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Building social capital between groups of people and developing social enterprises that integrate social goals into commercial business models are rapidly adopted as innovative poverty relief mechanisms across countries. Together, the translation of social relationships into increased accessibility to resources, and the entrepreneurial dynamics resulting in additional services and goods, are thought to meet the survival and developmental needs of poor families and communities. However, the socio-economic contexts, in which new public policies and initiatives have been taken, vary from country to country. In China, its strong Confucian culture, state-led development strategy, weak civil society, and hierarchical social relationships have contributed to a value structure of social capital, but decreased the efficiency of business practice in social enterprise. This chapter presents a case study of Rural Cooperative Program, a poverty relief initiative in China’s southwest Guizhou Province. With the introduction of China’s new policies in welfare and rural development, this chapter presents evaluation results of whether social enterprises and entrepreneurship can improve poor villagers’ socio-economic wellbeing and promote sustainable development of poor rural villages in China, and to what extent social capital has been mobilized to facilitate the Rural Cooperative Program.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

Customer experience is a relevant concept in marketing and tourism research since its correct understanding allows companies to achieve competitive advantage and service providers can reach several outcomes such as customer engagement, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This chapter aims to analyze one of the main outcomes of the customer experience, the customer satisfaction through online reviews, and using spatial analysis as a tool to incorporate the contextual nature of the customer experience. Thus, our study considers online rating as a measure of customer satisfaction and tries to analyze the impact of actions under the control of the service provider (price and objective quality) and actions under the control of the customer (subjective quality) on customer satisfaction.

With the Spanish hotel industry as a study framework, an empirical study is developed to analyze, through geographically weighted regression techniques, the relationship between price, objective quality and subjective quality, and online ratings given by consumers with a sample of 1870 of geolocated hotels in Spain. The findings show how a premium price, depending on the geolocation, is an indicator for better customer experiences, and they also show that objective quality is the antecedent of customer experience whose positive effect on customer satisfaction is geographically more widespread. Results show contradictory effects of subjective quality, while in some areas subjective quality does not match the product fit of customers, in others it allows hotels to provide more satisfactory experiences.

This chapter attempts to analyze mainly the interactions between the implementation of inflation targeting (IT) policy and performance in the conduct of economic policies (fiscal and exchange rate) in emerging countries. More precisely, empirical studies conducted in this chapter aim to apprehend the feedback effect of this strategy of monetary policy on the budget deficit and volatility of exchange rate performance. This said, we consider the institutional framework as endogenous to IT and analyze the response of authorities to the adoption of this monetary regime. To do this, the retained methodological path in this chapter is an empirical way, based on the econometrics of panel data. First, our contribution to the existing literature is to evaluate the time-varying treatment effect of IT’s adoption on the budget deficit of emerging inflation targeters, using the propensity score matching approach. Our empirical analysis, conducted on a sample of 34 economies (13 IT and 21 non-IT economies) for the period from 1990 to 2010, show a significant impact of IT on the reduction of budget deficit in emerging countries having adopted this monetary policy framework. Therefore, we can say that the emerging government can benefit ex post and gradually from a decline in their public deficits. Retaining the same econometric approach and sample, we tried secondly to empirically examine whether the adoption of IT in emerging inflation targeters has been effectively translated by an increase in the nominal effective exchange rate volatility compared to non-IT countries. Our results show that this effect is decreasing and that this volatility is becoming less important after the shift to this monetary regime. We might suggest that this indirect and occasional intervention in the foreign exchange market can be made by fear of inflation rather than by fear of floating hence in most emerging countries that have adopted the IT strategy. Finally, we can say that our conclusions corroborate the literature of disciplining effects of IT regime on fiscal policy performance as well as the two controversial effects of IT on the nominal effective exchange rate volatility.

Online reputation manager has become increasingly important in tourism industry. Managers, regardless of working for a hospitality structure or a tourism destination, are paying more and more attention in respect of the importance of reputational levels. Online reputation, in fact, originates in visitor's user-generated contents (UGCs) but reverberates on the whole web, on successive visitors' attitude and behavior, and on managed organization performances. How to manage online reputation in tourism and destination management anyway mostly stayed an anecdotal topic for many years. While best practices exist, indeed, literature has frequently neglected their systematization. Building on this need, this book will try to improve and organize the existing body of knowledge on this topic to help future hotel and destination managers to better deal with the mounting environmental complexity.

Special education in China has lagged behind regular education for many years, however, the past few decades, the government has made considerable efforts to develop and improve the special education system. While the citizens of China have had a generic moral interest in disability since ancient times, the development of special education schools did not occur until American and European missionaries started schools for the visually and hearing impaired in the 19th century. The next major influence in the development of the special education system occurred with China’s Cultural Revolution in 1978. Interestingly, there is not any exclusive legislation on special education but in the 1980s, the government started Learning in Regular Classrooms (LRC), which is China’s version of inclusion. LRC has progressed rapidly the past two decades; however, the quality of instruction is low due to a lack of specialists, a shortage of personnel, inadequate funding, and limited technology as well as other barriers that are delineated in the chapter. The chapter emphasizes the government’s recent efforts in in-service teacher training, the preparation of preservice teachers, working with families, developing community rehabilitation training programs, and implementing evidence-based practices. Special education in China today is at a good place but it has quite a way from the ideal situation.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.

The authors focus on a non-Western setting that has hardly featured in debates around political authenticity, Taiwan. The authors also adopt a novel inter-generational perspective to look at varying attitudes towards two ‘unconventional’, high-profile politicians, Ko Wen-je and Han Kuo-yu. Drawing on focus group data, the authors note the similarities and differences in the way that the different generations engage with, and assess, the two politicians with a particular focus on the extent to which their personalities, appearance, and everyday activities are perceived as authentic.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.