Importance measures have been widely studied and applied in reliability and safety engineering. This paper presents a general formulation of moment-independent importance measures and several commonly discussed importance measures are unified based on Minkowski distance (MD). Moment-independent...

For a long time, the traditional pattern of urban-rural human settlements has been shaped in reference to the existence of the urban-rural dual structure. In this paper, we put forward the notion of triaxiality of human settlements, and used the standards conversion entropy weight method to...

This study assesses the future impacts of biofuel production from the world’s major biofuel producers (the US, Brazil and the EU) over the next decade on global markets and the resulting spatial implications on income distribution and agricultural production in China. Rising global commodity...

Many cities worldwide have considered vehicle restriction policies to curb proliferating problems related to traffic and pollution. At the beginning of 2011, Beijing became the first city to allocate vehicle license plates using a lottery. We provide a background on Beijing׳s lottery and...

China and the United States of America (US) are developing renewable energy concurrently. In this paper, we seek the opportunities for potential cooperation between these two countries based on the analysis of annual economic data. A mathematical model has been established to characterize...

There have been growing concerns about the effects of food safety standards on agricultural trade throughout the world. The objective of this paper is to assess the impacts of food safety standards on tea exports from China, the world′s largest tea producer and exporter. To achieve this...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/24/07.

This paper applies both parametric and non-parametric approaches to evaluate Economies of Size and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in Alberta cow-calf production based on the unbalanced panel data from 196 farmers during the time period from 1995 to 2002. Under the parametric approach, a random...

Compliance and enforcement is a fundamental issue within environmental law. But despite its pertinence, it is an area that has been neglected in academic research. Addressing this gap, this timely book considers the circumstances under which networking can increase the effectiveness of...

This paper extends prior research on energy inefficiency in China by utilizing a unique shadow price framework allocation in 30 Chinese provinces. We estimate the shadow price for energy input using the framework of production, and use the ratio of the shadow price to the market price to...