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The central debate on pollution havens concerns whether the level of environmental regulation in developing countries influences foreign investment location decisions. Most empirical studies are based on aggregate data, while micro-level evidence is relatively lacking in the literature. To fill this research gap, this paper tests for the existence of intracountry pollution havens in China by estimating the determinants of foreign investment flows based on a large firm-level panel dataset. Evidence from this study supports the existence of pollution havens within China in certain industries. However, the sensitivity of foreign investment to environmental regulation varies significantly across industries with different pollution characteristics. Furthermore, when the impact of government subsidies on foreign investment is accounted for, the results show that subsidies can compensate for pollution treatment costs in provinces with stricter environmental regulation.

The new Silk Road provides cross-border-e-commerce firms with an opportunity to widen their markets. Under this circumstance, the preference recognition of countries and inventory allocation among overseas warehouses both become critical issues to solve. Three Chinese smartphone brands, including HTC, Huawei, and MI, are selected in this chapter for their relatively enormous sales. DHgate and AliExpress websites are chosen as platforms to analyze the sales for data availability. This chapter first depicts key features of the sales and then, based on which, divide countries into several groups according to their preference for phones by cluster analysis. Then, based on the results of cluster analysis, this chapter further models the inventory assignment among the seven major overseas warehouses that were built by AliExpress in 2015. The results show that the HTC seems to be pursuing the “high value with high price” strategy, while the other two companies seem to be pursuing a hybrid strategy of “low-price” strategy and “high value with low price” strategy. This chapter also provides an assignment pattern of inventory among the overseas warehouses based on the real data of sales and costs.

With the advance of the Silk Road Initiative proposed by China, it has been a focus of China government to develop strategic emerging industries. The development of strategic emerging industries needs the support of competitive intelligence on many aspects such as strategical planning, policy making, industrial structure adjustment, and technology innovation. However, so far there are few studies toward the competitive intelligence systems for strategic emerging industries. In this article, we focus on a number of issues related to the competitive intelligence for strategic emerging industries in China. First, we conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis on the situations of strategic emerging industries in China, based on which the necessity of building a competitive intelligence (CI) service system for strategic emerging industries is discussed. Next, the authors present a framework of a CI service system for strategic emerging industries in China. The principles, components, working process, and product forms are deeply described. The CI service system proposed in this article consists of a cooperation network platform, three layered organizations, and three systems, which integrates organizations, information, people, network, and service platforms into an ecosystem to offer competitive intelligence supports for government, industry, and enterprises. Finally, the authors discuss a case study of the proposed CI service system for the new energy automobile industry.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.