The paper reviews existing urban water reuse schemes in north China including existing policies, institutional, technical and financial practices, summarises the data of nine water reclamation plants in six case study cities, highlights key issues and constraints, and presents development trend in water reuse sector. It is based on an intensive study programme financed by the World Bank in 2004/2005.
This paper investigates energy use efficiency at the province level in China using the stochastic frontier panel data model approach. The stochastic frontier model is a parametric model which allows for the modeling of the relationship between energy use and its determinants using different control variables. The main control variables in this paper are energy policy and environmental and regulatory variables. This paper uses province level data from all provinces in China for the period 2010–2017. Three different models are estimated accounting for the panel nature of the data; province-specific heterogeneity and province-specific energy inefficiency effects are separated. The models differ because of their underlying assumptions, but they also complement each other. The paper also explains the degree of inefficiency in energy use by its possible determinants, including those related to the public energy policy and environmental regulations. This research supplements existing research from the perspective of energy policy and regional heterogeneity. The paper identifies potential areas for improving energy efficiency in the western and northeastern regions of China. Its findings provide new empirical evidence for estimating and evaluating China’s energy efficiency and a transition to cleaner energy sources and production.
The new generation of information technology (IT) promotes the integration of fintech with the real economy. Existing studies emphasize the relationship between fintech and the real economy over the development level of fintech-served real economy (FtRE). To fill up the gap, this paper explores the evaluation of FtRE based on fintech improvement (FtI). Firstly, an evaluation index system (EIS) was established for fintech service efficiency (FtSE), and FtSE was measured through data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering was performed to discretize continuous indices. Drawing on matter-element theories, the authors created the classic domain and node domain of FtRE, as well as the evaluation objects of real economy, calculated the correlation between each factor affecting development level and evaluated development level, and computed the weight coefficient of each index. Finally, the influence of FtI-based FtRE development was empirically analyzed through experiments.
Seventeen indices were selected to structure a new water ecological health assessment system, consisting of water quality, ecological system, and ecological landscape, for evaluation of small rivers in Shanghai, China. There are 200 samples taken from 56 rivers distributed in ten districts from 2014 to 2015 in Shanghai, which were selected to constitute the study case, and the mean value of each indicator was used in the evaluation. According to various features, including natural geographical condition, social development level, etc., these rivers were classified as one of three types: central urbanization watercourse (CW), new town watercourse (NW), and village watercourse (VW). The results showed that the investigated rivers were at a medium health level, ranging from 1.79 to 3.59, with the average being 2.95. The ecological health of streams in rural areas is better than that of CW rivers and NW rivers. This study is expected to provide accurate statistics and appraisal for the improvement of river health.
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