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The notion that China is factory of the world is now changing. Factories in China are shifting their production base to neighboring Asia, primarily because of higher input costs in China, a volatile Chinese exchange rate, and protectionist measures targeted against Chinese exports. In this paper, we examine the location substitution effect for China: Chinese firms are exporting primary, intermediate and machinery items, meant for producing final output in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Results suggest that GMS countries are exporting finished items to China, that are increasingly getting manufactured using primary and intermediate inputs imported from China.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

This study aims to explore the extent to which Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) rely on supranational institution – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – versus host country institutional quality to navigate their foreign location choice.

This study uses a conditional logit regression model using a sample of 1,302 greenfield investments by Chinese MNEs in 54 BRI participating countries during the period 2011–2018.

The results indicate that as a supranational institution, the BRI serves as a substitution mechanism to address the deficiencies in institutional quality in BRI participating countries, thereby attracting Chinese MNEs to invest in those countries. In addition, the BRI’s substitution effect on host country institutional quality is more pronounced for large MNEs, MNEs in the manufacturing industry and MNEs in inland regions.

This study expands the understanding of the BRI as a supranational institution for MNEs from emerging markets and reveals its substitution effect on the host country institutional quality. Furthermore, it highlights that MNEs with diverse characteristics gain varying degrees of benefits from the BRI.

For a long time, telecommuting has been expected to affect the aggregated travel pattern. A number of cause‐effect relationships between telecommuting and travel have been identified in literature concerning different types of trip with both decreased and increased travel as the outcome. To explore how telecommuting affects travel and travel patterns in Sweden an empirical study was conducted. The most important cause‐effect relationship concerns three categories: work‐trips, non‐work‐related trips and combination trips. The travel pattern, which is based on the telecommuter's regularity of trips, the point in time for different types of trip and the travel mode used, is also studied. The present results are compared with international findings, with the aim to create better understanding of how telecommuting affects the telecommuter's travel pattern and approximately estimate the magnitude of the travel impact. Finally, there is a contextual discussion concerning the probable total travel effects of telecommuting.

Despite the recent trend of off‐shoring branches of UK services industry to remote locations, urban theory has yet to enlist a theory of industrial rents that formally takes into account the properties of substitution between locations. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the Fujita, et al. model in order to develop theoretical foundations for a pricing theory of contemporary commercial real estate markets.

The paper employs panel data methods for the simultaneous estimation of local market rent structures, which include a complex of spill‐over effects from all other parts of the national market. The estimations are based on time series of locally adjusted estimates of tenancy demand and supply proxies for 48 UK office centres. Influences from the entity of UK regions are considered by applying a variety of deterministic and stochastic structural variability tests. The estimated structures are subjected to multivariate co‐integration tests for an examination of the stability of structural differentials.

The paper appears to find considerable support to the hypothesis that rental spill‐overs exist across the network of office centres in the UK. It suggests that the structure of these markets is characterised by certain properties of substitution and complementarity that have generally been observed in a wide range of real consumer or producer markets. This finding is critical to the development of a policy theory for national planning, which takes into account the impacts of local planning policies on national aggregate economic welfare.

This analysis is limited by the unavailability of a coherent theoretical micro‐economic framework, which may be the focus of further research.

The focus of this paper is on offices and business services industry but the principles can be extended to include industrial space. The paper questions some of the central assumptions and methodological approaches used in existing industrial location theory. It proposes a model that considers location pricing and allocation in relation to strategies to improve the spatial organisation of multinational services firms.

This study aims to test the effect of Seattle’s discontinuous sidewalk requirement, on the number of housing units per construction permit.

This study uses discontinuity linear regression (DLR) on a database of Seattle’s housing construction permits during January-2015 to January-2018, controlled by 51 socioeconomic, planning and geographic variables. The sidewalk requirement is continuous inside the designated urban villages; however, it is spatially and quantitatively discontinuous in the rest of the city: certain blocks at certain locations require sidewalks’ design and construction in permits with six or more housing units. DLR detects the effect of the discontinuity while controlling for a vast array of confounding variables.

The primary finding is that the discontinuous requirement reduces the number of housing units in about 75% of a housing unit per permit, which at the aggregate level amounts to around 335 fewer housing units during the period of analysis.

The database is relatively small, which has limited a more thorough specification process and robustness tests.

Besides directly testing the effect of a discontinuous in-kind development contribution, the research setup allows to discuss a wider, more structural problem: the possibility of contributions avoidance due to spatial substitution. In contrast, spatially continuous (i.e. city-level) contributions cannot be avoided by performing spatial substitution, and they are internalized by the housing supply side (market-neutral).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of outward foreign direct investment (O‐FDI) on the competitiveness of home‐country export.

This paper employs a six‐year data set from Taiwanese manufacturing data for 15 industries over the period between 1991 and 2007.

The authors find that exports in Taiwan are positively associated with O‐FDI by Taiwanese firms. This finding supports the view that outward FDI complements home country exports and concurs with the majority of earlier empirical findings which focus on developed home countries. The authors also find that such effect is stronger for Taiwanese FDI in China than in other countries and in traditional sectors than in modern sectors.

These findings suggest that location‐and industry‐specific characteristics moderate the strength of the relationship between O‐FDI and home country exports.

As climate change impacts residential life, people typically use heating or cooling appliances to deal with varying outside temperatures, bringing extra electricity demand and living costs. Water is more cost-effective than electricity and could provide the same body utility, which may be an alternative choice to smooth electricity consumption fluctuation and provide living cost incentives. Therefore, this study aims to identify the substitute effect of water on the relationship between climate change and residential electricity consumption.

This study identifies the substitute effect of water and potential heterogeneity using panel data from 295 cities in China over the period 2004–2019. The quantile regression and the partially linear functional coefficient model in this study could reduce the risks of model misspecification and enable detailed identification of the substitution mechanism, which is in line with reality and precisely determines the heterogeneity at different consumption levels.

The results indicate that residential water consumption can weaken the impact of cooling demand on residential electricity consumption, especially in low-income regions. Moreover, residents exhibited adaptive asymmetric behaviors. As the electricity consumption level increased, the substitute effects gradually get strong. The substitute effects gradually strengthened when residential water consumption per capita exceeds 16.44 tons as the meeting of the basic life guarantee.

This study identifies the substitution role of water and heterogeneous behaviors in the residential sector in China. These findings augment the existing literature and could aid policymakers, investors and residents regarding climate issues, risk management and budget management.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effects of recent demographic transition and rising labor costs on agricultural production structure and pattern in China during 1998-2012.

The authors, first, theoretically discuss the effects of changing relative input prices due to rising labor cost on producers’ decisions regarding input mix (substitution effect), output level, and product quality (output effect). A logarithmic mean Divisia index decomposition method is then applied to empirically identify these effects at aggregated levels, followed by an analysis based on the visualization of land use indicators on changing cropping patterns across Chinese provinces.

The authors find that tightened effective agricultural labor supply and rises in rural labor costs are associated with divergent changes in input mixes and output choices across products. Producers of land-intensive products focusing more on input mix adjustment, while those of labor-intensive products seem to more likely to adjust output choices. Producers’ adaption strategies also varied across Chinese provinces due to natural conditions, leading to shifts and concentrations in the regional distribution of agricultural products, with lower-value bulk products concentrating in the plain areas, whereas higher-value horticulture products increasingly prevailing in sloped areas.

This paper illustrates how adjustments in input mixes and output choice in Chinese agriculture counteracted disadvantages caused by rising labor costs and how such adjustments are product and region specific. Based on these observations, implications regarding further innovations in production technology and institutional arrangements needed within China’s agricultural sector are highlighted in the paper.