Recently, as vehicle computing technology has advanced, the paradigm of the vehicle has changed from a simple means of transportation to a smart vehicle for safety and convenience. In addition, the previous functions of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) such as traffic accident...

A building needs to be designed for the whole period of its useful life according to its requirements. However, future climate predictions involve some uncertainty. Thus, several sustainable strategies of adaptation need to be incorporated after the initial design. In this sense, tunnel...

Resilience thinking has strongly influenced how people understand and pursue sustainability of linked social-ecological systems. Resilience thinking highlights the need to build capacity and manage general system properties in a complex, constantly changing world. I modified an analytical...

Recent clinical research has studied weight responses to varying diet composition, but the contribution of changes in macronutrient intake and physical activity to rising population weight remains controversial. Research on the economics of obesity typically assumes a “calories in, calories...

Using a panel dataset of 31 provinces in China, this paper computes the output-oriented Malmquist productivity indexes and their decomposition in China's agricultural sector over the period 1994–2008. In the second-stage regression, which uses the efficiency change and technical progress rates...

This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests a new view of the so-called voracity effect according to which windfall gains in productivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth....

In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property...

“Best practice” in microfinance holds that interest rates should be set at profit-making levels, based on the belief that even poor customers favor access to finance over low fees. Despite this core belief, little direct evidence exists on the price elasticity of credit demand in poor...

We examine the long term dynamic relation between inflation and the price of gold. We begin by showing that there is no cointegration between gold and inflation if the volatile period of the early 1980s is excluded from the data. However, we are also able to demonstrate that there is significant...

Some strategic raw materials do have an extremely unsecure supply situation. Several working groups around the world have made criticality assessments for metallic raw materials to analyze the driving impact factors for this instability. However, the influences on raw material availability are...