Search results

The smart city process encompasses many features. The two chapters before this has succinctly introduced the concepts and some parts that relate to smart city. The process in implementation is dissected in this section of the book. It starts from the conceptualisation of the process to further definitions of the subject. Also, traits attributed to smart cities are explained in smart environment, economy, governance, living, people and mobility. Urbanisation brings along with it several features and terminologies. One of which is smartisation fused into the smart city process. The smartisation of the city system aim to bring developments in making the city wireless and developing smart families at the same time. Also, there are smart general administrations and improvement of social administrations, development of smart transportation, improvement of smart medicinal treatment, develop-ment of smart city administration, development of green city, and development of smart vacationer focus. Other smart city processes include the drivers, barriers, and benefits.

Since 1960s it has been realized that the bilateral trade at international level cannot be explained solely by the classical and neoclassical models of trade based on inter-industry trade. There is an existence of export and import within the same industry among the trading partners. Intra-industry trade (IIT) for products and product groups has been empirically observed by several studies. However, there is not much literature available on IIT in services. So also, from country perspective many studies are based on IIT for advanced countries. There is not much empirical evidence available for IIT among the emerging economies. The study aims to analyze the IIT in tourism services for five major emerging economies constituting BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The group constitutes 41% of world population with 24% of world GDP and 16% share in world trade. The study used both static and dynamic approaches to measure the IIT between India and other BRICS nations between 2018 and 2020. To empirically estimate the IIT, the study employs Grubel and Lloyd index and Brülhart index (MIIT). The study reveals that India had a very high level of intra-tourism trade with Brazil and South Africa. While with China and Russian Federation it was moderate. Results denote a correlation between the theory of international trade and tourism. There is two-way trade in BRICS tourism flows.

This research investigates the influence of bank loans on Chinese listed companies’ performance by collecting data on bank loan amounts and indicators used to measure performance, such as return on assets (ROA) and Tobin’s Q, semiannually from 2015 to 2020. Pooling panel regression models are employed to determine the relationship between firms’ performance and their amount of bank loans. This study contributes to the literature by controlling for additional bank loan characteristics and comparing the relevance between bank loans and bond issuance. The authors also find that the relationship between firm performance and bank loans shows a nonlinear concave relationship, suggesting the negative impact is more severe in the high loan-to-asset region. The subsample after 2018 shows a significantly positive relationship, indicating that the impact of COVID-19 might alter the prevalent relationship. In addition, short-term debt has a more noticeable negative impact on firm performance than long-term debt. Both results become weaker after COVID-19. This chapter can help listed companies to trade off using long-term or short-term bank loans as their debt financing methods and approach a better capital structure.