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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the temporal development of noncognitive abilities of children and the development trajectory of rural and urban children's noncognitive abilities in China.

Lexis diagram is used as the research framework to depict the development trajectory of rural and urban children's noncognitive abilities in China. By employing the nationally representative longitudinal survey data, China Family Panel Studies (2010–2016), the difference of rural and urban children's noncognitive abilities is disentangled into temporal, age and cohort effects.

There is a significant temporal rural–urban difference in children's noncognitive abilities, but the rural–urban gap would expand, narrow or show more complex development trends under different measurements. The results of age and cohort comparison are similar to those of temporal comparison, that is, there are divergent trajectories of rural–urban gap due to the different measurements and different ages and/or cohorts. Specifically, urban children perform better in self-esteem, but rural children always have a higher social responsibility, such a contrast between urban children's weak social responsibility under the advantageous condition and rural children's strong social responsibility in the relatively disadvantageous environment.

Children's noncognitive ability is not innate but is a gradually acquired characteristic through training and cultivation. The rural–urban difference of children's noncognitive abilities implies educational issues concerning educational principles in the urban environment and the educational resources' allocation in the rural society in China. Besides, as the unidimensional measurement of children's noncognitive ability is insufficient, the systematic measurement composed of multidimensional indicators utilizing cohort data or longitudinal data would be needed.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the supermarket sector.

In total, 480 supermarket customers participated in an intercept survey in four urban centres of Fiji. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the level of service quality provided by supermarkets, and inferential statistics to determine the gap between customer's service quality expectations and perceptions and to test the research hypotheses.

The findings indicate service quality of supermarkets is perceived as being unsatisfactory, service quality significantly affects customer satisfaction and loyalty and customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty reducing customer's perceptions of service quality, leading to lower customer loyalty.

This study provides an indication as to where supermarkets should target their marketing attention and scarce corporate resources and may help in their efforts to service, satisfy, retain and attract more long-term loyal customers in the increasingly competitive supermarket sector. This research could inform government policy makers in sequencing the supermarket sector transformation and assist local supermarkets to adapt to this changing retail landscape.

This study advances our understanding of the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the supermarket sector.

The objective of this chapter is to discuss how different techniques in Regional Science and Peace Science and the emerging techniques in Management Science can be used in analysing Disaster Management and Global pandemic with special reference to developing countries. It is necessary for me to first discuss the subjects of Disaster Management, Regional Science, Peace Science and Management Science. The objective of this chapter is to emphasise that the studies of Disaster Management should be more integrated with socioeconomic and geographical factors. The greatest disaster facing the world is the possibility of war, particularly nuclear war, and the preparation of the means of destruction through military spending.

The purpose of this paper is to postulate that the technique of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is currently underutilised in visitor management studies reported in the peer-reviewed marine wildlife tourism (MWT) research literature. Further, this paper provides insight into how IPA could inform future research and management of tourism experiences at marine wildlife destinations.

This paper synthesises learning gained from the natural area tourism and recreation literature that report the application of IPA in MWT and insights from a recent study at the Dolphin Discovery Centre in Bunbury, Western Australia.

Although currently underutilized in MWT research, IPA is a relatively straightforward, easy to interpret, and, if correctly applied, a powerful tool that managers and researchers can employ to investigate and enhance visitor satisfaction in the short-term and for longer-term sustainability of the industry through visitor-informed tourism management.

Having identified the opportunity to enhance visitor experiences, site management and target species welfare through increased IPA research, this review provides a plain language introduction to the application of IPA and direct access to comprehensible academic discourses and exemplars for the technique. Moreover, in light of increasing tourism demand, IPA can assist in determining management options for the future.

Prior studies have paid close attention to the impact of political risk on financial markets. Following this strand of literature, this paper aims to focus on the causality link between political shocks and their impacts on emerging stock markets.

This paper highlights an innovative counterfactual model for political risk assessment. Based on a natural experiment, i.e. the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-1996, this study utilizes one data-driven approach, e.g. the synthetic control methods (SCMs), to estimate causal impact of this political shock on Taiwan’s stock market.

Major findings in this study are consistent with existing literature on the price of political risk, e.g. political uncertainty commands a risk premium. The SCM estimations suggest that Taiwan’s stock prices dramatically underperformed its newly industrialized peers and other developed markets during the crisis. The SCM results are statistically significant and robust to various cross-validation tests.

Findings in this study indicate that political risks could generate enormous impacts on emerging financial markets. In particular, political uncertainty following new geopolitical dynamics requires proper identification and assessment.

To the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first rigorous counterfactual study to the causality relationship between political uncertainty and stock prices in emerging markets. This paper is distinct from previous studies in applying a data-driven approach to combine the features of learning from others (cross-sectional) and learning from the past (time series).