Inclusive globalization: unpacking China's Belt and Road Initiative

<p>China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framework for open cooperation and new multilateral financial instruments designed to lay the infrastructural and industrial foundations to secure and solidify China’s relations with countries along the Silk Roads and to extend the march of modernization and poverty reduction to emerging countries.</p

Uneven and combined development

Uneven and combined development. Regional Studies. The concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) interprets dynamic historical change and comparative geographical differentiation in terms of the co-existence of tendencies towards differentiation and equalization of the conditions of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, deriving from capital accumulation and political multiplicity. U&CD entails a conception of the global system as a constellation of interdependent, national institutional configurations and interests that shape international/national/regional trends. To explain geographies of industrialization and urbanization and current trends towards a pluri-centric world, U&CD requires, however, a specification of the underlying causal mechanisms, examined in economic geography, international relations and developmental state theories

Uneven and combined development

Uneven and combined development. Regional Studies. The concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) interprets dynamic historical change and comparative geographical differentiation in terms of the co-existence of tendencies towards differentiation and equalization of the conditions of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, deriving from capital accumulation and political multiplicity. U&CD entails a conception of the global system as a constellation of interdependent, national institutional configurations and interests that shape international/national/regional trends. To explain geographies of industrialization and urbanization and current trends towards a pluri-centric world, U&CD requires, however, a specification of the underlying causal mechanisms, examined in economic geography, international relations and developmental state theories

Integrating land surface conditions and transport networks to quantify the spatial accessibility of cities in China

Although there is a need to determine the spatial accessibility of cities in China, the limitations in available data and methods hinder research in this area. The main objective of this study was to quantify the accessibility of cities in China. We developed a comprehensive analytical method to quantify spatial accessibility at a spatial resolution of one kilometer by integrating both land surface conditions and transport networks. The results show that the spatial patterns of accessibility of Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above are characterized by significant spatial heterogeneity, consistent with the patterns in physical geography, population density, and economic activities. The results improve our understanding of deficiencies in the accessibility of cities in China and provide a foundation for transportation infrastructure planning.</p

The in-plane tensile and shear properties of novel chiral cellular structures

Cellular structures have been widely studied and employed in engineering because of their excellent mechanical properties. To enrich the geometric diversity of cellular structures, we proposed two novel chiral cellular structures composed of half-periodic and full-periodic cosinoidal beams respectively in this paper. The in-plane elastic properties were studied by a combination of the energy method and the finite element analysis, and verified by the experimental test. The influences of geometric parameters on the elastic constants were analyzed. Then, the elastic properties of the two structures as well as the V-shaped chiral structure were compared. Finally, error analysis was carried out on the theoretical models. Results show that: (1) the two structures own considerably low equivalent elastic moduli and extremely high strain capabilities, and possess certain in-plane elastic coupling effects; (2) the elastic properties of the two structures are highly tunable with the variations of geometric parameters; (3) the elastic moduli of the two structures are lower than that of the V-shaped structure, and the structure with half-periodic beams exhibits the lowest in-plane stiffness and the highest strain capabilities; (4) the theoretical models without considering the internal axial force are convincible in predicting the elastic properties when the corresponding chord ratio is larger than 0.2. Generally, the proposed structures have great potential as flexible structures for morphing application.</p

Globalisation, cost competitiveness and international trade: the evolution of the Italian textile and clothing industries and the growth of trade with China

Amongst developed countries, Italy is unusual in that it has maintained a specialisation in traditional industries such as textiles and clothing (TCI). Explanations of Italy’s unusual industrial profile mainly emphasise the role of endogenous economic and cultural resources. Globalisation in the 1990s and 2000s saw slow growth and a significant decline of these formerly resilient industries. Analyses of trade and unit value data support accounts of the lateness of the Italian TCI’s movement in the direction of Outward Processing Traffic (OPT) and the subsequent rise of a pan-Euro-Mediterranean system. More recently, however, this system has declined as a result of new competitive challenges from China and other emerging economies that have eroded the position of Italian enterprises on export and domestic markets and adversely affected their Euro-Mediterranean suppliers. As district and value-chain theories show, the geography of industrial activities is a result of enterprise strategies and the environment in which they operate. To embrace recent trends these theories must, however, be extended to give greater weight to exchange rate, trade, market, demand-side and related institutional issues

The Global Pattern of Urbanization and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Three Decades

<div><p>The relationship between urbanization and economic growth has been perplexing. In this paper, we identify the pattern of global change and the correlation of urbanization and economic growth, using cross-sectional, panel estimation and geographic information systems (GIS) methods. The analysis has been carried out on a global geographical scale, while the timescale of the study spans the last 30 years. The data shows that urbanization levels have changed substantially during these three decades. Empirical findings from cross-sectional data and panel data support the general notion of close links between urbanization levels and GDP per capita. However, we also present significant evidence that there is no correlation between urbanization speed and economic growth rate at the global level. Hence, we conclude that a given country cannot obtain the expected economic benefits from accelerated urbanization, especially if it takes the form of government-led urbanization. In addition, only when all facets are taken into consideration can we fully assess the urbanization process.</p></div

Robust Personalized Federated Learning with Sparse Penalization*

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging topic due to its advantage in collaborative learning with distributed data. Due to the heterogeneity in the local data-generating mechanism, it is important to consider personalization when developing federated learning methods. In this work, we propose a personalized federated learning (PFL) method to address the robust regression problem. Specifically, we aim to learn the regression weight by solving a Huber loss with the sparse fused penalty. Additionally, we designed our personalized federated learning for robust and sparse regression (PerFL-RSR) algorithm to solve the estimation problem in the federated system efficiently. Theoretically, we show that the proposed PerFL-RSR reaches a convergence rate of O(1/T), and the proposed estimator is statistically consistent. Thorough experiments and real data analysis are conducted to corroborate the theoretical results of our proposed personalized federated learning method.</p

The regression results explaining differences between level and speed.

<p><i>t</i> statistics in parentheses.</p><p>*<i>p</i><0.05,</p><p>**<i>p</i><0.01,</p><p>***<i>p</i><0.001.</p

Typical countries demonstrating no significant correlation between speed of urbanization and economic performance.

<p>Plotting the annual economic growth rate on the <i>X</i>-axis and speed of urbanization on the <i>Y</i>-axis, different countries form a set of scatter points on a quadrant map. (a) shows the countries with high urbanization speed and low economic performance, and (b) shows the countries with low urbanization speed and high economic performance. Names of countries are abbreviated to three-digit letters according to the ISO criterion. The full names of the countries are seen in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0103799#pone.0103799.s003" target="_blank">Appendix S3</a>. The results highlight the fact that speed of urbanization has no significant correlation with the economic growth rate of observed common phenomena throughout the world.</p