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The purpose of this paper was to assess and determine the impact of the five core technologies of Industry 4.0 (3D Printing, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotics) on the organizational performance of the retail industry in the context of Pakistan.

Pakistan's retail industry was chosen as the target sector, and the target population was composed of senior-level employees, including managers from first-level positions to top-level positions, as well as subordinate employees working under the supervision of first-level managers, possessing the technological know-how of Industry 4.0. The data were collected through a matrix-based survey questionnaire that was based on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” The process of data analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics.

The findings obtained by this research work showed a significant relationship among the five core pillars of Industry 4.0 and the organizational performance of Pakistan's retail industry. Besides, the obtained findings provided preliminary evidence that Industry 4.0's disruptive technologies, particularly, 3D printing, big data analytics, cloud computing, IoT and robotics, could help Pakistan's retail industry solve various problems and challenges, such as meager revenues, increased expenses and unorganized systems.

The present study extended the theoretical body of knowledge through studying and examining Industry 4.0's five crucial factors that significantly contribute to the service sector, particularly, the retail industry, of the big emerging markets (BEM) economies, including Pakistan.

This paper aims to conduct a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry. The current trends are analyzed for the industry, showing that this industry is still young and has great potential to boom. Meanwhile, the Asia market is the fastest growth region among the global, to which increasing cruise ships are repositioned by major cruise lines. However, for such a promising industry, the literature review on some state-of-the-art research works suggests that the research works that have been conducted for the cruise shipping are quite limited, and the majority of the works belongs to empirical and descriptive studies, which does not provide optimization-based quantitative analysis on some operation planning problems.

This paper conducts a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry.

In reality, there are some important operation planning problems faced by cruise lines or cruise ships, and four of them are addressed in this paper in response to the fast growing trend. The addressed operation planning problems are cruise fleet management, cruise ship deployment, cruise itinerary design and cruise service planning.

The importance and the attention for the research on the problems are also elaborated in the paper.

This paper aims to build a scientific evaluation index system for regional low-carbon circular economic development. Taking Sichuan Province as the empirical research object, the paper evaluates its low-carbon circular economy (LCCE) development level and proposes policy recommendations for climate change improvement based on the evaluation results.

This paper, first, built an evaluation index system with 30 indicators within six subsystems, namely, economic development, social progress, energy consumption, low-carbon emissions, carbon sink capacity and environmental carrying capacity. Second, develop an “entropy weight-grey correlation” evaluation method. Finally, from a practical point of view, measure the development level of LCCE in Sichuan Province, China, from 2008 to 2018.

It was found that Sichuan LCCE development had a general downward trend from 2008 to 2012 and a steady upward trend from 2012 to 2018; however, the overall level was low. The main factors affecting the LCCE development are lagging energy consumption and environmental carrying capacity subsystem developments.

This paper puts forward relevant suggestions for improving the development of a low-carbon economy and climate change for the reference of policymakers.

This paper built an evaluation index system with 30 indicators for regional low carbon circular economic development. The evaluation method of “entropy weight-grey correlation” is used to measure the development level of regional LCCE in Sichuan Province, China.

Container shipping companies face various risks with different consequences that are required to be mitigated. Limited empirical research has been done on identifying and evaluating risk management strategies in shipping operations with different risk consequences. This paper aims to identify the appropriate risk mitigation strategies and evaluate the relative importance of these strategies.

Literature review and interviews were used to identify and validate the appropriate risk mitigation strategies in container shipping operations. A questionnaire with a Likert five-point scale was then conducted to rank the identified risk mitigation strategies in terms of their overall effectiveness. Top six important strategies were selected to evaluate their relative importance under three risk consequences (i.e. financial, reputation and safety and security incident related loss) through using another questionnaire with paired-comparison. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was then conducted to analyse the paired-comparison questionnaire.

After conducting a systematic literature review and interviews, 18 mitigation strategies were identified. The results from the first questionnaire show that among the 18 strategies, the top three are “form alliances with other shipping companies”, “use more advanced infrastructures (hardware and software)” and “choose partners very carefully”. After conducting fuzzy AHP, the results show that shipping companies emphasize more on reducing the risk consequence of financial loss; and “form alliance with other shipping companies” is the most important risk mitigation strategy.

This paper evaluates the risk mitigation strategies against three risk consequences. Managers can benefit from the systematic identification of mitigation strategies, which shipping companies can consider for adoption to reduce the operational risk impact.

Following Hovland’s persuasion theory, this paper aims to develop a conceptual model and analyzes characteristics of online political deliberation behavior from three aspects (i.e. information, situation and manager). Based on the whole interactive process of online political deliberation, this paper aims to reveal the key points that affect the response effect of the government from the persuasive perspective of online political consultation.

Based on more than 40,000 netizens’ posts and government responses from 2011 to the first half of 2019 of the Chinese political platform, this paper used the text analysis and machine learning methods to extract measurement variables of online political deliberation characteristics and the econometrics analysis method to conduct empirical research.

The results showed that the textual information, political environment and identity of the political objects affect the effectiveness of government response. Furthermore, for different position categories of political officials, the length of political texts, topic categories and emotional tendencies have different effects on the response effectiveness. Additionally, the effect of political time on the effectiveness of response differs.

The findings will help ascertain the characteristics of online political deliberation behavior that affect how effective government response is and provide a theoretical basis for why the public should express their political concerns.

As a crucial institutional form established since the Chinese economic reform, the system of competitive local governments has been shaping the characteristics of China's socialist market economy to a considerable degree.

This study not only adopts the view of existing studies that attribute the economic motive of local governments to rent and consider land public finance as a means through which local governments carry out strategic investment but also attempts to further develop the view within a Marxist analytical framework.

As a result, the local governments have helped to maintain an incredibly high investment rate over a considerable period of time, facilitating the continuous, rapid growth of the Chinese economy.

This study concludes that China's local governments function as the productive allocator and user of rent in the strategic investment based on land public finance and thereby embed themselves in the relative surplus-value production initially arising from competition amongst enterprises, forming the dual structure of relative surplus-value production unique to China's economy.

This study examines whether and how government fiscal pressure influences corporate charitable giving (CCG).

The authors exploit sub-national tax revenue sharing changes as exogenous variations to government’s fiscal pressure at the city level and then construct a quasi difference-in-differences (DiD) model to conduct the analysis based on a sample that consists of 14,168 firm-year observations in China during the period of 2003 to 2012.

The authors found that firms increase charitable donations when local governments face higher fiscal pressure. Such effects are more pronounced for firms that have stronger demand for political connectedness in the sample period. Furthermore, this study’s findings suggest that the timing strategy of donating helps firms to lower the effective tax rate and to build stronger political connections. In addition, donating firms outperform non-donating firms in terms of bank loan access and market reputation.

The authors contribute to at least three lines of literature: first, extend the understanding of timing strategies of corporate charitable behaviors; second, contribute to the literature studying the “crowd out” effect between government-provided charitable funds and private donations; finally, contribute to the emerging literature exploring the financial interests associated with corporate donation strategy (Claessens et al., 2008; Cull et al., 2015).

The migration-tourism discourse has gained attention in global tourism and mobility among scholars because of the vast contributions of migrant visitors to various sectors of the host country's economy, including the tourism and hospitality industry. However, few studies appear to have been undertaken on the subject matter, particularly within the developing country tourism context. The purpose of this research was to assess and understand migrant visitors' sense of safety among five different nationalities (United Kingdom, USA, Germany, China and India) and their perceptions on trustworthiness of tourism information.

Anchored on the national cultural dimension of Hofstede model, this study sampled 306 migrant visitors, with the use of one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Games–Howell post-hoc test to examine mean differences of nationalities, with regard to trust of tourism information and sense of safety. Finally, the multiple regression analysis was conducted to establish the significant effects of national culture characteristics and trustworthiness of tourism information on sense of safety of migrant visitors.

The study finds that there were no significant differences in the sense of safety by the five nationalities. However, national culture characteristics (power distance and uncertainty avoidance) and trustworthiness of tourism information were significant predictors of sense of safety of migrant visitors.

This research adopted only two cultural dimensions of the Hofstede's model, so future studies within the migration-tourism literature should consider adopting other cultural dimensions of the model.

The research provides, first, insight into sense of safety, trustworthiness of tourism information and national culture characteristics which are relevant for destination marketers, the ministry of tourism and local tourism officials to promote safety tourism.

The study expands the application of the cultural dimension of Hofstede model within the migration-tourism literature and establishes that national cultural characteristics and trustworthiness of tourism information are significant predictors of sense of safety of migrant visitors.

The purpose of this study is to unearth the factors that influence tourists’ revisit intention. The proposed model of the study is grounded on using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and extending it with additional variables, i.e. satisfaction, destination image, perceived risk, service quality and perceived value.

This study adopted a cross-sectional approach to collect data. The data were collected by conducting a field survey questionnaire on 330 respondents and were analysed using partial least squares version 3.2.9.

The results show that perceived behavioural control, perceived value, destination image and satisfaction significantly affect visitors’ revisit intention. The influence of perceived value, perceived service quality and destination image on satisfaction is also confirmed. On the other hand, satisfaction is found to be a significant mediator between perceived service quality, destination image and perceived value.

The extended TPB model that includes perceived service quality, perceived value, perceived risk and satisfaction provided a model with a theoretical basis to explain tourist revisit intentions to a tourist destination.

El objetivo principal del estudio es descubrir los factores que influyen en la intención de revisita de los turistas. El modelo propuesto para el estudio se basa en el uso de la teoría del comportamiento planificado y se amplía con variables como la satisfacción, la imagen del destino, el riesgo percibido, la calidad del servicio y el valor percibido.

Este estudio adoptó un enfoque transversal para la recogida de datos. Los datos se recopilaron mediante un cuestionario de campo en el que participaron 330 encuestados. Los datos se analizaron utilizando la versión 3.2.9 de PLS.

Los resultados muestran que el control conductual percibido, el valor percibido, la imagen del destino y la satisfacción afectan significativamente a la intención de revisita. También se confirma la influencia del valor percibido, la calidad de servicio percibida y la imagen del destino sobre la satisfacción. Por otra parte, la satisfacción resulta ser un mediador significativo entre la calidad de servicio percibida, la imagen del destino y el valor percibido.

El modelo TPB ampliado que incluye la calidad de servicio percibida, el valor percibido, el riesgo percibido y la satisfacción proporcionó un modelo con una base teórica para explicar las intenciones de revisita de los turistas a un destino turístico.

本研究的目的是揭示影响游客重访意向的因素。本研究提出的模型以计划行为理论（TPB）为基础, 并以额外的变量（即满意度、目的地形象、感知风险、服务质量和感知价值）进行扩展。

本研究采用了横断面的方法来收集数据。通过对330名受访者进行实地调查问卷来收集数据, 并使用偏最小二乘法3.2.9版进行分析。

结果显示, 感知行为控制、感知价值、目的地形象和满意度对游客的再访意向有显著影响。感知价值、感知服务质量和目的地形象对满意度的影响也被证实。另一方面, 满意度被发现是感知服务质量、目的地形象和感知价值之间的一个重要中介因素。

包括感知服务质量、感知价值、感知风险和满意度在内的扩展TPB模型为解释游客对旅游目的地的再访意向提供了理论基础。

关键词: 满意度; 旅游; 计划行为理论; PLS-SEM; 目的地形象