Specific Human Resource Practices Towards Middle Managers and Their Effects on Their Strategic Roles

This research focuses on the contribution of human resource managers to activate and develop the potential of middle managers in a strategy development process. Precisely, the attention is directed on specific practices used by human resource managers and their effects on strategic roles of middle managers in emerging market companies. A survey questionnaire was distributed to 350 CEOs of large Tunisian companies participating in the Industrial Upgrading Program. The results of the application of structural equation methods show the existence and significant and positive effects of specific human resource practices on strategic roles of middle managers. Participation in the decisions and team/group incentives are used by middle managers and influence all strategic roles of middle managers. However, pre-employment training is used towards middle managers, but it has no effect on all strategic roles of middle managers.

Research on the Industrial Upgrade of Vegetable Growers in Shaanxi: A Cross-Regional Comparative Analysis of Experience Reference

The prime goals of this article are to classify farmers’ production structures in different regions through comparative analysis and propose a structural framework that can quantify the transformation and upgrade of the vegetable industry in Shaanxi. The study utilized New Structural Economics (NSE) theory to construct the theoretical model, and the empirical data set has been crafted from 1992 vegetable growers in the Shaanxi, Hebei, and Shandong provinces. We qualitatively evaluated the potentiality of the Shaanxi vegetable industry, facilitating an industrial upgrade by drawing on the development experience of other regions. More specifically, we utilized the tomato growers to construct a five-step analysis method to transform and upgrade the vegetable industries. This article found that the chosen three provinces have structural differences and similarities in their production sides, and, compared with Hebei and Shandong, the vegetable industry in Shaanxi is still in the catching-up stage. Hebei has similar planting characteristics to Shaanxi, but the production characteristics of growers in Shaanxi are quite different from those in Shandong. Therefore, tomato growers in Hebei are the desired learning object for growers in Shaanxi. By learning planting experience from Hebei growers, tomato growers in the Shaanxi Province can improve their yield and product quality. We found that Shaanxi farmers have 15.57 percent improvement potential in improving crop management and rational allocation of production materials. Proper information-sharing platforms should be implemented to grasp consumption trends on the demand side and guide industrial upgrading.

Influencing factors and paths of upgrading consumer goods industry in Shanghai: a FsQCA approach

PurposeThis study examines the factors that influence the improvement of the consumer goods sector in three dimensions (technology, internal factors and external environment) for exploring the upgrading paths of Shanghai's consumer goods industry.Design/methodology/approachThis paper targeted eight sub-industries of consumer goods as case studies, including food processing, and investigated from qualitative and quantitative perspectives using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework.FindingsThe study confirms the diversity of paths to promote the upgrading of the consumer goods industry in Shanghai, and three paths are summarized in this paper. The “human–environment” linkage upgrade path is to bring sufficient economic contribution to help industrial upgrading by expanding market share, and this path is suitable for large enterprises in the industry to adopt; the “internal factor aggregation” upgrading path is to strengthen the aggregation effect of resources, form industrial clusters and link high human aggregation with industrial aggregation to exert leverage to transform and upgrade the consumer goods industry, and this path is suitable for SMEs in the industry to adopt; the “technology–environment” linkage upgrade path is to use technological factors for product innovation to occupy a favorable market position, to obtain high economic returns and realize industrial upgrading under the joint action of technology and external environment, and this path is suitable for high-tech enterprises to adopt.Originality/valueShanghai still has a large area for growth toward foreign metropolises, under the backdrop of the strong development of new manufacturing. Also, to diversify their investment portfolio, the consumer goods industry should focus on population, job density and industrial growth while looking into industrial aggregation.

The role of environmental regulation, industrial upgrading and resource allocation on foreign direct investment: Evidence from 276 Chinese cities

Environmental pollution is becoming more and more prevalent in China, accompanied by the excessive expansion of the country's foreign direct investment in the scale of resource-based industries. This article uses the panel data of 276 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016 to estimate the impact of environmental regulation on foreign direct investment by employing the Spatial Durbin model. The empirical results show that: firstly, environmental regulation, and foreign direct investment have an obvious spatial correlation. Secondly, environmental regulation significantly inhibits foreign direct investment and has significant negative space spillover. Thirdly, non-eastern cities' environmental regulation has significantly greater inhibitory effects on foreign direct investment than eastern cities, and the key cities' environmental regulation has greater inhibitory effects than ordinary cities. Finally, from the perspective of industrial upgrading and resource configuration, environmental regulation has significantly promoted foreign direct investment and have significant negative space spillovers. Therefore, the reasonable use of environmental regulatory measures through industrial upgrading and resource configuration to attract clean, capital-intensive and technology-intensive enterprises and to achieve the effect of "decontamination and clean" for foreign-funded enterprises is critical.

The effects of the environmental protection tax law on heavily polluting firms in China

In 2016, China implemented an environmental protection tax (EPTL2016) to promote the transformation and upgrading of heavily polluting industries through tax leverage. Using panel data of China’s listed companies, this study assesses the treatment effects of the EPTL2016 on the transformation and upgrading of heavily polluting firms by incorporating the intermediary role of the financial market. The empirical findings show that the EPTL2016 significantly reduced the innovation investment and productivity of heavily polluting firms but had no significant effect on fixed-asset investment. Additionally, EPTL2016 reduced the supply of bank loans to heavily polluting firms and increased the value of growth options for private enterprises and the efficiency of the supply of long-term loans to heavily polluting firms. Although the environmental policy of EPTL2016 benefits the transformation and upgrading of heavily polluting industries in many aspects, it generally hinders the industrial upgrading because of the reduction of bank loans.

Credit Resource Availability and Innovation Output: Evidence from Chinese Industrial Enterprises

This paper investigates the effect of credit availability on the number of industrial enterprises' patents from the perspective of financial geography, using the number of bank branches in the vicinity of industrial enterprises in China as a proxy variable. The number of patents is a proxy for the innovation output of an enterprise. The study finds that the higher availability of credit resources, represented by the number of bank branches in the vicinity, inhibits the innovation output of enterprises, and this inhibitory effect is more obvious in state-owned enterprises and large enterprises. Higher availability of credit resources leads industrial firms to fall more easily into the resource curse trap and thus fail to gain more innovative capabilities. This paper also provides a theoretical and data base for China's inability to complete industrial upgrading; it provides new evidence for the phenomenon of insufficient innovation capacity of industrial enterprises under China's rapid economic development in recent years; and it also provides a policy reference for financial supply reform. Keywords: Availability of credit resources, Innovation output, Financial geography.

Research on Art Intervention in Rural Design Based on the Cultural Ecology: A Case Study of the Xun Jiansi Village in Jiangxi Province, China

In 2021, the world will enter the post-epidemic era. China is at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan for the integration of urban and rural development and rural revitalization. At the same time, the internal circular economy brings opportunities for rural development and regional revitalization. This article uses interdisciplinary research methods, integrates various design models involved in cultural ecology, and strengthens the connections between them, combined with innovative thinking in rural design, art promotion, cultural inheritance, and industrial upgrading paths. The article intends to solve how to use environmental art and public Art, experimental art and other art forms are involved in rural design, and based on the theoretical framework of cultural ecology, the rural design method is constructed through the case analysis of the Xun Jiansi village, and the innovative and characteristic development path of art intervention in rural design is studied.