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Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a worldwide public health problem which imposes a significant financial burden not only on patients but also on the healthcare systems, especially under the pressure of the rapid growth of the elderly population in China. The purpose of this paper is to examine the hospitalization costs of patients with CKD between two urban health insurance schemes and investigate the factors that were associated with their inpatient costs in Guangzhou, China.

This was a prevalence-based, observational study using data derived from two insurance claims databases during the period from January 2010 to December 2012 in the largest city, Guangzhou in Southern China. The authors identified 5,803 hospitalizations under two urban health insurance schemes. An extension of generalized linear model – the extended estimating equations approach – was performed to identify the main drivers of total inpatient costs.

Among 5,803 inpatients with CKD, the mean age was 60.6. The average length of stay (LOS) was 14.4 days. The average hospitalization costs per inpatient were CNY15,517.7. The mean inpatient costs for patients with Urban Employee-based Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI) scheme (CNY15,582.0) were higher than those under Urban Resident-based Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI) scheme (CNY14,917.0). However, the percentage of out-of-pocket expenses for the UEBMI patients (19.8 percent) was only half of that for the URBMI patients (44.5 percent). Insurance type, age, comorbidities, dialysis therapies, severity of disease, LOS and hospital levels were significantly associated with hospitalization costs.

The costs of hospitalization for CKD were high and differed by types of insurance schemes. This was the first study to compare the differences in hospitalization costs of patients with CKD under two different urban insurance schemes in China. The findings of this study could provide economic evidence for understanding the burden of CKD and evaluating different treatment of CKD (dialysis therapy) in China. Such useful information could also be used by policy makers in health insurance program evaluation and health resources allocation.

The purpose of this study is to sort out the potential dark sides of shared leadership so as to promote a more comprehensive and balanced views of the impact of shared leadership and provide directions for future research.

Through extensive database and manual searches, 766 literature records were obtained. After three rounds of literature screening, 17 studies were retained. On this basis, the 17 studies were coded and analyzed.

From the perspectives of individual motivation, hierarchical functionalism and leadership role configuration, the existing studies have explored the negative impacts of shared leadership on team members, formal team leaders and the overall work teams. Specifically, for team members, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like power struggle, role stress and knowledge hiding. For formal team leaders, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like psychological territorial loss, leadership motivation declines and the dualistic paradox of self and group. For the overall work teams, shared leadership may cause negative consequences like team performance inhibition, low decision-making efficiency, team responsibility dispersion and team creativity decline. Meanwhile, contextual factors play a key role in determining the effects of shared leadership.

Through a systematic review of the negative impact of shared leadership, this study responds to the research calls for exploring the dark sides of shared leadership, provides the academic community with a more comprehensive and balanced view of the impact of shared leadership and identifies several directions for future research.

Tourism may have important positive and negative economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts. However, cultural and natural resources are also the base to the development of competitive destinations and changes in these resources can have an important impact on tourism development. Despite the considerable literature regarding the impacts of tourism, a limited number of studies examine the impact of the environment on tourism, specifically the impact of air quality (AQ). Therefore, this paper aims to review what is known about the impact of AQ on tourism demand, analysing the different methods and approaches used, as well as the results obtained.

A systematic literature review method was used to examine the state of the art in this topic and identify research gaps and new research directions. Only 26 papers were identified that examine the impact of AQ on tourism demand.

The majority of the studies were carried out in China and investigate the impact of AQ on tourism from the perspective of tourism demand. Both global (tourism demand) and individual (tourist perceptions) approaches have been used to investigate the impact of AQ on tourism.

This is the first systematic literature review on the impact of outdoor AQ on tourism demand. Moreover, this paper analyses the methods and approaches that have been used in the literature to examine the impact of outdoor AQ on tourism demand. The paper ends with a discussion on the identified research gaps concerning the influence of AQ on tourism development.

Food and beverage (F&B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must diversify their markets and obtain predictable sources of revenues to withstand difficult and volatile periods such as the post-pandemic geopolitical scenario, recently burdened by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On the other hand, another strand of the literature suggests that public procurement could be considered a great source of income, enabling solid contracts, revenues and cash-flow stability. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of public procurement, the adoption of e-commerce platforms and their interactions in affecting the exporting performances of SMEs operating in the F&B sector.

The study retrieves data from 2,186 Italian F&B manufacturing SMEs relying on Margò by Cribis database. Therefore, it conducts a structured equational model (SEM) to test the developed hypotheses empirically.

The findings reveal that digital selling platforms positively affect exports, whereas public procurement negatively affects F&B SMEs exports. Nonetheless, findings underline that the interaction between public procurement and the adoption of digital selling platforms dampens public procurement's negative effects on exports.

This study brings an original contribution to the F&B literature by conducting empirical research on an extensive sample of firms from one of the most influential countries in the F&B vertical, Italy, with officially registered data. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers the investigation of the relationship between public procurement and e-commerce platforms in affecting F&B SMEs' export performances.

The purpose of this study is to empirically evaluate the impact of coercive pressure, normative pressure and mimetic pressure on digital transformation and benefits in the maritime shipping context.

The authors collect data from a survey of 119 shipping companies, shipping agencies, port corporations and shipping forwarders in Taiwan and apply a structural equation model to test the research hypotheses.

Four conclusions can be drawn: First, digital transformation mainly results from coercive pressure and mimetic pressure. Second, another positive and important source of pressure for shipping digital transformation is the fact that competitors are gradually undergoing digital transformation and have gained recognition from customers. Third, shipping professional organizations and association (e.g. IACS, IAPH, Baltic International Maritime Commission) must keep up with the trend toward digital transformation and put forward guidelines and recommendations that can be followed in order to lead the maritime shipping industry. Fourth, digital transformation has great potential to help deliver the benefits (i.e. improve efficiency, relationship with customers and sustainability).

This research explores the digital transformation of the shipping industry through the lens of institutional theory. The results show that digital transformation is mainly due to coercive pressure and mimetic pressure. Digital transformation has been found to bring benefits that can help shipping operators allocate their resources effectively, thereby increasing operational efficiency, improving relationships with customers and enhancing sustainability.

The shipper selects a suitable shipping route and plans for a voyage in order to import and export cargo on the basis of published sailing schedules. The reliability of the sailing schedule will influence the shipper’s logistics expense, which means that the logistics costs will depend on the reliability of schedules published by container shipping companies. Therefore, it is important to consider factors which can cause delays would for container ships sailing on sea routes. The reliability of published sailing schedules can be affected by a number of different factors. This study adopts the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to estimate the importance of the delaying factors in a sailing schedule. In addition, the consistent fuzzy preference relations (CFPR) method is applied to identify the subjective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. The entropy weight method combined with the actual performance of the container shipping company are both used when estimating the objective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. According to the analysis results, the criteria can be divided into four quadrants with different management implications, which indicate that instructions for chase strategy, sailing schedule control, fleet allocation, transship operation arrangement and planning for ports in routes are often ignored by container shipping companies. Container shipping companies should consider adjusting their operational strategies, which would greatly improve their operational performance.

This study aims to consider active vision in low-visibility environments to reveal the factors of optical properties which affect visibility and to explore a method of obtaining different depths of fields by multimode imaging.Bad weather affects the driver’s visual range tremendously and thus has a serious impact on transport safety.

A new mechanism and a core algorithm for obtaining an excellent large field-depth image which can be used to aid safe driving is designed and implemented. In this mechanism, atmospheric extinction principle and field expansion system are researched as the basis, followed by image registration and fusion algorithm for the Infrared Extended Depth of Field (IR-EDOF) sensor.

The experimental results show that the idea we propose can work well to expand the field depth in a low-visibility road environment as a new aided safety-driving sensor.

The paper presents a new kind of active optical extension, as well as enhanced driving aids, which is an effective solution to the problem of weakening of visual ability. It is a practical engineering sensor scheme for safety driving in low-visibility road environments.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a Christian perspective on the ethical issues related to natural procreation and artificial reproduction methods.

This paper uses descriptive and comparative methodology between the ethical aspects specific to natural procreation and artificial reproduction.

Religious beliefs play a significant role in shaping the moral perspective when an infertile couple is confronted with the choice between natural procreation and artificial reproduction.

This paper survey a broad bibliography and offers a critical evaluation of the moral aspects specific to different methods of reproductive technologies compared to the natural procreation approach.