emerges from the empirical results may not completely uniform. However, long-term investors and financial institutions should evaluate the time-scale based dynamics to derive a well-informed portfolio decision.

Future research is needed to ascertain whether the time-frequency findings can be generalizable to the regional and global context. Additional studies are required to identify the factors that contribute to the changes in the global and regional connectivity across the markets over the three investment horizons.

This study has successfully decomposed the various market linkage indicators into scale-dependent sub-components. As such, market integration in the Asia-Pacific real estate markets is a “multi-scale” phenomenon.

This study aims to explore how a Chinese lesson study (LS) supports a teacher's learning of transforming curriculum reform ideas into classroom practices.

Data analyzed in this study included lesson plans, three videotaped research lessons, three audio-taped group meetings, interviews, the teacher's reflection journals and other related materials. Clarke and Hollingsworth's interconnected model of professional growth (IMPG) was adopted as the theoretical and analytical framework for examining the teacher's learning process.

This study found that teachers can deepen their understanding of innovative curriculum ideas and implement them through an iterative cycle of planning, enactment and reflection in LS. Involving knowledgeable others in the process and reflecting on evidence-based evaluation of students' learning outcomes is crucial for changing the teacher's knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and teaching practices. Theoretical tools, such as learning trajectory, are useful for transforming curriculum reform ideas that teachers find abstract and overly broad into concrete and actionable lesson designs.

Theoretically, this study can broaden our knowledge about how the under-studied mechanism of Chinese LS can contribute to helping teachers to transform reform ideas into classroom practices. Practically, this study provides suggestions for researchers and educators to reflect on and improve the effectiveness of teachers' professional development programs in a reform context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how digital technologies are used for facilitating knowledge sharing and decision-making through enhanced coordination and communication and their impact on job performance in organizations.

A conceptual model is developed within the background of the social capital theory through a comprehensive review of the related literature for exploring how digital technologies can improve knowledge sharing and decision-making via enhanced communication and coordination between individuals in organizations for better job performance. This model is then tested and validated based on structural equation modeling of the collected survey data in Australia.

This study shows that digital technology enhanced coordination and communication have significant impact on knowledge sharing. It finds out that digital technology driven coordination significantly influences decision-making and digital technology driven knowledge sharing significantly influences decision-making. Furthermore, this study reveals that enhanced decision-making and knowledge sharing can lead to better job performance in organizations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to explore the role of digital technologies in enhancing knowledge sharing and decision-making for better job performance in a digitalized working environment in organizations. The validated model can be used as the foundation to further investigate the changing role of digital technologies in driving knowledge sharing for better performance of individuals and competitive advantages of organizations.

In acoustic detection technology, optical microcavities offer higher detection bandwidth and sensitivity than traditional acoustic sensors. However, research on acoustic detection technologies involving optical microcavities has not yet been reported. Therefore, this paper aims to design and construct an underwater acoustic detection system based on optical microcavities and study its acoustic detection technology to improve its performance.

Based on the principles of optical microcavity acoustic sensors, a signal-detection circuit was designed to form a detection system in conjunction with a laser, an optical waveguide resonator and an oscilloscope. This circuit consists of two modules: a photodetection module and a filter amplification module.

The photodetection module features a baseline noise of −106.499 dBm and can detect device spectral line depths of up to 2410 mV. The gain stability of the filter amplification module was 58 dB ± 1 dB with a noise gain of −107.626 dBm. This design allows the acoustic detection system to detect signals with high sensitivity within the 10 Hz−1.2 MHz frequency band, achieving a maximum sensitivity of −126 dB re 1 V/µPa at 800 Hz and a minimum detectable pressure (MDP) of 0.37 mPa/Hz^1/2, corresponding to a noise equivalent pressure (NEP) of 51.36 dB re 1 V/µPa.

This study designs and constructs a broadband underwater acoustic detection system specifically for optical waveguide resonators based on the sensing principles of silicon dioxide optical waveguide resonators. Experiments demonstrated that the signal detection module improves the sensitivity of underwater acoustic detection based on optical waveguides.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the impact of the carbon intensity constraint policy (CICP) on green innovation.

This study takes the implementation of the CICP as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a quasi–difference-in-difference method to investigate the impact of the CICP on firm green innovation from a microeconomic perspective.

The CICP significantly limits the quality of firms’ green innovation. Among the range of green patents, the CICP distorts only patents related to CO₂ emissions. The inhibitory effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and heavily polluting firms. R&D investment and green investor are identified as the main mechanism.

These findings provide evidence for the influence of the CICP on firm green innovation, which can guide policymakers in China and other emerging economies that prioritize carbon intensity constraint targets and the improvement of relevant auxiliary measures.

Governments and firms should have a comprehensive understanding of environmental policies and corporate behavior and need to mitigate the negative impact through a combination of measures.

This study contributes to the literature by providing additional empirical evidence regarding the two opposing sides of the ongoing debate on the positive or negative effects of CICP. It also provides new evidence on the policy effect of the CICP on firm green innovation, together with its mechanisms and heterogeneous influences.

Due to their very different contexts, the responses made by property hosts to online reviews can differ from those posted by hotel managers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of the responding behavior of hosts on peer-to-peer property rental platforms.

This study applied a comprehensive framework based on the theory of planned behavior. Empirical models are constructed based on 89,967 guest reviews with their associated responses to reveal the responding pattern of property hosts.

Unlike hotel managers, property hosts are more likely to reply to positive than to negative reviews; moreover, when they do choose to respond to negative reviews, they are likely to do so negatively, in a “tit-for-tat” way. This study also finds that one reason for the difference of responding patterns between property hosts and hotel managers is the hosts’ lack of experience of consumer relationship management and service recovery.

This study provides a good start point for future theoretical development regarding effective responding strategy on peer-to-peer property rental platforms, as well as some useful implications for practitioners.

This study is an early attempt to analyze the impact of the particularity of emerging platforms on the responding behavior of service providers based on a comprehensive conceptual framework and empirical model thus provides a good starting point for the further investigation of effective response strategies on these emerging platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze price transmission in the Chinese pork market between 1994 and 2016 and examine any incidence and causes of asymmetric price transmission.

The approach uses threshold autoregressive models, asymmetric error correction models and autoregressive moving average models to examine the price transmission using monthly pig and pork prices from 1994 to 2016.

While a symmetric price transmission between pork and pig prices was identified for the period between June 1994 and June 2007, an asymmetric price transmission response between pork and pig prices was found for the period July 2007 to June 2016. Key factors behind the asymmetric price transmission include the chicken price and China’s provisional purchasing and stockpiling policy which is having a counter-productive impact on prices.

The paper contributes to the literature by examining price transmission in two different periods: 1994 to 2007 where prices are lower and more stable; and 2007 to 2016 where prices are higher and volatile. The paper examines the impact of production and market policies on price transmission in the Chinese pork and pig market, with several policy implications.