In order to assess the environmental efficiency of power industry in China, this paper first proposes a new non-radial DEA approach by integrating the entropy weight and the SBM model. This will ...improve the assessment reliability and reasonableness. Using the model, this study then evaluates the environmental efficiency of the Chinese power industry at the provincial level during 2005–2010. The results show a marked difference in environmental efficiency of the power industry among Chinese provinces. Although the annual, average, environmental efficiency level fluctuates, there is an increasing trend. The Tobit regression analysis reveals the innovation ability of enterprises, the proportion of electricity generated by coal-fired plants and the generation capacity have a significantly positive effect on environmental efficiency. However the waste fees levied on waste discharge and investment in industrial pollutant treatment are negatively associated with environmental efficiency.
► We assess the environmental efficiency of power industry in China by E-SBM model. ► Environmental efficiency of power industry is different among provinces. ► Efficiency stays at a higher level in the eastern and the western area. ► Proportion of coal-fired plants has a positive effect on the efficiency. ► Waste fees and the investment have a negative effect on the efficiency.
For the survival of cancer and many other complex diseases, gene–environment (G-E) interactions have been established as having essential importance. G-E interaction analysis can be roughly ...classified as marginal and joint, depending on the number of G variables analyzed at a time. In this study, we focus on joint analysis, which can better reflect disease biology and is statistically more challenging. Many approaches have been developed for joint G-E interaction analysis for survival outcomes and led to important findings. However, without rigorous statistical development, quite a few methods have a weak theoretical ground. To fill this knowledge gap, in this article, we consider joint G-E interaction analysis under the Cox model. Sparse group penalization is adopted for regularizing estimation and selecting important main effects and interactions. The “main effects, interactions” variable selection hierarchy, which has been strongly advocated in recent literature, is satisfied. Significantly advancing from some published studies, we rigorously establish the consistency properties under high dimensionality. An effective computational algorithm is developed, simulation demonstrates competitive performance of the proposed approach, and analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data on stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) further demonstrates its practical utility.
China has one of the world's largest health insurance systems, composed of government-run basic health insurance and commercial health insurance. The basic health insurance has undergone system-wide ...reform in recent years. Meanwhile, there is also significant development in the commercial health insurance sector. A phone call survey was conducted in three major cities in China in July and August, 2011. The goal was to provide an updated description of the effect of health insurance on the population covered. Of special interest were insurance coverage, gross and out-of-pocket medical cost and coping strategies.
Records on 5,097 households were collected. Analysis showed that smaller households, higher income, lower expense, presence of at least one inpatient treatment and living in rural areas were significantly associated with a lower overall coverage rate. In the separate analysis of basic and commercial health insurance, similar factors were found to have significant associations. Higher income, presence of chronic disease, presence of inpatient treatment, higher coverage rates and living in urban areas were significantly associated with higher gross medical cost. A similar set of factors were significantly associated with higher out-of-pocket cost. Households with lower income, inpatient treatment, higher commercial insurance coverage, and living in rural areas were significantly more likely to pursue coping strategies other than salary.
The surveyed cities and surrounding rural areas had socioeconomic status far above China's average. However, there was still a need to further improve coverage. Even for households with coverage, there was considerable out-of-pocket medical cost, particularly for households with inpatient treatments and/or chronic diseases. A small percentage of households were unable to self-finance out-of-pocket medical cost. Such observations suggest possible targets for further improving the health insurance system.
It is difficult for micro and small entrepreneurial firms (MSEFs) to access external financing from formal financial institutions because financial institutions cannot obtain sufficient and reliable ...credit information about MSEFs. With the development of the internet and data collection technologies, more and more data can be accessed from different sources, and logistic regression model often suffers from bad performance. In this paper, we propose a credit scoring model using composite MCP logistic regression and firstly apply the proposed method to predict the probability of default of MSEFs in China. The proposed method can carry out parameter estimation and automatic bi-level selection of variables simultaneously with respect to the grouping structure of variables. Empirical results of MSEFs with complex grouping structure data have shown that the proposed method outperforms forward stepwise logistic regression, MCP logistic regression and group MCP logistic regression. In addition, we find that gross salary, tax paid, bank and injury insurance information of MSEFs are the most important factors to predict the probability of default.
Cure rate models have been widely adopted for characterizing survival data that have long-term survivors. Under a mixture cure rate model where the population is a mixture of cured and susceptible ...subjects, a primary goal is to study covariate effects on the cure probability and survival function of the susceptible subjects. In this article, we propose a penalization method for estimating the mixture cure rate model where we explicitly consider the structural effects of covariates. The proposed method is more informative than the standard estimations and more flexible than the existing works on structural effects. Depending on data characteristics, we develop different penalties and corresponding computational algorithms. Simulation shows that the proposed method outperforms the alternatives by more accurately estimating parameters and identifying relevant variables. Two breast cancer datasets, one with low-dimensional clinical variables and the other with high-dimensional genetic variables, are analyzed.
The main goal of this study is to examine the associations between illness conditions and out-of-pocket medical expenditure with other types of household consumptions. In November and December of ...2011, a survey was conducted in three cities in western China, namely Lan Zhou, Gui Lin and Xi An, and their surrounding rural areas.
Information on demographics, income and consumption was collected on 2,899 households. Data analysis suggested that the presence of household members with chronic diseases was not associated with characteristics of households or household heads. The presence of inpatient treatments was significantly associated with the age of household head (p-value 0.03). The level of per capita medical expense was significantly associated with household size, presence of members younger than 18, older than 65, basic health insurance coverage, per capita income, and household head occupation. Adjusting for confounding effects, the presence of chronic diseases was negatively associated with the amount of basic consumption (p-value 0.02) and the percentage of basic consumption (p-value 0.01), but positively associated with the percentage of insurance expense (p-value 0.02). Medical expenditure was positively associated with all other types of consumptions, including basic, education, saving and investment, entertainment, insurance, durable goods, and alcohol/tobacco. It was negatively associated with the percentage of basic consumption, saving and investment, and insurance.
Early studies conducted in other Asian countries and rural China found negative associations between illness conditions and medical expenditure with other types of consumptions. This study was conducted in three major cities and surrounding areas in western China, which had not been well investigated in published literature. The observed consumption patterns were different from those in early studies, and the negative associations were not observed. This study may complement the existing rural studies and provide useful information on western Chinese cities.
The health insurance system in Taiwan is comprised of public health insurance and private health insurance. The public health insurance, called "universal national health insurance" (NHI), was first ...established in 1995 and amended in 2011. The goal of this study is to provide an updated description of several important aspects of health insurance in Taiwan. Of special interest are household insurance coverage, medical expenditures (both gross and out-of-pocket), and coping strategies.
Data was collected via a phone call survey conducted in August and September of 2011. A household was the unit for survey and data analysis. A total of 2,424 households covering all major counties and cities in Taiwan were surveyed.
The survey revealed that households with smaller sizes and higher incomes were more likely to have higher coverage of public and private health insurance. In addition, households with the presence of chronic diseases were more likely to have both types of insurance. Analysis of both gross and out-of-pocket medical expenditure was conducted. It was suggested that health insurance could not fully remove the financial burden caused by illness. The presence of chronic disease and inpatient treatment were significantly associated with higher gross and out-of-pocket medical expenditure. In addition, the presence of inpatient treatment was significantly associated with extremely high medical expenditure. Regional differences were also observed, with households in the northern, central, and southern regions having less gross medical expenditures than those on the offshore islands. Households with the presence of inpatient treatment were more likely to cope with medical expenditure using means other than salaries.
Despite the considerable achievements of the health insurance system in Taiwan, there is still room for improvement. This study investigated coverage, cost, and coping strategies and may be informative to stakeholders of both basic and commercial health insurance.
This study measures the environmental efficiency of China based on environmental super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (SEDEA) model by using data of 30 provinces in China during the period of ...2000–2010. We find that environmental efficiencies across 30 provinces show regional disparities. Cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have experienced improvement in efficiency while Qinghai showed worse performance. More generally, East areas are more efficient in production while the west rank the last with central areas ranking in between during the period studied. Policies should be established to further promote production efficiency.
•Propose a new insurance customer profitability measurement.•Firstly apply RF regression to forecast insurance customer profitability.•A case study of the insurance industry from Taiwan.•Finds ...several most important factors to predict insurance customer profitability.
This paper proposed a new customer profitability method for the insurance industry by adding liability reserve. Considering the historical purchasing behavior and the foreseeable future cash flow, the proposed method can measure the real insurance customer contribution effectively. In addition, this paper firstly applies random forecast regression, a method for Big Data analytics, to forecast insurance customer profitability. Comparing with other models, we find that random forest outperforms traditional forecasting methods, such as linear regression, decision tree, SVM and generalized boosted model. Empirical study finds that customer’s region, age, insurance status, sex and customer source are the most important factors to predict insurance customer profitability.
Economic growth in China needs lots of energy to support, but how to obtain a sufficient energy supply is now a problem. Meanwhile, environmental pollution caused by energy consumption is a problem ...that urgently needs to be solved. In order to adapt China’s fast developing economy, and on the basis of current policies, paying more attention to energy saving and environmental protection is more important. Therefore, to reasonably analyze China’s regional environmental efficiency and its determinants has practical significance. This article uses the Super-SBM model under undesirable outputs to measure regional environmental efficiency in China, and then explores influential factors of China’s environmental efficiency between 1991–2001 by means of the Tobit regression model. The empirical results show that during the sample period, the overall average level of China’s environmental efficiency is low, and the gap between different provinces and areas is large. The eastern area’s efficiency is obviously superior to the central and western area, which shows the necessity at present to optimize regional integration and promote innovation of energy conservation and emission reduction technology. At the same time, the “Eleven-Five ” year plan clearly states the energy saving and consumption reducing index, which motivates a great increase in China’s overall environmental efficiency, and promotes the fast development of resource conservation and environmentally friendly societal construction. The analysis of the influence factors by the Tobit model shows that fiscal decentralization and technology progress can increase environmental efficiency on the whole while economic scale and regional difference can also influence the efficiency. However, these factors’ influence is not the same in different areas. Finally, based on the research results, this paper gives policy recommendations on reducing pollution emissions and increasing China’s environmental efficiency.
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