The development of rural e-commerce has rapidly driven the development of rural logistics in China. Improving the service quality of the last mile delivery is an important measure to promote the sustainable development of rural e-commerce logistics. However, such work is challenging because the current rural last mile delivery is inefficient and unsustainable and is influenced by a set of interacting factors. It is necessary to explore the relationships among the sustainability influencing factors of rural last mile delivery. A total of 15 sustainability influencing factors are selected. The improved fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is used to assign the weights of the factors and then the interpretative structural model (ISM) is used to determine the hierarchical structure of each factor. The driving force-dependency quadrant graph is constructed by cross-impact matrix multiplication (MICMAC). The research results show that four factors, including “convenience of returning goods”, “integrity of goods”, “advance reservation of goods pickup”, and “delivery costs”, are the most basic factors affecting the sustainability of rural last mile delivery and are the deepest and most indispensable factors. This research provides valuable information for decision makers to develop proactive strategies and reinforcement policies to improve the service quality of rural last mile delivery, which could promote the sustainable development of rural logistics.
This paper aims at investigating the relationship between the use of the Internet and access to external finance of small and micro businesses, both theoretically and empirically. We first develop a theoretical model to explore how access to the Internet affects the credit availability of firms. The model suggests that access to the Internet can effectively mitigate financing difficulty of firms by alleviating information asymmetry and reducing agency cost, and thus can promote the sustainable development of those firms. The model also shows that access to the Internet can improve social welfare based on aforementioned mechanism. Using China household finance data from China Household Finance Survey, we tested the impact of access to the Internet on access to finance of small and micro businesses. Our empirical results confirm the positive role played by access to the Internet in alleviating financing difficulty of those firms. Moreover, we also found evidence that access to the Internet can reduce borrowers' dependence on physical branches of banks when making bank choice decision for loan applications. Our evidence also implies that access to the Internet is conducive to the sustainable development of small and micro businesses via mitigating their financing difficulty.Keywords: access to the Internet; access to finance; sustainable development of small and micro businesses JEL Classification: G21; O16
Signalized crosswalks are considered an important pedestrian facility, where the pedestrian flow possesses unique characteristics. This study used an improved cellular automaton model, which incorporated social forces to describe the interactions between pedestrians, to model the bidirectional pedestrian flow at a crosswalk. The simulation model was capable of estimating crossing time for various levels of pedestrian demand. The observation field data extracted from the video record validated the model's ability to estimate average crossing speed. It also found that pedestrian crossing time and speed are correlated to pedestrian demand. In addition, the proposed model presented the characteristics of pedestrian flow at the crosswalk visually and showed that the interaction between the conflicting flows contributed to an increase in crossing time and a reduction in crossing speed. The benefits of this model can be used to assess the design of signalized crosswalks, including their geometry and pedestrian cycle length.
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