Rural restructuring is a process of reshaping socio-economic morphology and spatial pattern in rural territory in response to the changes of elements both in kernel system and external system of ...rural development, by optimally allocating and efficiently managing the material and non-material elements in the two systems. It aims at ultimately optimizing the structure and promoting the function within rural territorial system as well as realizing the coordination of structure and complementation of function between urban and rural territorial system. This paper establishes a theoretical framework of rural restructuring through elabo- rating the concept and connotations as well as analyzing the mechanism pushing forward rural restructuring based on the evolution of ＂elements-structure-function＂, and probes the approaches from the three aspects of spatial restructuring, economic restructuring and social restructuring. Besides, the authors argue that the study of rural restructuring in China in the future needs to focus on the aspects of long-term and multi-scale process and pattern, mechanism, regional models, rural planning technology system and standard, policy and institutional innovations concerning rural restructuring as well as the impacts of globalization on rural restructuring, in order to serve the current national strategic demands and cope with the changes of rural development elements in the process of urban-rural development transformation.
Rapid and far-reaching development transition has triggered corresponding restructuring in rural China especially since the turn of the new millennium. Recently, there has been an increasing trend ...emphasizing regional resources in formulating rural development policy and restructuring rural areas. This paper analyzes the rural restructuring in China affected by the allocation and management of critical resources including human resource, land resource and capital, by establishing a theoretical framework of “elements-structure-function” of rural territorial system. It is argued that rural restructuring is a process of optimizing the allocation and management of the material and non-material elements affecting the development of rural areas and accomplishing the structure optimization and the function maximum of rural development system. Due to the constraints from the maintained urban–rural dualism of land ownership and household registration, the rapid rural restructuring under both globalization and the implementation of the national strategies on industrialization, urbanization, informatization and agricultural modernization, the changes of the allocation of critical resources have brought about many problems and challenges for the future development of rural China, such as the nonagriculturalization, non-grain preference and abandonment of farmland use together with the derelict and idle rural housing land, the weakening mainbody of rural development, the unfair urban–rural allocation of capital and its structural imbalance, and so on. Aiming at how to resolve the problems and adapt to the challenges, it is pivotal to restructure the rural development space, rural industry, and rural social organization and management mainbody. Furthermore, it is necessary to restructure the contours of state intervention in rural societies and economies and allocate and manage the critical resources affecting rural development, from the perspectives of integrating urban and rural resources, improving the efficiency of resources utilization, and fully understanding the influences of globalization on rural restructuring in China.
•Rapid development transition has triggered corresponding restructuring in rural China.•Analyzes rural restructuring in China affected by allocation and management of critical resources.•Emphasizes role of regional resources in formulating development policy and restructuring rural areas.•Restructures rural development space, rural industry, and rural social organization and management mainbody.•Fully understanding the influences of globalization on rural restructuring in China.
Currently, the functions of rural territories in metropolitan suburbs have been gradually evolved under rapid urbanization since the turn of the new millennium. Meanwhile, the socio-economic ...morphology and spatial pattern in the rural areas are undergoing dramatic restructuring. This paper takes the Huangshandian village in the suburb of Beijing as a case study area to carry out an empirical study on the process of rural restructuring by adopting the method of participatory rural assessment (PRA) and GIS technology. The results show that since 2000, the Huangshandian village has experienced different industrial transformations from traditional agriculture to the industries of primary processing and eco-tourism. The function of traditional agricultural production is declining gradually, and the industrial production, ecological culture and other multi-functional value of the rural territory have successively appeared. With the evolution and restructuring of socio-economic morphology, there are significant changes in the quantity, structure, and pattern of rural living, production and ecological space accordingly. The mutually reinforced and restrictive relationships among economic restructuring, spatial restructuring, and social restructuring have jointly driven the systematic development of the “natural-ecological-economic-social” systems and the comprehensive promotion of the “production-living-ecology-culture” functions. Based on the analysis of the process of rural restructuring of the Huangshandian village in the aspects of economic restructuring, spatial restructuring, and social restructuring, this paper puts forward some suggestions on land use policy and institutional innovations aiming at optimally allocating the land resources and promoting the rural restructuring in metropolitan suburbs, including accelerating the institutional framework design of rural land transfer, exploring the tourism land management system adapting to the new pattern of rural economy and pushing forward the re-use mechanism of abandoned industrial and mining land.
•The functions of rural territories have been gradually evolved under rapid urbanization.•It is necessary to restructure the rural socioeconomic morphology and spatial pattern.•Economic restructuring, spatial restructuring and social restructuring are mutually reinforced and restrictive.•Land and its utilization play an important role in promoting rural economic and social restructuring.•Rural restructuring relies on land use policy and institutional innovations.
The article discusses mechanisms and policy that stimulate regional economic restructuring. Economic restructuring is conceptualised through the notion of path development. The article distinguishes ...four types of path development: the extension and upgrading of existing regional industries are two types, diversification of existing industries and the creation of new industry paths are the two others and more substantial path developments. A main idea in the article is that new path development requires industry actors who initiate new firms or innovation activities in existing firms, i.e. firm level agency, but that restructuring also requires action by actors operating in the regional support system, i.e. system level agency. System level agency, understood as actions or intervention to transform regional innovation systems to better support economic restructuring, is particularly important for the two most 'radical' types of restructuring, i.e. path diversification and creation, and in regions with thin and specialised knowledge and industrial structure.
The mass concentration of soot aggregates is often estimated from mobility size distributions using a mobility-based effective density, ρeff. This ρeff changes with aggregate morphology. In ...particular, the ρeff of a soot core increases when it becomes compacted by the surface tension of condensing coatings, such as combustion-related vapours, secondary aerosols, and cloud water. The extent of this compaction is a function of coating volume, up to an asymptotic limit of complete compaction. While complete compaction has previously been shown to correspond to a universal, scale-invariant packing factor for sufficiently large aggregates, it has not previously been explicitly quantified. Here, we critically reanalyze multiple datasets compiled from the literature on the ρeff of completely compact soot. We show that, regardless of the coating material, soot aggregates generally become completely compacted following a 5-fold increase in volume. The final aggregate shape is more simply described by ρeff than by mobility diameter or shape factor. Below 140 nm diameter (about 20 aggregate monomers), the compacted ρeff obeys a power law; above 140 nm, it reaches a constant value of 651 ± 8 kg m−3. This ρeff is 3 times larger than that of freshly-produced soot at 140 nm. We provide a parameterization of the compacted ρeff for the estimation of soot mass concentration after coating, or, conversely, for use as a benchmark to estimate the extent of aggregate restructuring. Our parameterization can be easily adapted to other nanoparticle aggregates whose material density is known.
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•Soot aggregates are always completely compacted when coatings reach five-fold the initial aggregate volume.•Above the small-aggregate limit of ∼20 monomers, collapsed soot has a universal, constant effective density.•We synthesize equations describing soot's fractality and mass-mobility relationship across multiple studies and morphologies.
•The Pd/α-MoC catalyst demonstrates an overwhelming selectivity to MMP.•Water treatment induces the formation of a thin layer of MoO3 on catalyst surface.•The heterogeneous layer significantly ...increases the acidity of modified catalyst.•The unexpected activity is attributed to the synergy between Pd and MoC/MoO3 layer.
Selective hydrodeoxygenation of biomass and its derivatives to produce chemicals and biofuels is an effective upgrading strategy to achieve global sustainable development goals. Through the development and utilization of renewable resources, sustainable consumption and production patterns can be promoted and climate change and its impacts can be addressed. Herein, selective hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) of vanillin was conducted by utilizing a Pd/α-MoC catalyst modified with solvent water. The water modification induced the formation of a thin layer of molybdenum oxide on the Pd/α-MoC catalyst surface, which significantly promotes the selective hydrodeoxygenation of vanillin. The conversion of vanillin over the modified Pd/α-MoC catalyst reached 99.9 %, while the selectivity to 4-methyl-2-methoxyphenol (MMP) reached 99.9 % at 0.3 MPa H2 and 80 °C. Comprehensive characterizations elucidate that the heterogeneous layer on the surface of the modified catalyst significantly increases the acidity of the catalyst and improves the removal efficiency of hydroxyl groups, thus improving the high selectivity to the desired product. Moreover, the side reactions are inhibited due to the using of water as the solvent, which contributes a high carbon balance. The modified Pd/α-MoC catalyst exhibits efficient hydrodeoxygenation of vanillin under mild conditions, which suggests an avenue for chemical transformations of biomass derivatives into high value chemicals.
The research results on the global problem of household debt growth, its causes, consequences, social context, and influence on the formation of aggregate demand are presented. It is substantiated ...that with the growth of debts, households are losing their share in aggregate demand, and the state is becoming an increasingly influential player compared to others due to the strengthening of fiscal and regulatory government influence. Facing the increasing debt pressure, households start reducing consumption, thus negatively affecting aggregate demand. The government, on its part, trying to improve the situation, increases subsidies and provides policies that encourage banks to restructure loans, develops restructuring programs, etc. These trends are proven to be of an urgent character and should not be routinized, in order not to distort the market environment or increase the direct influence of the state on purely market processes. The analysis of global experience, carried out in the article, shows that in the condition of economic destabilization debt restructuring is the only way to help the population out of the debt trap. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the ways to harmonize the accumulation of household debt through restructuring, to identify its market mechanisms, and to prove that the state should provide extensive assistance to households trying to overcome the debt trap. Three options for the state participation in the restructuring process have been identified: institutional participation (when the state only provides regulatory support); design and implementation of state restructuring programs; adoption of regulations on compulsory restructuring. New Ukrainian norms and regulations related to forced debt restructuring are analyzed, and their social context is proved to be contradictory. On the one hand, the adoption of corresponding laws became a significant step towards maintaining the social stability of the Ukrainian population against the background of the growing poverty and increasing total indebtedness of the people (even in the sphere of payments for public utility services), and the growing currency risks. On the other hand, Ukrainian market players often show moral hazards of non-compliance with the conditions of debt discipline, which have become part of the financial behavior, negatively affecting the general financial culture.
We show that pay is higher for chief executive officers (CEOs) with general managerial skills gathered during lifetime work experience. We use CEOs' résumés of Standard and Poor's 1,500 firms from ...1993 through 2007 to construct an index of general skills that are transferable across firms and industries. We estimate an annual pay premium for generalist CEOs (those with an index value above the median) of 19% relative to specialist CEOs, which represents nearly a million dollars per year. This relation is robust to the inclusion of firm- and CEO-level controls, including fixed effects. CEO pay increases the most when firms externally hire a new CEO and switch from a specialist to a generalist CEO. Furthermore, the pay premium is higher when CEOs are hired to perform complex tasks such as restructurings and acquisitions. Our findings provide direct evidence of the increased importance of general managerial skills over firm-specific human capital in the market for CEOs in the last decades.
The primary objective of this study is to investigate the opportunities for economic restructuring, resulting in an optimal increase in the energy-environmental efficiency of the global economy. A ...novel stochastic data envelopment analysis with a perfect object method (SDEA PO) constitutes the methodology of the research. We equip SDEA PO with the projected gradient of the efficiency score. We employ the indicators of the gross domestic product (GDP) and carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as output and undesirable output, respectively, and population and clean energy consumption as input and undesirable input, respectively. By using the SDEA PO, we obtain a group efficiency score for the global economy; the projected gradient identifies the direction of optimal economic restructuring. The indicator-wise components of the projected gradient determine locally optimal changes in the shares of each economy, serving particular goals. We use a factor analysis technique to aggregate them into one factor vector that determines the multicriteria optimal structural change. The factor vector determines the redistribution of the GDP, clean energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and population, leading to the maximum possible increase in the energy-environmental efficiency. The suggested approach may be used as a tool for decision-making in a variety of two-tier economic systems.
•Energy-environmental efficiency of the global economy is examined.•A novel stochastic data envelopment analysis with a perfect object is employed.•Ways to increase energy-environmental efficiency are investigated.•Locally optimal economic restructuring is suggested.•Computer R-program is utilized and provided to support further research.
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