Search Results (2,927)

This paper examines the implications of the Trump administration’s trade policies for the future of the world trading system and the role Japan should play in response. It argues that, behind the discourse of “national security” and “economic security,” recent U.S. trade policies primarily seek to rebuild and protect domestic industrial capacity and address the distributional consequences of globalization and industrial hollowing-out. This signals an emerging era of intensified international competition in industrial policy, in which governments increasingly pursue national interests through tariffs, subsidies, and other interventionist measures. This transformation is weakening the liberal foundations of the multilateral trading system. The principle of non-discrimination, particularly most-favoured-nation treatment, may give way to bilateral strategies and plurilateral arrangements among like-minded countries. Yet the United States is unlikely to abandon the WTO; rather, it appears to seek to reshape international rules through their revision, reinterpretation, or selective application. Against this background, de facto plurilateral arrangements, both within and outside the WTO, are becoming increasingly important. The WTO Agreement on Electronic Commerce and the CPTPP illustrate alternative pathways for developing new trade rules. Japan has responded by strengthening economic security while supporting the multilateral system through WTO reform, the MPIA, and the CPTPP. The paper concludes that Japan must move beyond adaptation and articulate an independent vision for the future institutional and normative development of the world trading system. Full article

This article examines oil-spill-related environmental damage in the Russian North as an eco-social risk that affects ecosystems, Indigenous communities, traditional nature management, and territorial welfare. This paper develops a qualitative conceptual analysis based on interdisciplinary document analysis, literature-based synthesis, and illustrative case contextualization. It contributes to debates on eco-social policy and sustainable welfare by arguing that environmental remediation and monetary compensation often remain insufficient when ecological harm disrupts land-based livelihoods, food autonomy, cultural ecosystem services, and Indigenous participation. This article proposes the concept of traditional nature management as a form of territorial welfare: a place-based welfare arrangement that supports food security, mobility, intergenerational knowledge transfer, cultural continuity, and community autonomy. The analysis identifies several interconnected transformation channels through which oil spills affect Indigenous communities: resource degradation, disruption of mobility routes, weakening of traditional food systems, erosion of cultural ecosystem services, compensation conflicts, and marginalization of Indigenous and local knowledge. The synthesis further shows that the most important assessment gaps arise where legally recognized ecological damage is disconnected from fishery and food-system losses, seasonal mobility, cultural ecosystem services, and Indigenous participation. In the context of Russian legal policy, existing mechanisms recognize traditional nature use and compensation for damage to Indigenous habitat and livelihoods, but non-market territorial-welfare losses remain only partially operationalized in environmental damage assessment. The paper argues that these consequences reveal an institutional missing link between environmental liability, social protection, Indigenous rights, and corporate responsibility. To address this gap, this article proposes an eco-social assessment framework that combines economic valuation with participatory mapping, cultural ecosystem service assessment, Indigenous and local knowledge, long-term welfare-oriented compensation, and community-based monitoring. The framework is intended as a conceptual and policy-oriented instrument rather than an empirical valuation model; the 2020 Norilsk diesel spill is used solely as an illustrative vignette to demonstrate the institutional disconnect between legally recognized environmental damage and broader welfare-related losses. The findings are relevant for eco-social policy debates because they show how extractive-sector risks reshape welfare arrangements in peripheral regions and create new entanglements between state responsibility, corporate welfare, and community resilience in the context of conflicting ecological transitions. More broadly, this study demonstrates that sustainable recovery in northern resource-dependent territories requires the integration of ecological restoration, legally grounded compensation, long-term welfare monitoring, and meaningful Indigenous participation. Comparative Russian evidence from the Nenets and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrugs, Sakhalin, and Yakutia further indicates that compensation and benefit-sharing arrangements vary substantially with regard to procedural inclusion and transparency. The framework does not replace existing Russian statutory loss-calculation procedures; its added value is to connect them with community-defined territorial relationships, participatory mapping, co-validation of locally relevant indicators and repeated assessment of welfare recovery. Full article

As industrial green transformation advances and urban risks become more complex, this study explores the relationship between China’s national green industrial park policy and urban resilience. The empirical analysis draws on panel data for 293 Chinese cities at the prefecture level or above between 2011 and 2024 and uses a Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML) framework to flexibly account for observed city characteristics and possible nonlinear relationships. A positive association is observed between the green industrial park policy and the composite urban resilience measure, with this pattern remaining broadly consistent under a range of robustness and sensitivity analyses. Positive coefficients are also obtained across all four resilience components; however, the empirical support is comparatively stronger for the ecological and infrastructure components than for their economic and social counterparts. The pathway results are compatible with potential roles for environmental governance investment, residents’ income, and new-quality productive forces. Differences in the estimated relationships are more pronounced when cities are grouped by resource dependence and industrial-base characteristics, whereas the east–central–west classification does not yield statistically significant between-group variation. By shifting attention from park-specific environmental performance to broader resilience outcomes at the city level, this study extends the scope of green industrial park policy assessment. Given the assumptions underlying the empirical design, the reported coefficients represent conditional relationships rather than conclusive causal evidence. Full article

Paludiculture, the sustainable productive use of wet and rewetted peat soils, offers a dual solution for preserving soil carbon and reducing greenhouse gas emissions whilst offering a form of income for landowners/farmers. However, establishing best practices for the transition to wet agriculture production systems remains difficult due to the inherent variability of peatland sites. This study synthesises evidence from the peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, and stakeholder surveys to map current practices, concepts, knowledge gaps, and research priorities. The main gap is a lack of long-term studies tracking crops from establishment through multiple harvests. Practical knowledge is also geography-ically, limiting applicability without local environmental and policy context. Further critical gaps include crop species selection, upscaling, biodiversity impacts, specialised harvesting equipment, and evolving end-product markets, alongside country-specific legal and financial barriers. Key recommendations include establishing a robust initial site investigation as edaphic properties and previous land-use can inform crop establishment and potential operational hurdles. Furthermore, increased funding for long-term farm-based projects, technological innovation and prioritising producing data that supports finance models must be made available to offset the costs of transitioning and developing new, system-level agronomical tools. Ultimately, scaling paludiculture hinges on robust incentive frameworks, shared knowledge platforms, and standardised nomenclature to guarantee long-term environmental and economic sustainability. Full article

Energy efficiency (EE) has emerged as the paramount and cost-effective key strategy for achieving climate and energy objectives. Nonetheless, energy efficiency measures (EEMs) are frequently hindered by various barriers. Barriers, and to a lesser extent drivers, have been thoroughly examined across several contexts and sectors; nevertheless, research on barriers and drivers in Tunisia is still lacking. Thus, in the present paper, we explore the key barriers and drivers affecting industrial energy efficiency in Tunisia using qualitative analysis. Semi-structured interviews were performed with a set of industrial firms. The study included the major external key stakeholders. The findings show that economic barriers resulting from high investment costs, limited access to capital, and a lack of incentives are major impediments to the adoption of energy efficiency measures in Tunisia and that technical, institutional, regulatory, informational, awareness, and behavioral barriers may further stymie investment in these measures. This study’s main drivers are cost reductions, subsidies, management commitment, and awareness campaigns. The results offer Tunisian policymakers a useful resource for understanding the barriers to energy efficiency that exist today and creating new policies to get over them. The findings are also a useful resource for other countries. Full article

This study conceptualizes RE100 not merely as a voluntary corporate campaign, but as an evolving socio-technical system that intersects with South Korea’s path-dependent energy regime. Applying BERTopic to a comprehensive corpus of 21,901 raw news articles (reduced to 13,507 analytically relevant articles after noise filtering; January 2019–October 2025), we trace the systemic evolution and multi-layered governance of RE100. Grounded in social constructionism and institutional systems theory, the research reveals how the global sustainability norm becomes structurally embedded in South Korea’s industrial and economic systems through a partially sequential evolutionary process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. BERTopic identified 39 analytically meaningful topics, subsequently organized into four interpretive clusters: (1) local government-centered construction, (2) spatial reconfiguration and industrial-policy formation, (3) corporate-led market institutionalization, and (4) ESG-driven corporate governance. Collectively, these clusters demonstrate that RE100 has evolved from a peripheral international initiative into a multilayered governance norm embedded across local governance, industrial infrastructure, corporate strategy, and ESG systems. The findings hold theoretical and policy implications for energy-transition governance and climate communication. This progression is recursive rather than strictly linear: corporate-level internalization (Cluster 4) is conceptually linked to, and may interact with, regional and industrial-policy externalization (Clusters 1–2), consistent with a non-linear reading of institutionalization in which corporate site-selection criteria shape local-government infrastructure competition. Cluster 1’s prominence reflects local governments’ discursive visibility rather than substantive policy authority. Notably, RE100’s “normalization” denotes routinized corporate compliance practices, not political consensus on its legitimacy relative to alternatives such as carbon-free 100% or nuclear power. Full article

Isolation, quarantine, and contact tracing are some of the most critical and commonly employed non-pharmaceutical interventions used to control the spread of COVID-19. However, the effectiveness of these strategies and their implementation depends on many factors, including a country’s population, the availability of resources to diagnose and effectively isolate infected individuals, culture and societal beliefs, family dynamics, and the feasibility and acceptability of isolation and quarantine policies among the public. This narrative review aims to appraise the evidence on the implementation strategies and shortcomings of isolation and quarantine strategies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous evidence has found that early quarantine and isolation of COVID-19 patients were more effective than late adoption (5-fold vs. 2.6-fold). Approximately 90% of outbreaks could have been managed if 80% of contacts were monitored, traced, and isolated within four days of the index case being identified. For each new case of COVID-19, around thirty-six individuals should be traced. When the percentage of asymptomatic individuals is greater than 30%, isolation and contact tracing alone cannot contain the infection. The delay between symptom onset and isolation was the most important factor in determining infection control. Symptom-based isolation strategies should not be considered the sole criterion for isolation, as many asymptomatic individuals escaped isolation and increased the risk of disease transmission. Digital contact tracing, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based surveillance systems are potential adjuncts to support isolation and quarantine measures. Changes in societal behaviors and cultural norms, fear of stigma, psychological issues, economic burden, poverty, poor literacy rates, lack of public trust in government, and language were identified as challenges and barriers associated with the effective implementation of isolation and quarantine measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article

Energy transition is central to both economic development and climate-change mitigation and has become a shared global challenge. Given the close relationship between conventional energy prices and the development of the new-energy industry, this study investigates systemic risk spillovers among three crude-oil futures, two natural-gas futures, and five Chinese new-energy sector indices. We employ a quantile time-frequency-connectedness framework and an out-of-sample-validated link-prediction model to assess both realized spillovers and potential changes in the network structure. The results reveal that network connectedness is time-varying and asymmetric across quantiles, with short-horizon connectedness accounting for the majority of average system-wide connectedness. Overall connectedness also increases markedly during major crisis episodes. INE crude-oil futures and both natural-gas futures are net receivers of shocks, whereas WTI and Brent crude-oil futures consistently act as net transmitters, with Brent playing the dominant role under extreme market conditions. As the investment horizon lengthens, the solar sector shifts from a net risk receiver to a net risk transmitter. In the predicted network, the solar sector emerges as the market most likely to initiate new short-term spillover links. This finding reflects a prospective, model-implied tendency rather than a causal relationship. These findings offer useful implications for energy market policy, portfolio risk management, and investment decisions involving new-energy companies. Full article

Cities are the main sites of production, employment, and capital accumulation in advanced economies, which places urban economic performance at the centre of economic policy and urban governance. This work develops an integrated grey-based multi-criteria approach for assessing that performance and applies it to the sixteen G7 cities covered by the Global Power City Index (GPCI). Criterion weights are obtained with Grey RANCOM (G-RANCOM), which converts the ordinal rankings of a five-member expert panel into interval weights, and the cities are ranked with Grey MUNRA (G-MUNRA), which aggregates linear, vector, and non-linear normalization. Each performance entry is an interval bounded by the minimum and the maximum annual score observed in the GPCI Economy function over 2021–2025. Market size, economic vitality, and business environment emerge as the most influential criteria, and New York, London, and Tokyo occupy the highest positions, while Osaka, Milan, and Fukuoka occupy the last three. Robustness is tested via scenario analyses on the model parameters and through a global analysis of 100,000 replications in which all of them vary jointly. New York holds the first position in 74% of the replications and the three lowest positions are unchanged in 87%, whereas cities in adjacent middle positions are not separated reliably. Rankings produced by five established grey approaches, by crisp and fuzzy counterparts, and by the published GPCI Economy rankings agree with the reported ordering, with Spearman correlations between 0.92 and 1.00. The framework offers urban policymakers a transparent benchmarking tool for evidence-based competitiveness strategies. Full article

High-Standard Farmland Construction (HSFC) is widely expected to support both food security and low-carbon agriculture in China, yet prevailing assessments treat agricultural carbon performance (ACP) as a single aggregate, obscuring the structural asymmetry between emission mitigation and carbon sequestration. This study examines whether HSFC simultaneously reduces agricultural emissions and enhances carbon sequestration. Using a city-level panel of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (2007–2022), this study treats HSFC as a quasi-experiment and decomposes ACP into carbon sequestration performance (CSP) and carbon mitigation performance (CMP). The results show that HSFC robustly improves overall ACP and CSP, while its effect on CMP is statistically insignificant. Further decomposition indicates that HSFC promotes ACP through both efficiency change and technological change, though these gains are concentrated primarily in the sequestration dimension. Mechanism analysis shows that farmland scale management improves both efficiency and technology adoption, whereas agricultural socialized services promote both channels with a particularly pronounced effect on technological progress; neither channel, however, delivers a strong mitigation effect. In addition, the CSP-enhancing effect is robust across mechanization levels and in major grain-producing areas, whereas it is statistically absent in the upstream reaches characterized by fragmented terrain, and no significant CMP effect emerges in any subgroup. These findings provide new evidence on the climate consequences of farmland policies and offer implications for better aligning food security with agricultural decarbonization. Full article

Vegetation greenness helps cool cities, but how its cooling effect changes over time in newly expanded and existing old built-up areas (BUAs) across different urban development stages remains poorly understood. This study investigated the spatiotemporal trends of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST) within newly expanded and old BUAs across cities of different development stages from 1992 to 2020. Utilizing the ESA CCI dataset for BUA delineation and Landsat-derived NDVI and LST, we applied the Mann–Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimator to analyze 26 core cities. City sizes were classified into five categories from small cities to super megacities based on their status, and then assigned to urban development stages ranging from Stage 4 (least developed) to Stage 1 (most developed). The results revealed a significant decrease in NDVI across all areas in both new BUA (average significant slope = −0.0009, p < 0.05) and old BUA (average significant slope = −0.0002, p < 0.05), and a significant increase in LST in both new BUA (average significant slope = 0.0818, p < 0.05) and old BUA (average significant slope = 0.0245, p < 0.05). In addition, NDVI trends in BUA expansion varied significantly across urban development stages (p for trend = 0.016). Excluding Stage 1 (Shanghai only), vegetation loss attenuated from the sharpest decline in Stage 4 (average significant slope = −0.0021, 36.60% significant, p < 0.05) to a moderate decline in Stage 3 (−0.0011, 26.03%), and reversed to a slight vegetation gain in Stage 2 (0.0031, 19.14%), whereas LST showed no significant stage-dependent pattern. These findings underscore the widespread decreasing NDVI and increasing LST in both newly expanded and old BUAs, with the stage-wise vegetation differences potentially reflecting varying policy and economic contexts. Full article

The European Union Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 on novel foods has created new opportunities for the valorization of marine by-products within the framework of the circular bioeconomy and sustainable blue economy. Refined shrimp peptide concentrate (RSPC), obtained through enzymatic hydrolysis of Pandalus borealis shells and heads, represents a relevant case study for examining the interaction between food innovation, regulatory assessment, sustainability, and value-chain development. This study analyzes the EFSA scientific opinion on RSPC and reviews available compositional, toxicological, allergenicity, and clinical evidence, contextualizing the ingredient within European policies on circular economy, resource efficiency, and sustainable food systems. The assessment indicates that RSPC consists mainly of 8 low-molecular-weight peptides with demonstrated angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitory activity and potential applications in blood pressure management. Beyond its functional properties, the valorization of shrimp processing by-products offers opportunities to reduce waste generation, increase resource efficiency, and create new economic value within the seafood sector. The case study highlights how the novel food regulatory framework can support the safe market introduction of innovative marine-derived ingredients while contributing to circular economy objectives. Although challenges related to allergenicity management, consumer acceptance, and industrial scalability remain, RSPC demonstrates the potential of marine by-product valorization to foster more sustainable, resilient, and economically viable food systems. Full article

In South Africa, the culture and creative industry still faces structural constraints and rapid technological change. While digital infrastructure has opened new paths for creative production, distribution, and commercialisation, the extent to which digital connectivity and innovation translate into tangible, measurable performance in the creative economy remains a question. In this paper, the study investigates the short- and long-run relationships among technological innovation, telecommunications infrastructure, digital services intensity, and the performance of South Africa’s creative economy over the period 1999–2023 using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The study uses patent applications as an indicator of formal innovation, as well as of fixed telecommunications infrastructure, digital services exports, and overall economic activity. The negative and marginally significant long-run association of digital services exports is also observed, while overall GDP is insignificant. The error-correction mechanism is negative and statistically significant, although its small magnitude suggests a slow recovery toward the long-run equilibrium. The study’s results show that the development of the creative economy is not only about increasing overall digital connectivity but also about innovation capacity and technological infrastructure within the creative innovation ecosystem. The study further observes that technological access alone is insufficient to achieve sector-level benefits and that it must be accompanied by stronger innovation support, commercialisation capabilities, and institutional support for creative companies. From a policy perspective, the findings call for greater attention to intellectual property development, innovation capabilities, digital production capacity, and infrastructure to help creative companies translate their technology into business. The study provides time-series evidence on the link between technological innovation, digital infrastructure, and creative economy performance in an African emerging-market context, and it offers policy-relevant insights for developing innovation-led creative sector development in South Africa amid uneven digital and economic development. Full article

Synergistic governance of pollution and carbon reduction is a critical pathway for promoting the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development. Based on panel data from 30 Chinese provinces over the period 2006–2023, this study employs the super-efficiency SBM-DEA model to measure the synergistic efficiency of air pollution and carbon reduction (SE), and applies the Dagum Gini coefficient and spatial autocorrelation analysis to reveal its spatiotemporal differentiation characteristics. The modified gravity model and social network analysis are used to characterize the evolutionary patterns of the spatial network of synergistic efficiency of air pollution and carbon reduction (SEN). Furthermore, a two-way fixed-effects model and the Spatial Durbin Model are constructed to empirically examine the impact of new quality productivity (NQP) on SE and its spatial spillover effects. The main findings are as follows: First, SE exhibits an overall declining trend, with a clear gradient pattern of “East > West > Central > Northeast” and significant positive spatial agglomeration. Second, the linkage intensity of SEN has steadily increased, and inter-provincial synergistic connections have grown closer; however, the core–periphery structure remains stable, network density fluctuates at a persistently low level, and a multi-center balanced pattern has yet to emerge. Third, NQP significantly enhances SE, but green technological innovation exhibits a suppression effect along the transmission pathway. Fourth, the driving effect of NQP on SE demonstrates notable regional and resource-endowment heterogeneity, while also showing a significant positive spatial spillover effect. These findings offer policy implications for advancing regionally tailored synergistic governance of pollution and carbon reduction and for optimizing the structural configuration of inter-provincial synergistic networks. Full article

Recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis (RVVC), commonly defined as ≥3 symptomatic episodes per year, affects an estimated 138 million women worldwide. This structured narrative review (PubMed/MEDLINE and open-indexed sources, January 2020–July 2026, as well as selected pre-2020 landmark studies) synthesizes epidemiological and metabolic risk factors (including SGLT2-inhibitor-associated susceptibility), host immunogenetic and vaginal microbiome mechanisms, emerging preventive pharmacotherapies, and patient-reported outcomes within a unified clinical framework. RVVC arises from interacting host, microbial, metabolic, behavioral, and iatrogenic domains—diabetes-related hyperglycemia, innate immune polymorphisms (MBL2, TLR2), altered bacterial–fungal vaginal communities, and non-albicans Candida in difficult-to-treat cases. Fluconazole maintenance remains a guideline-supported suppressive option but relapse after discontinuation is common; oteseconazole and ibrexafungerp expand prevention choices, while probiotics show inconsistent, low-certainty benefit. RVVC consistently impairs health-related quality of life, sexual function, and mental health and imposes substantial economic burden; regional data from Southeastern Europe underscore diagnostic and access gaps. We propose a multifactorial host–pathogen–microbiome model that favors individualized, diagnosis-driven management and routine incorporation of validated patient-reported outcomes. Research priorities include harmonized case definitions, head-to-head trials of new agents, validated quality-of-life instruments, longer post-treatment follow-up, and real-world cost-effectiveness evaluations. Implementation research, equitable access strategies, clinician education, and national health policy are essential to translate evidence into improved patient outcomes globally. Full article