Search results

The Chinese Government has used a number of policies to encourage commercial agribusiness firms to do more innovation. These include public sector agricultural research and development (R&D), public sector biotechnology research and innovation, subsidies for commercial research, encouraging foreign firms to invest in China as minority shareholders in joint ventures, and allowing commercial companies to raise money on the stock market. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether these policies were effective in stimulating innovations by commercial firms in China.

This study estimates the impact of public biotech research and other policies by employing an econometric model of patenting by commercial firms. It uses a unique data set collected from commercial agribusiness firms for the years 2001, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Addition data were collected from public research institutes and universities and patent data from the Derwent Innovations Index database. It employs four count data models for the empirical analysis.

This study finds a positive impact of public biotechnology (measured by the number of biotech patents of government research institutes and public universities) on commercial innovation measured by the number of patents granted to the commercial firms. As expected the firm’s research expenditure and having their own R&D center (as opposed to contracting R&D or no R&D investment at all) have a positive and statistically significant effect on the number of patents granted. The impacts of public R&D investment spending have no statistically significant effect on commercial innovation. Multi-national firms and publicly traded firms have fewer patents than their counterparts suggesting that policies to encourage multi-nationals and financing through stock markets had no impact on innovation.

This study is one of the first studies to untangle the relationship between government policies and innovation by commercial agricultural research output and public R&D investment and biotechnology. The main findings suggest that simply increasing research money to public research does not increase commercial innovations, but moving resources to the development patentable biotech does improve commercial research productivity. The results also suggest that policies to increase commercial research will also increase innovation. These could include strengthening the legal framework and institutional resources for public institutes to the protection and enforcement of intellectual properties.

Economic interest groups such as seed, pesticide, feed, and food companies play an important role in supporting or preventing the production of genetically modified (GM) crops. The purpose of this paper is to examine firm managers’ attitudes toward GM technology, biotechnology R&D investment, and political lobbying activities.

Using data from surveys of 160 managers in the food, feed, chemical, and seed industries in 2013-2014, this paper employed three probit models to examine the determinants of managers’ attitudes, biotechnology R&D investment, and lobbying activities.

The results show that most Chinese agribusiness managers are concerned about GM foods and oppose its adoption. Nevertheless, one-third of the firms invest in biotechnology R&D and less than 15 percent of managers lobbied the government to change biotechnology policies. The econometric estimation results suggest that profit change expectation is the main factor affecting managers’ attitudes and biotechnology R&D investment decisions, whereas lobbying activities are significantly influenced by their attitudes and biotechnology R&D investment. In addition, managers’ attitudes toward GM foods also significantly influence firms’ decisions to invest in biotechnology R&D.

This paper has improved on previous research in two ways. First, it analyses the determinants of agribusiness firm managers’ attitudes toward GM technology, biotechnology R&D investment, and lobbying activities. Second, the methodology involves an analysis of agribusiness firm survey data in the food, feed, chemical, and seed industries, which is the first time to use such data to research on economic interest group in agricultural biotechnology field.

We introduce a risk management framework to assess food security, which is interpreted as the probability of fatality or adverse health effects due to lack of food and which is a product of food availability, access, and vulnerability.

We derive cost-minimizing policies to achieve food security objectives by addressing availability, access, and vulnerability, and taking into account how randomness, uncertainty, and heterogeneity affect the system.

Ignoring key sources of variability, particularly heterogeneity, may lead to biases because food security policies require targeting the most vulnerable populations, which may each have unique features such as age, location, and health status. Establishing any policy solution requires making tough choices about policy criteria. Outcomes will differ when the criteria is to minimize overall risk or to minimize risk to the most vulnerable.

Policies addressing food security crises should balance enhanced supply with targeting available food and the provision of emergency health services to vulnerable populations.

Because the mechanism of how knowledge sharing affects organizational innovation is still unclear, the study focuses on the relationship between knowledge sharing and organizational innovation performance, with a focus on mediating role of absorptive capacity and individual creativity.

On the basis of the knowledge base view and organizational learning theory, the study propose a model to verify the impact of inbound and outbound knowledge sharing on organizational innovation performance based on previous research. It also analyzed how these effects were mediated by individual creativity and absorptive capacity. The study collected 166 samples to verify the theoretical model.

Results corroborate that inbound knowledge sharing cannot directly promote organizational innovation performance, and absorptive capacity has a full mediation effect between inbound knowledge sharing and organizational innovation performance. Knowledge outbound sharing, individual creativity and absorptive capacity can improve innovation performance. In addition, absorptive capacity and individual creativity have direct and significant impacts on organizational innovation performance. Moreover, absorptive capacity plays a partial mediate role between individual creativity and innovation performance. Finally, this study discusses the policy implications of the study and describes possible future research directions.

The paper creatively divides knowledge sharing into inbound knowledge sharing and outbound knowledge sharing and verifies that knowledge sharing does not directly affect organizational innovation performance. The mediating role of absorptive capacity and individual creativity was analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to study the tribological properties of Cu nanoparticles (NPs) as lubricant additives in three kinds of commercially available lubricants.

A four-ball machine is used to estimate the tribological properties of Cu NPs as lubricant additives in three kinds of commercially available lubricants. Three-dimensional optical profiler and electrical contact resistance are evaluated to investigate the morphology of the worn surfaces and the influence of Cu NPs on tribofilms.

Wear tests show that the addition of Cu NPs as lubricant additives could reduce wear and increase load-carrying capacity of commercially available lubricants remarkably, indicating that Cu NPs have a good compatibility with the existing lubricant additives in commercially available lubricants.

The tribological properties of Cu NPs as lubricant additives in three kinds of commercially available lubricants were investigated in this paper. These results are reliable and can be very helpful for application of Cu NPs as lubricant additives in industry.

This paper aims to describe a three-dimensional mathematical and numerical model based on finite volume method to simulate the fluid dynamics in weld pool, droplet transfer and keyhole behaviors in the laser-MIG hybrid welding process of Fe36Ni Invar alloy.

Double-ellipsoidal heat source model and adaptive Gauss rotary body heat source model were used to describe electric arc and laser beam heat source, respectively. Besides, recoil pressure, electromagnetic force, Marangoni force, buoyancy as well as liquid material flow through a porous medium and the heat, mass, momentum transfer because of droplets were taken into consideration in the computational model.

The results of computer simulation, including temperature field in welded plate and velocity field in the fusion zone were presented in this article on the basis of the solution of mass, momentum and energy conservation equations. The correctness of elaborated models was validated by experimental results and this proposed model exhibited close correspondence with the experimental results with respect to weld geometry.

It lays foundation for understanding the physical phenomena accompanying hybrid welding and optimizing the process parameters for laser-MIG hybrid welding of Invar alloy.

Despite the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in Malaysia, there is a knowledge gap on what drives the lending decision of P2P lending in the emerging Malaysian market. This research investigates how borrower's loan tenure, funding purpose, verified documents, accumulated transaction and repayment history, age, trustworthy and geographical resemblance affect likelihood of lending decision in P2P platform.

Using snowball sampling, survey data was collected from 300 online banking users who were willing to invest in online P2P platform from different states in Malaysia (i.e. Selangor, Malacca, Johor and Negeri Sembilan). For estimation, regression analyses were estimated.

The findings suggest that borrower's loan tenure and borrower's age increase the probability of lending in online P2P platform, while funding purpose of credit card reduces the likelihood of lending in the P2P platform. The findings contribute to the signalling theory.

The findings imply that borrowers need to concentrate on loan tenure and clearly indicate their age in the listing in order to increase the funding probability. Moreover, they are suggested not to submit listing for credit card as funding purpose.

This study is first in its nature about P2P lending in Malaysia and the possible factors that influence lending decisions in this new financing platform.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of chickpea (Cicer arietinum) protein hydrolysates prepared at two degrees of hydrolysis (DH) on lipoprotein profile and on oxidant status in cholesterol-fed rats.

Eighteen male Wistar rats (220 ± 10 g) were divided into three groups and fed for 30 days a diet containing 20 per cent casein supplemented with 1 per cent cholesterol and 0.5 per cent cholic acid. During the experimentation, the first and the second groups received daily by gavage 250 mg of chickpea protein hydrolysates/rat at DH = 8 per cent (CPH8) and DH = 17 per cent (CPH17), respectively. The third group, named control group (CG), received water under the same conditions.

Serum total cholesterol concentrations were reduced in CPH8 (p < 0.0073) and CPH17 (p < 0.0004) groups versus CG. This reduction corresponded to a lower very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL)-cholesterol (p < 0,0019). CPH17 reduced low-density lipoprotein- and high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol (p < 0.0001) but increased apolipoprotein A4 (p < 0.002) concentrations and lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase activity (p < 0.0001). APOA1 remained unchanged in the treated groups. Liver total and esterified cholesterol contents were twofold lower in both treated groups versus CG. CPH8 increased triacylglycerols and phospholipids (p < 0.0001) contents, while CPH17 decreased those of unesterified cholesterol (p < 0.0016). Compared with CG, CPH8 and CPH17 reduced serum (p < 0.0001) and lipoprotein hydroperoxides by stimulating paraoxonase activity (p < 0.0001). However, only CPH17 treatment reduced serum, VLDL- and HDL-malondialdehyde contents and improved glutathione peroxidase activity (p < 0.061).

Thus, chickpea protein hydrolysates and especially hydrolysed at DH = 17 per cent may have a great potential for use as a nutraceutical to reduce hypercholesterolaemia and, by consequence, oxidative stress. Therefore, the degree of enzymatic hydrolysis has a significant influence on the production of potent bioactive peptides.