Strengthening Local Governance in Health Financing in China: A Text-Mining Analysis of Policy Changes between 2009 and 2020

In the last two decades, developing countries have increasingly engaged in improving the governance of their health systems and promoting policy design to strengthen their health governance capacity. Although many well-designed national policy strategies have been promulgated, obstacles to policy implementation and compliance among localities may undermine these efforts, particularly in decentralized health systems. Studies on health governance have rarely adopted a central-local analysis to investigate in detail local governments’ distinct experiences, orientations, and dynamics in implementing the same national policy initiative. This study examines the policy orientations of prefectural governments in strengthening governance in health financing in China, which has transitioned from emphasizing the approach of fiscal resource input to that of marketization promotion and cost-containment regulation enforcement at the national level since 2009. Employing text-mining methodologies, we analyzed health policy documents issued by multi-level governments after 2009. The analysis revealed three salient findings. First, compared to higher-level authorities, prefectural governments generally opted to use fiscal resource input over marketization promotion and cost-containment regulation enforcement between 2009 and 2020. Second, policy choices of prefectural governments varied considerably in terms of enforcing cost-containment regulations during the same period. Third, the extent of the prefectural government’s orientation toward marketization promotion or cost-containment regulation enforcement was not only determined by the top-down orders of higher-level authorities but was also incentivized by the government’s fiscal dependency and the policy orientations of peer governments. These findings contribute to the health governance literature by providing an overview of local discretion in policy choices, and the political and fiscal dynamics of local policy orientations in promoting health governance in a decentralized health system.

The Influence of R&D in Mining on Sustainable Development in China

Mining and the utilization of mineral resources, especially coal for energy consumption, are considered a major contributor to China’s total index of environmental pollution, but there is less focus on its sustainable development. This study focused on the influence of research and development (R&D) on the sustainable development capabilities of 45 coal mining cities in China from 2008 to 2017. These cities were grouped into growing, maturity, declining, and regeneration categories. A DEAP model together with the Malmquist productivity index were used in calculating their sustainable development capabilities. It emerged that the R&D inclination for the coal mining cities was low at an average of 0.3406 and its influence has not pushed enough to reach the production frontier. The overall sustainable development capabilities of the four categories of coal mining cities were 0.6918 and also proved to have an unstable trend. There was evidence of inefficiencies in some categories of resource input and output. Technological changes (TECHCH) that promote the sustainable development capabilities grew at 12.2% for the period, which is moderately significant but still needs improvement. Major factors hindering the sustainable development of coal mining cities were insufficient desired input indicators including decisional capabilities, recovery in the treatment of pollution, and effective utilization of resources.

The sunk cost fallacy in the implementation of virtual medical education

Administrative decisions in the medical education are subject to the general theory of management, one of the key concepts of which is «sunk cost» – financial investment, time or other resource input that cannot be returned in the future. In medical education, these include investments in the construction, reorganization and reconstruction of buildings and premises, installations and upgrade of technologies, equipment and software, research and development, training and retraining of pedagogical personnel. One should avoid the sunk cost fallacy by not taking into consideration such non-returnable investment, when making a managerial decision on the implementation of virtual technologies into medical education.

Determinants of a Firm’s Sustainable Competitive Advantages: Focused on Korean Small Enterprises

This study identifies an integrated model of a firm’s sustainable competitive advantages that helps understand how market orientation is related to an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage. An empirical test of the proposed framework utilized data from 312 top management team members or project managers in Korea to access and evaluate resource input levels, organizational capabilities, and overall environmental contexts; it indicates that market and technological resource input and marketing and innovative capabilities mediate the positive impact of market orientation on a firm’s competitive advantages. The findings suggested that technological turbulence’s moderating role weakened the positive effect of technological resource input on innovative capability. Contrastingly, market turbulence has not moderated the influence of market resource input on marketing capability. The results call on management to understand the internal market orientation process to enhance the presence of environmental turbulences in industries, thus increasing the competitive advantage of firms.

Maturity Evaluation of National Agro-technology Park Innovation Network Based on Improved Matter-element Extension Model From the Perspective of Intensive Development

Based on the improved match-element extension model, the maturity of collaborative innovation network in China’s agricultural science and technology parks was explored with 257 national agricultural science and technology parks as research objects. The results show that: (1) the results obtained by measuring the maturity level of collaborative innovation network in national agricultural science and technology parks by asymmetric proximity degree are more consistent with the actual situation;(2) the maturity of collaborative innovation networks in national agricultural science and technology parks are good. Therefore, the park should replace the traditional resource input-driven development model through innovation-driven development to achieve low energy consumption, intensive and high-quality development.

Circular Economy Adoption in the Hotel Industry in Indonesia

The world needs for natural balance and environmental sustainability force companies to change their business model towards a more friendly and caring environment. This is in line with one of the objectives of the SDGs, which is to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. In this regard, one concept that is currently developing is circular economy (CE) which is a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission and energy leakage are minimized by slowing, closing, and narrowing of materials and energy loops (Geissdoerfer : 2018). It is expected that the industry will be able to reduce waste when they implement this concept. The ecosystem can be better maintained and energy can be saved. CE concept can be applied to various industries including hotel industry. It is a part of the hospitality industry that makes a significant contribution to the economy. The problem lies in the level of awareness of the companies themselves and the practicality of the CE concept in hotel industry. Keywords: circular economy, awareness, hotel industry

Research on the Application of VR Technology in the Cultivation of Double Innovation Talents

Shuangchuang talents refer to talents with innovative thinking and entrepreneurial abilities. This is also the main goal of training talents for education and teaching in my country’s higher education institutions. In the process of training and teaching innovative and entrepreneurial talents, there are problems such as imperfect training facilities and insufficient teachers, which have seriously affected the training of innovative talents in universities. The rise of VR technology has provided a new way for the training of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, which not only greatly eases the resource input of talent education in colleges and universities, but also effectively improves the efficiency of talent training. This article conducts detailed research on the application of VR technology in talent education and training from multiple perspectives.

A Theory of Return-Seeking Firms

We introduce a theory of return-seeking firms to study the differences between this and profit-maximising models. A return-seeking objective takes into account the opportunity cost of each additional resource input to a firm’s production as being a potential capital input choice in an alternative project. We find that firm supply curves cease to exist in perfectly competitive markets, supply curves in general may slope up as well as down, that economies of scale are necessary for production, and that firms always produce on a decreasing portion of their cost curve.

Disentangling the mechanisms underpinning disturbance-mediated invasion

Disturbances can play a major role in biological invasions: by destroying biomass, they alter habitat and resource abundances. Previous field studies suggest that disturbance-mediated invader success is a consequence of resource influxes, but the importance of other potential covarying causes, notably the opening up of habitats, have yet to be directly tested. Using experimental populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens , we determined the relative importance of disturbance-mediated habitat opening and resource influxes, plus any interaction between them, for invader success of two ecologically distinct morphotypes. Resource addition increased invasibility, while habitat opening had little impact and did not interact with resource addition. Both invaders behaved similarly, despite occupying different ecological niches in the microcosms. Treatment also affected the composition of the resident population, which further affected invader success. Our results provide experimental support for the observation that resource input is a key mechanism through which disturbance increases invasibility.