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Tokenization is a relatively new activity in digital finance. Tokenization, a process that creates a blockchain representation of the underlying instrument, can enhance the standard features and characteristics of assets and securities. Asset and security tokenization produces many benefits. These benefits include reducing issuance and trading costs, lessening dependency on intermediaries, facilitating more liquidity in markets, and providing greater transparency around an asset’s lifecycle for all parties involved. This chapter synthesizes the key characteristics, benefits, processes, tools, and techniques of tokenizing real-world assets. It also provides several examples of current asset-backed token applications to help understand the rapidly growing industry and analyzes future expectations of this new technology.

This chapter aims to define comparative and international higher education (CIHE), describe its orientation and application, and reflect on research trends of the past five years. Research trends were identified through the review of panel sessions of the Higher Education Special Interest Group at the Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society between 2014 and 2018. These trends include a greater focus on equity, access, and affordability; competition, rankings, and status; partnerships (e.g., international and public–private); regional integration and mobility; and a continued interest in quality and accountability as well as understanding the internationalization at the institutional and system levels. This chapter suggests explanations for these trends, which relate closely to impacts of growing competition for funding in higher education and growing inequities in the world system of higher education. Lastly, it offers recommendations for how CIHE researchers can engage with practitioners to further address these inequities.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between government control and firm value in China.

Government might extract social or political benefits from a state-controlled firm, thus decreases firm value. However, government’s monitoring on firm management reduces managers’ agency problem, which increases firm value. We first build a game-theoretic model to prove the existence of optimal government control given these two roles of government, and we then employ the OLS regression method to test the theory predictions using the length of intermediate ownership chains connecting the listed state-owned enterprises to their ultimate controllers as the measure of government control.

We find that firm values first increase then decrease as government control weakens. Moreover, we find that government usually retains a stronger control over state-owned enterprises than the optimal level. In addition, we show that government control can be further weakened in firms with good corporate governance mechanisms, which serve as a substitution of government monitoring.

Our results demonstrate that government control in China is still a necessary but costly mechanism to mitigate agency costs, especially when corporate governance system is underdeveloped.

We identify the substitution effect between government control and corporate governance using a unique measure of government control.

It is well known that entrepreneurs possess human, political and social capital that allow them to be successful. While we know that each of these “capitals” possess value, we know much less about how they interact – for example, are they substitutes or complements? – and whether where the capital was acquired matters. The latter point is particularly Germaine to the issue of global entrepreneurship and the importance of returnee entrepreneurs for economic development. We provide an overview of this research to date and call for an agenda that concentrates more on the total value a portfolio of these capitals generates and on how that capital is acquired both at home and overseas.

This chapter explores the significance of blockchain technology in protecting data for intelligent applications across various industries. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that ensures the immutability and security of transactions. Given the increasing need for security measures in industries, understanding blockchain technology is crucial for preparing for its future applications.

This chapter aims to examine the use of blockchain technology across industries and presents a compilation of existing and upcoming blockchain technologies for intelligent applications. The methodology involves reviewing research to understand the security needs of different industries and providing an overview of methods used to enhance multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research in areas like the financial system, smart grid, and transportation system.

The findings highlight the benefits of blockchain networks in providing transparency, trust, and security for industries. The Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network (RSBN) is an example that utilizes blockchain's decentralized ledger to track sustainable sourcing from mine to final product. This information can be shared with auditors, corporate governance organizations, and customers.

The practical implications of this chapter are significant, serving as a valuable resource for industries concerned with identity privacy, traceability, immutability, transparency, auditability, and security. Understanding and implementing blockchain technology can address the growing need for secure and intelligent applications, ensuring data protection and enhancing trust in various sectors.

This study examines the impact of corporate performance and corporate size on corporate environmental information disclosure of A-share listed enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen during the period 2008–2017. In this study, corporate size (size) is represented by total assets, and corporate performance (Jzc) is represented by return on net assets. Environmental information disclosure quality (EID) is measured by the Environmental Information Disclosure Index (EIDI). Non-balanced panel data models are used. In order to eliminate the influence of unobservable factors during the sample period, year fixed effects and industry fixed effects are included. The results show that corporate size and performance both promote the improvement of EID quality. Measures such as improving corporate management efficiency and setting clear environmental performance indicators can help improve corporate competitiveness and core values, thus providing important support for improving EID quality. Future research is recommended to focus on the influence of internal corporate characteristics such as corporate nature (state-owned or not), equity structure, and executive background on EID quality.

This chapter examines the development of accounting thought and practices in China with the purpose of illustrating its relevance to current accounting policies and practices. The review indicates that changes in accounting in China did not usually occur completely and easily. Over the past three decades, while Chinese accounting has gradually moved toward the Anglo-American model, convergence has presented unique features in China. For example, the review suggests that the accounting reforms in China have been heavily government-driven and that uniform accounting systems still remain. Chinese regulators maintain a cautious attitude toward the application of fair value and professional judgment, which are essentially the center of the Anglo-American accounting system. Furthermore, Chinese accounting regulators have a different view of business combinations from the IASB and have developed alternative accounting methods for those transactions. China’s departure from IFRS reflects its politico-economic context and essentially challenges the IASB’s goal of achieving international accounting convergence. China’s approach to internationally acceptable practices is likely to have implications for the effectiveness of the imported ideas.

Spatial integration and industrial clustering have become an important feature of the culture tourism business. When the core elements in both the culture industry and tourism industry are integrated, a model based on system science is constructed that combines the resources and capacity of the two entities to envisage the ways of creating integrated products and services from the two sectors. Guided by the system science, this study proposes a culture tourism system revealing the clustering and hierarchical structure of the industrial elements. The system contains two subsystems: internal system and external system. The agglomeration model of the system includes 26 indices and the PEF methods, which involved the Parallelogram Law, Entropy-weight Method, and Fuzzy Membership Function. Finally, this study deploys an empirical study involving all provincial territories (N=31) in mainland China. It analyzes the variability and degree of balanced development of the system. In addition, through the resultant data this research adds a typology of culture tourism system along with policy recommendations.

Even though following the laws of nature to construct harmonious nature–human interactions has long been one of the most influential philosophies in Chinese history, nature-based solutions (NBS), an innovative concept referring to the sustainable utilization of nature in solving various social and environmental challenges facing contemporary societies, can hardly be found in research papers and practices in Chinese context until very recently. Yet, some NBS features, and also NBS thinking, have already been successfully embedded within many environmental management decisions and practices, which are commonly characterized by (1) prioritization of nature preservation/restoration to economic activities and (2) functionalization of nature as a countermeasure to environmental and/or social issues. This chapter will present a comprehensive overview of the Beijing Afforestation Scheme, an exemplar case of NBS in the Chinese context. Starting from a description of Beijing and this massive afforestation project, it delineates major characteristics of this NBS, signified by (1) a shift from outcome-driven to integrated ecological resilience, (2) a change from recreating tree rows to restoring natural boreal forest, and (3) an evolution from top-down to adaptive and inclusive governance. Lastly, lessons learnt and future challenges are discussed.