Despite the People’s Republic of China government being the most aggressive in pursuing the carbon neutrality goal, it remains the world’s largest carbon emitter and polluting country. This study ...used 31 provinces’ panel data from 2010 to 2019 to compare fiscal decentralization’s impact on regional carbon emissions. It applied SBM-DEA undesirable models to calculate the Malmquist index and study environmental governance performance. It then used the systematic GMM model to explore fiscal decentralization’s influence on environmental governance performance. It is found that fiscal decentralization in eastern China exhibited a strong positive relationship with environmental governance performance. With high tax autonomy, local governments implemented the best tax policies for clean production, raising enthusiasm for enterprises’ green production. Nevertheless, there was no relationship between fiscal decentralization and environmental governance in poorer central and western regions with less tax collected. Benefits that arose from fiscal decentralization were limited. Moreover, more elite officials working in affluent cities and wealthier citizens have a higher expectation of environmental governance. These lead to better environmental and carbon emission policies. This paper also brings policy implications: 1) the central government should raise local government flexibility to use financial resources for environmental management. 2) Local government performance appraisal should include environmental protection (including carbon emission control). 3) The production taxes retained by local governments should be minimized to reduce governments’ incentives to obtain taxes from polluting/high energy consumption industries. 4) Raise government officials’ income in poorer regions to attract talented officials to work.
A positive and robust destination image endows a competitive advantage. As architecture appeals to tourists, it may be helpful to improve people’s perceptions of a place’s image. Social media ...cultivates the destination image. This study focused on the interrelationship of architectural heritage and destination image and aimed to investigate the potential of architectural heritage YouTube videos in communicating and cultivating the destination image of Beijing. It collected and analysed 2237 YouTube videos in French and 25,234 comments related to Beijing’s architectural heritage in tourism. The social networks analysis found that viewers lacked interaction. The sentiment analysis via artificial intelligence findings demonstrate that most video descriptions (94%) and viewers’ comments (91%) had a neutral or complimentary attitude on the buildings’ heritage in Beijing. The keyword in context (KWIC) results found that when people viewed Beijing’s architectural heritage tourism relevant videos and were fascinated by the content, they associated it with China rather than the city where the architectural heritage was located. This indicates a cultivation effect on the destination country image of China. The significance of this study is to provide suggestions to improve a country’s destination image with YouTube via architectural heritage. It also raises the importance and social awareness of architectural heritage conservation and provides insights for policymakers on destination country image building.
Carbon neutrality is one of the most critical global concerns at present. As one of the largest social media, Twitter is used widely by individuals, organisations, and government agencies to share ...their comments and perceptions on carbon neutrality. This study collected 26425 English and 20331 French tweets to compare the differences between French and English tweets. Social network analysis found that users in the French social networks interacted more frequently than the English ones. The geodesic analysis evidenced that the connection of any two users required about five intermediate users on average in French networks, while English ones required seven intermediate users. The modularity metrics of the English network were higher, indicating that users in English networks did not communicate with different clusters and people in carbon neutrality issues. In addition, the French network of carbon neutrality activists comprised politicians, government agencies, journalists, NGOs, and companies, while those in the English network mainly included companies, media, and politicians. Sentiment analysis and independent samples t-test have confirmed that despite the types of activists and the interactions between clusters being different, negative Tweets were more than positive ones in English and French networks, especially in French networks. It may be caused by people’s dissatisfaction with the government’s current carbon neutrality policy. By analysing the social pattern on Twitter, the research results allow people to know more about the means to enhance carbon-neutral knowledge sharing, which has the policy and social significance for addressing climate change.
The Chinese government set a goal in 2009 to cut carbon emissions by 40–45 percent of 2005 GDP per unit by 2020. The role of fiscal decentralization reform in strengthening environmental governance ...has gained importance. This paper explored the impact of fiscal decentralization reform from 2010 to 2019 on carbon dioxide emissions in China. We utilized the first-order differential dynamic panel econometrics model to examine the correlation between fiscal decentralization and carbon dioxide emission under fiscal imbalance and transfer indirect effects. The findings revealed that 1) fiscal imbalance reduced CO
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emissions due to the decentralization of revenue, and expenditure asymmetry undermined CO2 emissions control. 2) The central government’s transfer payments offset the negative consequences of a fiscal imbalance. The fiscal decentralization of the government caused a difference between regional income and expenditures in the budget. However, it could affect local government expenditure on carbon emission control through central transfer payments, which could restrain carbon emissions and control environmental pollution. 3) The impact of fiscal decentralization on carbon dioxide emissions was influenced by the industrial structure with the U-Shape effect. This was because the adjustment of the industrial structure was cross-term. In the early stage of the industrial structure adjustment, there was a significant decline in coal consumption demand and carbon emissions reduced. However, as the proportion of the secondary industry increased, there was a significant positive correlation between the secondary sector and carbon dioxide emissions in China. Our findings have important policy implications. First, while the promotion of Chinese officials is based on local GDP performance, locals may introduce green GDP as the criterion for rating governments’ performance. Second, local governments should improve environmental governance by increasing technical, environmental protection, and innovation investment. All in all, the findings provide a theoretical basis for relevant research and policy suggestions for China.
One major change in the modern construction industry worldwide in recent years is moving toward prefabricated buildings (offsite construction) to achieve sustainable development. Despite an increase ...in attention to ESG due to global stock markets’ requirements and prefabricated buildings aid industries in achieving the ESG goal, few or even no research investigated the ESG attributes of the prefabricated buildings. Additionally, ESG subitems in different industries receive varying attention. Developed countries are primarily subject to ESG rules, but ESG laws in developing countries are at their infant stages. No study examined the effects of economic progress on prefabricated buildings’ ESG attributes. The research gaps are filled by visualising and clustering the WoS and Scopus articles’ keywords, themes, and authors’ locations. This article also studied the evolution of this field. Based on the science map modularity cluster analysis, cost control is the most concerned issue in developed and developing countries. There are far more articles related to sustainability and environmental aspects of prefabricated buildings. Although the governance aspects of prefabricated buildings have not been thoroughly studied, inadequate governance increases bond yields. Therefore, future research on prefabricated buildings may expand to governance aspect to benefit industry and academia.
Central macrosegregation and coarse microstructure are the main defects in ingot castings of high alloy steels. Rapid cooling associated with continuous casting could be beneficial in improving the ...internal quality of ingot castings. This work evaluated the effects of superheat and cooling intensity on the solidification structure and macrosegregation in 6Cr13Mo stainless steel billet. Numerical modeling was performed to determine the cooling conditions of a continuous casting billet. The simulated cooling conditions were used to solidify 6Cr13Mo steel samples in a thermal simulator. Experimental results suggest that low superheat of the melt combined with an increased cooling intensity reduce central segregation and form refine microstructure. Relationships between the macrosegregation index, (Km_i), of solute elements in the final solidification zone and secondary dendritic arm spacing (λ2), which inversely proportional to cooling rates, conform to simple monotonic equations. Such monotonic relationships indicate that increasing cooling rates is an effective way of reducing central macrosegregation and refining microstructure of 6Cr13Mo steel billet.
Housing safety and health problems threaten owners' and occupiers' safety and health. Nevertheless, there is no systematic review on this topic to the best of our knowledge. This study compared the ...academic and public opinions on housing safety and health and reviewed 982 research articles and 3,173 author works on housing safety and health published in the Web of Science Core Collection. PRISMA was used to filter the data, and natural language processing (NLP) was used to analyze emotions of the abstracts. Only 16 housing safety and health articles existed worldwide before 1998 but increased afterward. U.S. scholars published most research articles (30.76%). All top 10 most productive countries were developed countries, except China, which ranked second (16.01%). Only 25.9% of institutions have inter-institutional cooperation, and collaborators from the same institution produce most work. This study found that most abstracts were positive (n = 521), but abstracts with negative emotions attracted more citations. Despite many industries moving toward AI, housing safety and health research are exceptions as per articles published and Tweets. On the other hand, this study reviewed 8,257 Tweets to compare the focus of the public to academia. There were substantially more housing/residential safety (n = 8198) Tweets than housing health Tweets (n = 59), which is the opposite of academic research. Most Tweets about housing/residential safety were from the United Kingdom or Canada, while housing health hazards were from India. The main concern about housing safety per Twitter includes finance, people, and threats to housing safety. By contrast, people mainly concerned about costs of housing health issues, COVID, and air quality. In addition, most housing safety Tweets were neutral but positive dominated residential safety and health Tweets.
The world’s population is getting older these days. Frailty, a gerontologic health condition associated with ageing, has serious consequences. One crucial remedy for the elderly population is the ...development of ageing-in-place infrastructures. To better understand the market requirements for ageing housing units, the causes of downsizing and the governmental measures to ameliorate the situation, face-to-face in-depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted in this study. Elderly residents of two significant ageing-in-place institutions in Hong Kong, along with their caregivers, were interviewed. The method of methodological triangulation was used to combine interviews, records, and communication tools to increase the reliability and trustworthiness of the findings. The provision of facilities for the elderly has successfully established a pathway for creating and making housing spaces available to families who need larger homes, while the elderly typically downsize from larger homes and relieve their financial needs. It is also found that a digital divide exists; some respondents suggested that they do not know about computers and do not use smart facilities in their homes.
•This study explores how YouTube facilitates construction safety knowledge sharing through the perspective of two-step flow theory.•Via social network analysis and semantic analysis, this study ...explored the video network and investigate how sentiment affects users’ viewing and commenting behaviours.•This study reveals that most top commenters were construction safety experts and staff from training institutes or companies, who attempted to market their brands via YouTube.•Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm results indicated that neither the opinion leaders nor the users had a strong will to interact with others.•Opinion leaders might use videos with negative emotions for effective knowledge sharing.
This study explores how YouTube facilitates construction safety knowledge sharing. It contributes to knowledge by applying two-step flow theory, social network analysis, and semantic analysis to explore the video network and investigate how sentiment affects users’ viewing and commenting behaviours. By conducting data mining and interactive visualisation algorithms, this study analysed 500 construction safety videos from 2007 to 2021, 2000 users and 2608 comments about these videos. Most top commenters were construction safety experts and staff from training institutes or companies. They attempted to market their brands via YouTube. 3722-word pairs semantic analysis, indicated that most opinion leaders expressed their opinions positively. Half of the construction safety YouTube videos were uploaded in 2020 and 2021, indicating that YouTube social network and video making activities became prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, the US accounts for half of the top ten videos uploaders. Many YouTube videos mentioned social media such as “Facebook,” “Instagram”, “Twitter,” and “LinkedIn”, evidenced cross information sharing among social network platforms. Popular Indonesian words like “Bangunan” (building), “kerja” (work) and Ahmedabad (India’s industrial hub) evidenced the popularity of Indonesian and Indian in sharing construction safety knowledge via YouTube. Unlike many YouTubers in the entertainment sector who utilised it to interact with fans, Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm results of 277 YouTube video clusters revealed that neither the opinion leaders nor the users had a strong will to interact with others.
•Analyse English and French Tweets about “occupational safety” through social network analysis and sentiment analysis.•Reveal the dominant role of strong tie in information dissemination on ...Twitter.•Analyse social structure of “occupational safety” twitter networks and the attributes of English and French opinion leaders.•The number of extreme negative French tweets was more than English, negative tweets were more likely to be favorited.•Offer suggestions for policy makers, occupational safety organisations when they wish to share occupational safety knowledge via Twitter.
To study the social structure of English and French Tweets of occupational safety and their sentiment distributions, this study applied NodeXL and MeaningCloud to analyse 17,147 English Tweets and 16,618 French Tweets about “occupational safety” in Twitter. We found that French and English Twitter users who are interested in this topic did not usually interact. While top English Twitter influencers were professors, top French influencers were government officers and individuals. Clusters of Twitter members interested in occupational safety had a low tendency to reach people in other groups. Most failed to make good use of weak ties to increase their impact and shared information about occupational safety outside their circle of friends. This overthrows previous research that Twitter’s social network was built based on the weak tie: Twitter users follow commentators, celebrities, and opinion leaders who do not know personally. Besides, we also conducted sentiment analysis via machine learning algorithms. We found that the more positive sentiment of an English Tweets, the more likely it will be retweeted. Yet, the more negative sentiment of a French Tweets, the more likely the Tweets will be retweeted. Thus, negative occupational safety Tweets have stronger impacts than positive ones among French but not English Tweets. While sentiment analysis results of French Tweets indicated that most Twitter users discussed occupational safety issues with a neutral tone, the number of extreme negative in French Tweets was a lot more than that of English. That reflects languaculture differences, and informal institutions impact users’ behaviours.
