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The purpose of this paper is to develop a hybrid semantic recommendation system to provide personalized government to business (G2B) e‐services, in particular, business partner recommendation e‐services for Australian small to medium enterprises (SMEs).

The study first proposes a product semantic relevance model. It then develops a hybrid semantic recommendation approach which combines item‐based collaborative filtering (CF) similarity and item‐based semantic similarity techniques. This hybrid approach is implemented into an intelligent business‐partner‐locator recommendation‐system prototype called BizSeeker.

The hybrid semantic recommendation approach can help overcome the limitations of existing recommendation techniques. The recommendation system prototype, BizSeeker, can recommend relevant business partners to individual business users (e.g. exporters), which therefore will reduce the time, cost and risk of businesses involved in entering local and international markets.

The study would be of great value in e‐government personalization research. It would facilitate the transformation of the current G2B e‐services into a new stage wherein the e‐government agencies offer personalized e‐services to business users. The study would help government policy decision‐makers to increase the adoption of e‐government services.

Providing personalized e‐services by e‐government can be seen as an evolution of the intentions‐based approach and will be one of the next directions of government e‐services. This paper develops a new recommender approach and systems to improve personalization of government e‐services.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effects earthquakes may have on rates of marriage and divorce in China, a country strongly affected by losses due to earthquakes.

This paper studies the effect of earthquakes on marriage and divorce rates in China between 2000 and 2011, using panel data from 31 provinces as well as from Sichuan at the prefecture level, a province that has a high frequency of earthquakes.

The results show that when controlling for demographic, economic, and social factors, losses due to earthquakes are found to be associated with increases in both marriage and divorce rates. While the estimated elasticities are low, amounting to 1.92×10−2 and 6.102×10−2, respectively, they are highly significant, suggesting that a doubling of losses due to earthquakes increases marriages by 1.92 percent and divorces by 6.102 percent with a lag of one year. Since the first elasticity is smaller than the second, losses due to earthquakes may influence familial instability. Moreover, these effects increase in the second year but cannot be traced beyond three years after the disaster.

In view of the cost imposed on society by instable family relationships, these findings point to a need to provide relief to families after earthquake disasters.