Yunxian Yan, Lu Tian and Yuejie Zhang
The purpose of this paper is to discover an effective maize price for trading and policy-making reference by assessing the price transmission of the US spot and futures maize…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discover an effective maize price for trading and policy-making reference by assessing the price transmission of the US spot and futures maize prices to Chinese counterparts.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply a systematic, quantitative method to analyze the integration between US and Chinese maize markets. Based on the residuals of the variables through error correction model, the directed acyclic graph (DAG) among six price variables is conducted. With consideration of the dependence on and direction of six price variables, the variance decomposition of each variable is calculated.
Findings
This paper shows that the vertical price transmission passes from wholesale price to farm-gate price. The horizontal price transmission ranges from spot price to futures price at the domestic market and from the American spot price to domestic spot price, from the American spot price to domestic futures price and from the American futures price to domestic futures price. The American maize spot and futures prices, and in particular the spot price, have greater effects on domestic maize prices contemporaneously. It also indicates that the American spot price is the leader price in the long run at both maize markets.
Originality/value
This paper contributes by using the DAG method in this paper. It also contributes by helping policy makers and market participants find the leading prices and offers insight into ways of gaining power of price setting in the maize market.
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Keywords
Jie Chen, Bruce Judd and Scott Hawken
With the dramatic transformation of China’s industrial landscape, since the late 1990s, adaptive reuse of industrial heritage for cultural purposes has become a widely occurring…
Abstract
Purpose
With the dramatic transformation of China’s industrial landscape, since the late 1990s, adaptive reuse of industrial heritage for cultural purposes has become a widely occurring phenomenon in major Chinese cities. The existing literature mainly focusses on specific cases, yet sees heritage conservation similarly at both national and regional scale and rarely identifies the main factors behind the production of China’s industrial-heritage reuse. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in heritage reuse outcomes among three Chinese mega-cities and explore the driving factors influencing the differences.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper compares selected industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, and explores the local intervening factors influencing differences in their reuse patterns, including the history of industrial development, the availability of the nineteenth and/or twentieth century industrial buildings, the existence of cultural capital and the prevalence of supportive regional government policy.
Findings
The industrial-heritage reuse in the three cities is highly regional. In Beijing, the adaptation of industrial heritage has resulted from the activities of large-scale artist communities and the local government’s promotion of the city’s cultural influence; while in Shanghai, successful and more commercially oriented “sea culture” artists, private developers in creative industries and the “creative industry cluster” policy make important contributions. Chongqing in contrast, is still at the early stage of heritage conservation, as demonstrated by its adaptive reuse outcomes. Considering its less-developed local cultural economy, Chongqing needs to adopt a broader range of development strategies.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to knowledge by revealing that the production of industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Chinese mega-cities is influenced by regional level factors, including the types of industrial heritage, the spontaneous participation of artist communities and the encouragement of cultural policy.
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Laila Kechmane, Benayad Nsiri and Azeddine Baalal
The purpose of this paper is to solve the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP), which is an NP-hard problem that involves making strategic decisions as well as tactical and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to solve the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP), which is an NP-hard problem that involves making strategic decisions as well as tactical and operational decisions, using a hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.
Design/methodology/approach
PSO, which is a population-based metaheuristic, is combined with a variable neighborhood strategy variable neighborhood search to solve the CLRP.
Findings
The algorithm is tested on a set of instances available in the literature and gave good quality solutions, results are compared to those obtained by other metaheuristic, evolutionary and PSO algorithms.
Originality/value
Local search is a time consuming phase in hybrid PSO algorithms, a set of neighborhood structures suitable for the solution representation used in the PSO algorithm is proposed in the VNS phase, moves are applied directly to particles, a clear decoding method is adopted to evaluate a particle (solution) and there is no need to re-encode solutions in the form of particles after applying local search.