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This paper examines the impact of livestock environment regulations (LERs) on the location dynamics of the livestock farming industry. Specifically, it tests whether a “pollution haven effect” (PHE) exists in the Chinese livestock industry.

The authors manually collected LERs data based on the frequency of livestock-related vocabulary in government work reports from 279 prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2017. Using China's implementation of LERs since 2014 as a natural experiment, the authors employed difference-in-difference (DID) to avoid the endogeneity problem.

LERs have led to a decline in livestock production in regulated areas. Moreover, compared with areas with more stringent LERs – southern China and developed areas, areas where LERs are less stringent – northern China and undeveloped areas, attract more livestock industry. As a result, people in northern China and undeveloped areas are exposed to higher livestock pollution.

First, most empirical studies on PHE focus on industrial firms. PHE in the livestock industry has received limited attention. This paper aims to fill this gap. Second, this paper regards LERs as an endogenous process and uses the DID method to generate unbiased results. Third, this paper introduces a novel measurement of LERs based on the frequency of livestock-related vocabulary in government work reports from each prefecture city. Fourth, this paper uses prefecture-level data to analyze the PHE of LERs, and thus obtains more reliable results.

Based on government data from 1993 to 2008, this chapter aims to compute and analyze the trends of inequity in interprovincial and regional per-student spending in China's compulsory education, and to ascertain the potential impact of changes in education financing policies. Appropriate inequity measures (Gini and Theil index and Gini decomposition, among others) are employed to provide a systematic picture of the trends. Main findings include: (1) all inequity measures show large and overall increased disparities among provinces and among regions, between 1993 and 2008. (2) However, a slight drop of spending inequity is observed at the primary education level around 2002 and a larger reduction in 2005 and on. There are more turning points in the trend of lower-secondary per-student spending among provinces. These patterns are consistent across different inequity measures and spending indicators (per-student total spending, per-student recurrent spending, and per-student nonpersonnel spending). (3) The trend toward more balanced resource allocation around 2002 and 2005 could be the impact from the Reform of Tax and Administrative Charges and the New Mechanism for Financing Rural Compulsory Education. An increased share of budgetary expenditure in determining total spending suggests that equalizing financing policies have the potential to induce a significant reduction in spending inequity. These findings may help policy makers to better understand and alter the extent of spending inequity in compulsory education. This is an original empirical study that systematically derives the spending inequity trends over a long period in China's compulsory education.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an insight into the fundamental changes taking place in Port wine production value chains. Specifically, the authors examine two distinct production regimes: when Port is aged and sold in the Greater Oporto and, alternatively, when it is produced, aged and sold in Douro.

The authors apply a tri-regional input–output model (Douro, Greater Oporto and rest of the country) for Portugal’s economy. This framework comprises a significant level of detail, with 431 products and 136 industries, the corresponding supply and demand for the products, by industry (for intermediate consumption) and final demand.

This study shows that the two regimes generate noteworthy, but quite heterogeneous, regional impacts. In both cases, the distribution of value added generates international and interregional trade flows. Moreover, the study reveals a greater capacity to capture national value added by getting the supply chain more intensive in localised services and by using state-of-the-art production techniques.

Using detailed regional data, the authors use disaggregated information, both for industries as well for territories, overcoming a common limitation in similar works that are grounded in international databases. Additionally, the approach integrates the trade interactions among industries and regions, which proves essential to uncovering spillovers resulting from the (direct and indirect) use of inputs from other regions and other countries.

This paper investigates CEO turnover and the usefulness of relative performance evaluation (RPE) as a management incentive in an emerging economy lacking market-based competition.

In a sample of China’s listed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from the period 2001 to 2005, we manually collect the data where a CEO has gone after being removed by reading the annual reports of the firms and searching the major news and business publications, and run OLS regressions to examine how various incentives provided by different CEO turnovers such as promotion, demotion, and rotation affect the firm performance.

We find that 41% of departing CEOs in SOEs is being promoted. The promotion is positively associated with preceding firm performance relative to peers in the same region and this association is more significant than that between the promotion and firm’s specific performance. Furthermore, the promotion outperforms other incentive schemes such as CEO demotions by 5–8% in terms of subsequent Tobin’s q in three years. These consequences persist in undeveloped regions where there are fewer firms listed on the stock market, a lower stock market capitalization, or a higher regional Herfindahl–Hirschman Index ( HHI ).

The findings imply that promotion based on RPE provides an important incentive by creating competitions.

Mexico has an economic dynamic mostly associated with low added value sectors; regions of Guerrero and Michoacan highlight at national and even international levels in the agri-food production, however, they present substantial lags in their development and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the innovation policy in the agri-food sector of these regions through its regulations and local policy.

The present work has a qualitative approach through a case study with the treatment of units of analysis (UA), in which innovation policy in the agri-food sector as main UA, whose sources of interpretation have been direct observation and documentary sources such as laws and the guiding instruments of the regional public policy on innovation and the agri-food sector.

This paper identifies severe institutional weaknesses, a lack of incentives and structures for generating certainty and innovation capabilities in the agri-food sector. Both regions have weak and poorly articulated institutions in their innovation policy, with few incentives and scarcely defined property rights tending to increase uncertainty among the actors participating in the agri-food sector, although the economic dynamics of both regions is mostly associated with that sector, therefore, the low development and lack of competitiveness are a direct consequence of a minimum priority of innovation policy.

Our research is useful for the academic sphere by contributing to applied knowledge on the implications of innovation policy at the sectoral level on the development and competitiveness of regions, particularly in an emerging country such as Mexico, allowing to generate bridges gaps between theory and practice.

The main contribution is for policymakers, allowing them to compare and facilitate a better design of regulatory and public policy instruments that enable them to address and enhance economic vocations through innovation for regional development.

The research focuses on a debate at the regional level on the institutional limitations of promoting innovation through public policy. This study approaches economic and political processes having as empirical evidence of two undeveloped Mexican regions that stand out internationally in agri-food production. These regions have sectoral dynamics inserted in global value chains but have not achieved a local articulation, which has negatively affected their competitiveness and development. The cases of Guerrero and Michoacan are examples of regions like many others, which present diverse institutional weaknesses and lack of incentives associated with innovation policy that limit the development and articulation of their territorial capabilities.

Improving Turkey's low level of education quality and achieving equity in quality education across its seven regions continue to be a monumental challenge. The purpose of this study was to document the extent of Turkey's regional differences in science achievement at the eighth grade and to investigate factors associated with these differences. Identifying the factors influencing Turkey's regional inequalities in student learning is crucial for establishing policies that will help raise the educational performance at the national level as well as close regional gaps. A series of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses were performed at two levels (the school/class level and student level) using Turkey's nationally representative data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007. Findings suggested that attempts to increase Turkish students' achievement and close the achievement gaps between regions should target the students in the undeveloped regions, particularly in Southeastern and Eastern Anatolia. Designing interventions to improve competency in Turkish and to compensate for the shortcomings of insufficient parental education, limited home educational resources, poor school climate for academic achievement, and inadequate instructional equipment and facilities might be expected to close the regional achievement gaps as well as raise the overall achievement level in Turkey. Using TIMSS data, this study provided an example of a methodology that may be employed to describe how student achievement is distributed among various subpopulations of national interest and to investigate the factors that contribute to differences in the achievement distribution.

The purpose of this paper is to set the context for the papers in this Special Issue, which explore the state of e‐learning in China. It introduces relevant topics such as the imbalanced development between the Eastern developed region and the Western undeveloped region and the fact that a large number of students who graduate from senior secondary schools cannot go to reputable universities, which drive the development of e‐learning in China. With rapid economic development, China now has the ability to provide better infrastructure and other necessary conditions for schools and universities. E‐learning is believed to be a promising approach since it offers students ways to interact with experienced teachers or professors. The Chinese government has initiated a number of national projects to set up or upgrade the infrastructure in schools, and a number of Chinese online schools and distance education colleges have been established to offer various e‐learning programs.

This article introduces the case studies that comprise this special issue on e‐learning in China.

The use of information and communication technologies in education is at different stages in China. This review presents a clear picture on the development of e‐learning in China and the challenges it currently faces.

The paper summarizes the form of e‐learning form China. This information is useful for policymakers, administrators and teachers.

The state of e‐learning in China is under‐represented in Western educational technology journals.

The Chinese population is rapidly ageing before they are rich. The purpose of this paper is to describe healthcare seeking behaviour and the critical factors associated with healthcare seeking behaviour.

Using a purposive sampling method, the authors recruited 44 adults aged 60 years or older from three provinces, representing the developed (Shanghai), undeveloped (Ningxia) regions and the regions in between (Hubei). From July to September 2008, using a semi-structured guide, the authors interviewed participants in focus group discussions.

The healthcare needs for chronic and catastrophic diseases were high; however, the healthcare demands were low and healthcare utilizations were even lower owing to the limited accessibility to healthcare services, particularly, in underdeveloped rural areas. “Too expensive to see a doctor” was a prime complaint, explaining substantial discrepancies between healthcare needs, demands and use. Care seeking behaviour varied depending on insurance availability, perceived performance, particularly hospital services, and prescription medications. Participants consistently rated increasing healthcare accessibility as a high priority, including offering financial aid, and improving service convenience. Improving social security fairness was the first on the elderly’s wish list.

Healthcare demand and use were lower than needs, and were influenced by multiple factors, primarily, service affordability and efficiency, perceived performance and hospital service quality.

The non-observed economy (NOE) is a pervasive phenomenon worldwide, especially in developing countries, but the size of the NOE and its contributions to the overall economy are usually unknown. This paper presents an estimation of the average size of the NOE for the 31 provincial regions in China between 1992 and 2013.

This study uses the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime light data combined with 11 existing surveys on or measurements of NOE for 191 countries or regions throughout the world, to measure the size of the NOE.

The results show that the NOE share is unevenly distributed among China's provincial regions, with the smallest being 3.19% for Beijing and the largest being 69.71% for Ningxia. The national average is 43.11%, while the figures for the eastern region, middle region, northeastern region and western region are 39.3%, 47.6%, 44.7% and 43.6%, respectively. The NOE estimates are negatively correlated with the measured gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita, which suggests that developed regions tend to have less NOE.

The nighttime lights are used to measure the NOE for China's provincial regions. Compared with traditional databases, one of the prominent features of nighttime lights is its objectivity, as there is little human interference; therefore, it can be used to achieve more accurate results.

This paper aims to understand how the different stakeholders assess the adequacy of smart specialization policies defined for their regions.

This paper has followed a quantitative methodology through the application of questionnaire surveys to stakeholders of the various territorial regions in Portugal.

As a result, from the “resource-based view” approach applied to the various regions, the attained results highlight that the suitability of smart specialization policies defined for the Portuguese regions is not unanimous among its stakeholders.

The research can be used as a tool to assist regional policymakers in strategic reflection when defining and adjusting smart specialization strategies in their territories.