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This paper aims to explore how upstream supply chain companies will control the carbon emissions and price decisions of products when the government implements environmental tax policy on consumers. It provides some suggestions to control carbon emissions for the government and manufacturers.

This study establishes two-echelon Stackelberg game models with and without the implementation of environmental tax policy on consumers in a centralized scenario and a decentralized scenario. Through the comparative analysis of the four models, the optimal emission abatement and pricing strategies are obtained.

This paper concludes that implementing environmental tax policy on consumers within the market’s acceptable range is more beneficial to the retailer and the environment, as well as the overall social welfare, except for the manufacturer. Moreover, consumer’s low-carbon preference always has a broader impact on carbon abatement and corporate profits than environmental tax coefficient. Finally, the side-payment self-executing contract can effectively ensure that the supply chain members make rational decisions spontaneously while achieving a win-win solution of centralized scenario.

This paper first considers how the government’s environmental tax policy on consumers will affect the decision-making of supply chain companies, and proposes an improved side-payment self-enforcing contract to maximize environmental and economic benefits of centralized scenario. In addition, it provides a reference for the government to adopt both the carbon cap policy and the environmental tax policy.

The paper aims to identify the contributors to freight rate fluctuations in the Suezmax tanker market; this study selected the refinery output, crude oil price, one-year charter rate and fleet development as the main influencing factors for the market analysis.

The paper used the vector error correction model to evaluate the degree of impact of each influencing factor on Suezmax tanker freight rates, as well as the interplay between these factors.

The conclusion and results were tested using the 20-year data from 1999 to 2019, and the methodology and theory of this paper were proved to be effective. Results of this study provide effective reference for scholars to find the law of fluctuations in Suezmax tanker freight rates.

This paper provides a decision-making support tool for tanker operators to cope with fluctuation risks in the tanker shipping market.

Institutional actors are critical allies for grassroots movements, but few studies have examined their effects and variations within the non-democratic context. This chapter argues that while institutional allies are heavily constrained and unlikely to give open endorsement to grassroot activists, some institutional activists indirectly facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes in the process of advancing their own political agendas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 and 2012, I illustrate this argument by examining the Anti-PX Movement – a landmark grassroots environmental movement against a chemical plant – in Xiamen, China. I find that the environmental institutional actors were constrained and divided, yet some still fostered opportunities for movement mobilization and in turn exploited the opportunity created by the protesters to pursue their policy interests, thus facilitating positive movement outcomes. As long as the claims are not politically subversive to the authoritarian rule, this type of tacit and tactical interaction between institutional activists within the state and grassroot activists on the street is conducive to promoting progressive policy changes.

We take a state-stewardship view on corporate governance and executive compensation in economies with strong political involvement, where state-appointed managers act as responsible “stewards” rather than “agents” of the state.

We test this view on China and find that Chinese managers are remunerated not for maximizing equity value but for increasing the value of state-owned assets.

Managerial compensation depends on political connections and prestige, and on the firms’ contribution to political goals. These effects were attenuated since the market-oriented governance reform.

Economic reform without reforming the human resources policies at the executive level enables the autocratic state to exert political power on corporate decision making, so as to ensure that firms’ business activities fulfill the state’s political objectives.

As a powerful social elite, the state-steward managers in China have the same interests as the state (the government), namely extracting rents that should adhere to the nation (which stands for the society at large or the collective private citizens).

As China has been a communist country with a single ruling party for decades, the ideas of socialism still have a strong impact on how companies are run. The legitimacy of the elite’s privileged rights over private sectors is central to our question.

Chinese executive compensation stimulates not only the maximization of shareholder value but also the preservation of the state’s interests.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the post-treatment processes on lattice structures of selective laser melting. Moreover, the effect of pressure during hot isostatic pressing (HIP) is determined.

Three post-treatment processes, annealing at 650°C, 920°C and HIP were adopted. The microstructure evolution and mechanical properties of selective lasering melted Ti6Al4V lattice structures after post-treatment were systematically investigated by optical microscope, scanning electron microscope, electron backscattered diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry and quasi-static mechanics tests.

The main findings in this paper are as below: first, the pores existing in the samples as-fabricated, annealed at 650°C and 920°C are disappeared after HIP. Second, the microstructure and compressive properties after HIP are similar to that after pure annealing at the same temperature. However, the HIPed sample had the highest number of cycles to failure. Third, the fracture mechanism of as-fabricated samples changes from mixed fracture to the micro-voids accumulation fracture after post-treatment processes.

HIP post-treatment can be replaced by annealing at the same temperature when the requirement for porosity and fatigue life is not very high.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a novel current sensor-less drive system for a novel axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor drive to reduce the costs and avoid problems caused by faults of the current sensors.

Commonly, a conventional controller needs at least two current sensors; in this paper, the current sensors are removed by replacing estimated stator current with the extended Kalman filter.

A prototype of the novel axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor is fabricated and tested. It is found that the experimental results confirm the proposed method and show that the control has almost the same performance and ability as the conventional control.

The axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor is one of the most efficient motors, but current sensor-less control of an axial flux-switching permanent-magnet motor with a sandwiched permanent magnet and a unity displacement winding factor has not been specially reported to date. Thus, in this paper, the authors report on current sensor-less control based on the extended Kalman filter for electric vehicles.

Using protest event analysis, this study aims to investigate which risk factors influence the severity of environmental protests in China, thus filling a gap in China-related environmental protest literature.

Using a database derived from media coverage of 129 environmental protests in China from 2009 to 2015, this empirical study identifies underlying risk factors influencing environmental protest severity, quantifies these protest cases and verifies the associations between risk factors and severity using ordered logistic regression.

The results show that higher environmental health threat, economic loss, distrust of local government, lack of local governmental response, improper local government action and higher population density are likely to increase environmental protest severity; however, contrary to expectations, environmental information disclosure has no significant effect. These findings illuminate the vital and variational role of local government throughout all stages of the evolutionary process in environmental protests. Moreover, public distrust of local government is the principal cause of these protests.

This study enhances the understanding of how Chinese environmental protests arise from the identified risk factors and contributes to quantitative multi-case research in this area. Furthermore, the findings may help local governments in China, as well as in other countries, to enact positive measures to prevent serious environmental protests and improve their ability to address the environmental problems that cause protests. More effective governance can decrease the number and severity of environmental protests and thus promote social stability.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new method, namely, “Re-modified quintic B-spline collocation method” to solve the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky (KS) type equations. In this method, re-modified quintic B-spline functions and the Crank–Nicolson formulation is used for space and time integration, respectively. Five examples are considered to test out the efficiency and accuracy of the method. The main objective is to develop a method which gives more accurate results and reduces the computational cost so that the authors require less memory storage.

A new collocation technique is developed to solve the KS type equations. In this technique, quintic B-spline basis functions are re-modified and used to integrate the space derivatives while time derivative is discretized by using Crank–Nicolson formulation. The discretization yields systems of linear equations, which are solved by using Gauss elimination method with partial pivoting.

Five examples are considered to test out the efficiency and accuracy of the method. Finally, the present study summarizes the following outcomes: first, the computational cost of the proposed method is the less than quintic B-spline collocation method. Second, the present method produces better results than those obtained by Lattice Boltzmann method (Lai and Ma, 2009), quintic B-spline collocation method (Mittal and Arora, 2010), quintic B-spline differential quadrature method (DQM) (Mittal and Dahiya, 2017), extended modified cubic B-spline DQM (Tamsir et al., 2016) and modified cubic B-splines collocation method (Mittal and Jain, 2012).

The method presented in this paper is new to best of the authors’ knowledge. This work is the original work of authors and the manuscript is not submitted anywhere else for publication.

Traditional switching harmonic suppressor design methods require domain experts to adjust design parameters due to various complex performance requirements and practical limitations in switching ripple suppressor designs. The purpose of this paper is to present a method for filter parameter design.

An improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA II) was used in the inductor-capacitor-inductor (LCL) filter design to find the optimal design parameters, and a method was proposed to handle the constraints by transforming the them into decision variables.

The performance of the proposed algorithm in parameter designing was verified by simulation on MATLAB and experimental results on hardware-in-the-loop plat-form with StarSim software. The results indicate that the optimization algorithm has a better effect than the traditional expert parameters on each optimization index, especially on the switching harmonic suppression.

The paper presents an improved multi-objective optimization algorithm with ingenious constraints handing to obtain better filter parameters and reduces switching harmonics.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new cubic B-spline (CBS) approximation technique for the numerical treatment of coupled viscous Burgers’ equations arising in the study of fluid dynamics, continuous stochastic processes, acoustic transmissions and aerofoil flow theory.

The system of partial differential equations is discretized in time direction using the finite difference formulation, and the new CBS approximations have been used to interpolate the solution curves in the spatial direction. The theoretical estimation of stability and uniform convergence of the proposed numerical algorithm has been derived rigorously.

A different scheme based on the new approximation in CBS functions is proposed which is quite different from the existing methods developed (Mittal and Jiwari, 2012; Mittal and Arora, 2011; Mittal and Tripathi, 2014; Raslan et al., 2017; Shallal et al., 2019). Some numerical examples are presented to validate the performance and accuracy of the proposed technique. The simulation results have guaranteed the superior performance of the presented algorithm over the existing numerical techniques on approximate solutions of coupled viscous Burgers’ equations.

The current approach based on new CBS approximations is novel for the numerical study of coupled Burgers’ equations, and as far as we are aware, it has never been used for this purpose before.