Search Results (7)

Oil prices are volatile. How does this affect Japanese and South Korean firms? Since they import almost all of their oil, oil price increases may harm their economies. To investigate these issues, this paper examines how oil prices affect sectoral stock returns. Using Hamilton’s method to decompose oil price changes into portions driven by global demand and by oil supply, the results indicate that many sectors in both countries benefit from increases in global aggregate demand that raise oil prices. Many industrial firms in Japan that produce advanced products also benefit from supply-driven oil price changes. The finding that many firms benefit from higher oil prices indicates that blanket subsidies to compensate for oil price increases are unnecessary. Targeted subsidies would be more economical and eco-friendly. Many sectors in Japan and Korea that produce for the domestic economy are harmed by oil price increases. Large oil price swings will continue due to wars, tariffs, geopolitical events, and climate change. These will whipsaw sectors in both countries. To shield their economies from oil price changes, Japan and Korea should invest in technologies to improve wind, solar, and hydro power and should facilitate intra-regional trade in renewables. They should also encourage individual sectors such as airlines, cosmetics, agriculture, hotels, semiconductors, and automobiles to reduce their exposure to fossil fuels and to choose environmentally friendly production methods. In addition, both countries should expedite their targets for achieving carbon neutrality. This paper considers ways to achieve these goals. Full article

For increased penetration of energy production from renewable energy sources at a utility scale, battery storage systems (BSSs) are a must. Their levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) has drastically decreased over the last decade. Residential battery storage, mostly combined with photovoltaic (PV) panels, also follow this falling prices trend. The combined effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine has caused such a dramatic increase in electricity prices that many consumers have adjusted their strategies to become prosumers and self-sufficient as feed-in subsidies continue to drop. In this study, an investigation is conducted to determine how profitable it is to install BSSs in homes with regards to battery health and the levelized cost of total managed energy. This is performed using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) in MATLAB, along with its embedded solver Intlinprog. The results show that a reasonable optimized yearly cycling rate of the BSS can be reached by simply considering a non-zero cost for energy cycling through the batteries. This cost is simply added to the electricity cost equation of standard optimization problems and ensures a very good usage rate of the batteries. The proposed control does not overreact to small electricity price variations until it is financially worth it. The trio composed of feed-in tariffs (FITs), electricity costs, and the LCOE of BSSs represents the most significant factors. Ancillary grid service provision can represent a substantial source of revenue for BSSs, besides FITs and avoided costs. Full article

Talent is an important strategic resource for regional economic development. Based on the background of “the talent war” that has broken out between various cities in recent years, this study empirically verified the influence of the talent policy on urban innovation in 277 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019 using the multi-period difference-in-differences model. The results indicated that “the talent war” caused by the talent policy has positively influenced urban innovation, causing, for instance, a dramatic increase in the number of patents for inventions. Among the subsidy methods of “the talent war” policy, the employment and entrepreneurship subsidy had the greatest incentive effect on urban innovation, followed by the talent housing subsidy. Moreover, the “the talent war” policy exerted a positive impact on urban innovation by improving the innovation willingness of cities and the level of talent gathering. At present, “the talent war” cities have, to a certain extent, restrained the improvement of urban innovation in neighboring cities because of the siphon effect, resulting in the division of the regional labor market. A heterogeneity analysis showed that “the talent war” has significantly promoted substantive innovation and the development of coastal cities with a better business environment and a higher degree of intellectual property protection. Full article

This study analysed the dynamics of the international soybean market using econometric techniques and economic models to study the impacts of the US–China trade war. It considered the analysis of “spatial” (horizontal) price transmission during an approximately ten-year period from September 2009 to May 2019 using monthly time-series data. The research focused on the leaders in the international soybean market, namely, China, the USA, the EU, Brazil and Argentina. Several econometric techniques were employed. The stationarity of the price time series was determined using the augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) unit root test. Structural breaks were inferred using the ADF test with a breaks test and a Bai–Perron multiple break test. The long-term relation/cointegration amongst the series was determined using the Johansen cointegration test (1988), with the previous breaks input as dummy variables. The direction of the causality was inferred using the Granger causality test (1969). The long-term and short-term causal relations were determined using the vector autoregression model (VAR) and the vector error correction model (VECM). The results showed a highly efficient and cointegrated market. The incidents of the trade war, as represented by tariffs and subsidies, had minor effects on the market efficacy, cointegration and price transmission. The arbitrage process of the studied market managed to get around the tariffs. In other words, there was no empirical evidence to support the claim that the law of one price (LOOP) did not hold. Full article

Spatial inequalities in urban public transportation are a major concern in many countries but little of this research has focused specifically on taxi services. The taxi situation has grown more complex, as traditional ride-for-hire services face growing competition from e-hailing apps like Uber in the U.S., or Didi and Kuaidi in China. In 2014, Didi and Kuaidi triggered a nationwide subsidy war, with possible effects on the spatial inequality of taxi services. Taxi trajectory data from Shenzhen collected during the subsidy war shows that this competition reduced spatial inequality in the inner city but aggravated it in the outer city. In this study, a measure of service rate to depict the quantity of taxi services is proposed to calculate a Gini coefficient for evaluating change in the spatial inequality of taxi services. The Theil index and its decomposition were used to distinguish the contribution of Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs) in the inner and the outer city and compare them to the overall spatial inequality of taxi services in Shenzhen, TAZs in the outer city had greater inequality in taxi services than the inner city. Furthermore, the primary contributor to overall inequality in taxi services was inequality within, rather than between, the inner and outer city. Moreover, the mean values for the changed service rates in the inner city were always larger than the outer city, and the inner city had a more equitable changed service rate than the outer city. These results could serve as a foundation for improving taxi services citywide. Full article

The locations where taxicabs pick up and drop off passengers are crucial to understanding the dynamics of taxi trip demand. Investigating their spatial distribution and derived dynamic features is still a key task in the fields of urban geography and transportation. Such investigations are urgently needed, considering the competition created by new communication technology services, specifically e-hailing apps such as Uber, Didi and Kuaidi. For example, a subsidy war between two e-hailing apps occurred in China in 2014. However, how the pick-up and drop-off locations of taxicabs change during subsidy wars is still an open question. This paper introduces a methodological framework that can be used to derive the pick-up and drop-off dynamics of taxicabs. It also proposes three indexes that can be used to assess the dynamics of the pick-up and drop-off locations at the city and sub-district scales, namely the numbers of daily pick ups and drop offs per taxi, average transfer distance per unit area of weighted mean centers of pick-up and drop-off locations, and degree of dispersion in the spatial distribution of pick-up and drop-off locations. This paper employs data from taxicabs in the city of Shenzhen to uncover the dynamics of their pick-up and drop-off locations. The results show that the methodological framework and the indexes introduced are powerful tools for uncovering the dynamics of the pick-up and drop-off locations of taxicabs in urban environments. Full article

The migration crisis affecting Europe since the war in Syria began is the greatest challenge facing our continent since the Second World War. In the last three years, the number of applicants for international protection in Spain has grown exponentially. Our refugee system has been unable to scale up its supply at the same rate and 20,000 requests have accumulated without response. In addition, the EU has set up a mechanism to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy in the rest of the member states (hotspot approach). Of the 17,337 refugees Spain pledged to offer asylum before September 2017, only 744 have been received so far. This article analyzes the strategy the Spanish government has followed to increase the housing capacity of our refugee system. The main conclusion drawn from this case study is that the strategy of expanding supply based on outsourcing the refugee system via subsidies to NGOs is ineffective and, therefore, unsustainable. If the Spanish government wants to solve this problem it will have to launch a program to build new public refugee centers in the short to medium term. This article develops recommendations for the sustainable planning of this plan in the construction system (prefabrication) and in terms of the need to set minimum standards for the centers. Full article