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The purpose of this paper is to assess the risk due to climate induced disasters in coastal regions. Coastal areas, being economically attractive and ecologically fragile, need altogether different development approaches. The paper also explores the applicability of stakeholder theory for managing coastal regions in a sustainable manner. This paper should help policymakers when making their decisions to maintain coastal regions’ prosperity.

The paper opted for an exploratory study using secondary information available at various levels. This paper presents the case study of the coastal region of Gujarat. It starts by evaluating the present status of the coastal resources and their degradation. It then assesses the risk due to climate induced coastal hazards. It has critically reviewed the policy response towards coastal issues and problems. The applicability of stakeholder approach had been tested for coastal management.

The paper has identified that in an absence of stakeholder approach, the current planning strategies have failed to deal with coastal issues and problems. The coastal region needs a special attention for sustaining its development. An integrated regional framework for coastal development is required which encompasses trade‐off among various sectors. The region needs a long‐term regional land use planning, which can facilitate the disaster resilience and adaptation strategies for local communities. Finally adopting a stakeholder approach is recommended, to improve the ecological productivity and biodiversity of the coastal region.

The research has important policy implications for the state of Gujarat and infers that the stakeholder approach is the most appropriate approach for planning the development of the coastal region.

The paper has direct policy implications for the government of Gujarat and Government of India. Coastal planning needs a systematic approach to have an integrated development. The use of stakeholder approach can solve many issues and problems of coastal conflicts. Such an approach is very important for the protection and sustainable development of the coastal region. This also has colossal relevance for any developing countries preparing coastal region development plans.

The suggestions incorporated in the paper have also looked into the consideration of environmental conservation and protection of rights to livelihood for marginalized groups such as fishing communities.

The use of stakeholder theory for public sector planning is a new approach in a research. The paper has delved into the requirement of stakeholder approach in coastal planning for developing the coastal economy and conserving the coastal environment.

This chapter studies the technical efficiencies of Chinese airports by using a meta-frontier production function model which accounts for airports in different regions accessing different technologies. Our empirical results show that the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in the coastal region are higher than their counterparts in the inland region. However, the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in inland region are steadily increasing while the counterparts of airports and provincial output in coastal region are slowly declining. In addition, our analysis of provincial efficiency changes shows that airport productivity has a positive and statistically significant effect on the technical changes of provincial output. Our results partially confirm the success of the government policy of promoting airport construction and development in the western inland region.

Salinity is one of the major problems in the coastal region of Bangladesh that contributes to 20% of the total land area. About 53% of the coastal region is affected by different degrees of salinity. Salinity intrusion in this area is mainly derived through climate change as well as anthropogenic factors that make this region more vulnerable. Hence, salinity intrusion has adverse effects on water, soils, agriculture, fisheries, ecosystem, and livelihoods of this region. To ensure the availability of food as well as drinking water, this chapter highlights how individual and community people have endeavored several adaptation measures to minimize salinity effects. Moreover, it further discloses governmental and other development organizations’ actions toward salinity to reduce its impacts.

Mauritius’s residential real estate sector has undergone an increase in foreign investment over the past decades. This study aims to establish if the increasing level of foreign real estate investments (FREI) has increased land demand and land prices. The study also aims to depict whether the relation between FREI and land prices prevails at an aggregate and/ or a regional level.

Data from 26 regions, classified as urban, rural and coastal is collected on an annual basis over the period 2000 to 2019, and a dynamic panel regression framework, namely, an autoregressive distributed lag model, is used to take into account the dynamic nature of land price modeling.

The findings show that, at the aggregate level, in the long-term, FREI does not have a significant influence on land prices, while in the short term, a positive significant relationship is noted between the two variables. A regional breakdown of the data into urban, rural and coastal was done. In the long term, only in coastal regions, a positive significant link was observed, whereas in urban and rural regions FREI did not influence land prices. In the short term, the positive link subsists in the coastal regions, and in rural regions also land prices are positively affected by FREI.

Unlike other studies which have used quite general measures of FREI, the present research has focused on FREI mainly undertaken in the residential real estate market and how these have affected residential land prices. This study also contributes to research on the determinants of land prices which is relatively scarce compared to research on housing prices.

In recent years, consumers have developed an interest in the type and the quality of food they eat. As consumers’ opinion is very important in identifying development strategy for food industry it seems justified finding out if geographical region had an influence on consumers’ opinion. Furthermore, this is the topic that is still under researched. The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ perception of functional food (FF) relative to geographical region.

Questionnaire based survey was conducted on a representative national sample with participants aged 18 and older (n=687). Participants were divided according to their place of residence taking into account difference in dietary habits, which created two geographical sets: Coastal (Adriatic) Croatia and Continental Croatia. Data were analyzed using univariate statistics and multivariate analysis as exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis and principal component analysis.

The results indicate that Croatian consumers are familiar with the term “FF” and that there are significant differences between two geographical sets of respondents (Coastal Croatia and Continental Croatia) in their willingness to pay for FF. Furthermore, research showed that there is a general lack of confidence in the information provided on the product labels especially in the continental region. The results have shown that “taste” and “price quality ratio” are the most important features in choosing the FF and are equally important to the consumers’ in both geographical region.

Research results indicate a need for development of consumers’ confidence and need to focus mainly on educating consumers in label comprehension. This is particularly true for the Continental Croatia. Targeted advertising should take into account consumers’ preferences, confidence and label comprehension according to their geographical regions.

The case study represents consumers’ opinion coming from different geographical regions (Coastal Croatia and Continental Croatia) regarding FF. In this research the most important attributes in choosing the FF were extracted.

Following the catching‐up hypothesis and using new published provincial data, this paper examines Chinese regional productivity growth by way of catch‐up in the reform period. It provides a general catch‐up measurement and a special assessment for regional development “trickle‐down” effects. Number of measurements include regional productivity averages, indices, growth rates, absolute increments, the coefficients of variation, rank correlation coefficients, and so on. The study indicates that the strength of Chinese catch‐up varied from time to time with weakened potentiality and the regional development spreading effects from coastal area to interior provinces have been limited so far. The review of social capabilities indicates that their different degrees of development acted to limit the strength of technological potentiality in the interior areas, though such changes on their surface did not exhibit the uniformly self‐limiting character for different regions. Furthermore, the pace of realization of the potentiality for catch‐up was affected by a number of factors that govern the diffusion of knowledge, the mobility of resources and the rate of investment.

History has taught us that every aspect of the world around us is changing. Right from its formation, the earth has been evolving climatically, edaphically, and biotically to its present state. The forcing for all these changes in the past was natural, and human activities had least influence till the industrial revolution. Since the beginning of the 18th century, human activities associated with the industrial revolution have changed the composition of the atmosphere and thereby having a greater influence on the earth's climate. The use of fossil fuels like coal and oil coupled with deforestation has increased the concentration of heat-trapping “greenhouse gases,” which prevent the heat from the earth escaping to space. Because of this, the very greenhouse gases, which helped sustain life on the earth under normal circumstances, have become detrimental due to its higher concentration. Several models have predicted that the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases produce an increase in the average surface temperature of the earth over time. Rising temperatures may, in turn, produce changes in precipitation patterns, storm severity, and sea level, commonly referred to as “climate change.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate change broadly as “any change in climate over time whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.” The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines climate change as “a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity, that alters the composition of the global atmosphere, and that is in addition to natural climate variability over comparable time periods.”

Market integration in China is still progressing, while the border effects of trade among regions still exist. The question of whether eliminating or weakening regional bias can promote of China's agricultural trade still remains an important issue. This paper analyzes the impact of regional bias on China's agricultural trade.

This paper constructs a pure exchange computable general equilibrium model of nine regions and three sectors, and analyzes the impact of regional bias on China's regional agricultural trade; Comparing the differences of regional bias on China's inter-regional and external agricultural trade, the paper especially analyzes the impact of the agricultural imports and exports in eight regions of China.

The results show that regional bias has had substantial impacts on China's agricultural trade. Elimination of regional bias would therefore increase China's agricultural exports and imports by factors of 1.32 and 1.63, respectively while its agricultural trade deficit would increase by 84%. Inter-regional agricultural trade in China would increase by 3.53 times. With the elimination of regional bias, the Northern coastal, Central and Northwestern regions would have the largest increase in inter-regional agricultural trade. Unlike the Northern coastal region, inter-regional agricultural import in the Central and Northwestern regions tends to be greater than inter-regional agricultural exports.

This paper thus aims to fill existing gap in investigating the impacts of regional bias on China's agricultural trade. Firstly, the model proposed in this paper does not only consider the linkage between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, but also the inter-regional agricultural trade linkages of the different regions in China. Secondly, the authors decompose home bias into national and regional biases and assess how regional bias affects agricultural trade of the various regions of China.

Discusses the pattern of the regional distribution in the Chinese economy of Direct foreign investment (DFI) in the context of the open‐door policy and the regional difference in investment environments. Presents a regression analysis on the effects of DFI on the economic growth in the eastern and western regions, using pooled time‐series and cross‐section data for 16 provinces over a seven‐year period (1986‐92). Discusses other important factors influencing regional economic development including rural industry development, differential growth of fixed capital investment and exports, and domestic capital flow from the western region to the eastern region. A case study of the effect of DFI on the intra‐provincial economic inequality in Guangdong Province is presented and some conclusions and policy implications are drawn.