China’s Belt and Road rail freight transport corridors – the economic geography of underdevelopment

Traffic volumes between China, Europe and Central Asia through China’s ‘CR Express’ intercontinental rail freight system remain intransparent. We sought new methods of data collection to better understand the significance of this novel trans-Eurasian transport mode. Cumulative causation economic theory can explain how positive industrial development can occur in both linear transport corridors and industrial cluster development in node cities. However on current economic metrics, it is difficult to accept the China narrative of structurally transformative economic development resulting from the intercontinental rail system policy. This paper expresses doubt as to the underlying institutional factors behind the intercontinental rail system being developed by China and its surrounding Eurasian transport policy. We detail the economic theory underpinning the development of the ‘CR Express’ policy through examination of China central level transport policy sources and their horizontal integration with other central-level spatial planning policies, and we examine the deployment of China’s model of intercontinental rail development in the ‘Middle Corridor’ between the Kazakhstan border and Eastern European ports. Both theory and practice point to supply-side development of greater containerised transport capacity resulting in complementarity-driven economic growth clusters. However, without adequate demand, industrial investment in Eurasian clusters, or transparent statistics with which to gauge either the rail freight logistics development or the economic development spill-over effects, we expect to find the initial practical economic results in the Eurasian economies underwhelming. We argue that China’s Eurasian transport policies are not multifaceted enough to result in future growth

Factor Misallocation and Declining Labor Income-Share in China

In China’s present economic development, factor misallocation and labor’s low income-share both are important and interrelated, with factor misallocation being an important reason for the decline in China’s labor income-share. Theoretical modeling demonstrates that if capital-labor is substitutable, the factor misallocation will lead to a decline in labor income-share. Empirical studies, using 2001-2013 provincial panel data show that factor misallocation significantly reduces labor income-share, even after controlling for other factors that affect the labor-share. The conclusion is both significant and robust. Therefore, economic policy which optimizes factor allocation will improve labor’s income-share

From Art Introspection to Selfie Co-creation: Looking for Clues from O’Doherty’s “Inside The White Cube” to Improve Evaluation and Design in the Attention-Experience Economy

This practice-based research is a visitor experience engagement framework applied in cultural institutions. We revisit O’Doherty`s (1999) Inside the White Cube as a lens to the attention-experience economy. The White Cube precedes digital technology and 24/7 contemporaneous experiences. What principles derived from the ‘White Cube’ inform contemporary experience consumption? How are designers to consider stakeholder experiences in cultural institutions? We employ contextual analysis and experience researcher introspection including people, place, objects, rules, relationships, and blocking mapped with ‘White Cube’ ideology. We document a table informed by white cube themes for the future visitor engagement framework for cultural institutions

Insurance Plus Futures: Agricultural Commodity Price Reform in China

China's agricultural support policies are moving towards market institutions through a quasi-market transition. Ten years of direct minimum purchase price procurement on agricultural commodities resulted in overcapacity, oversupply, mixed-market signals and grey-market imports. The Insurance Plus Futures (??+??) policy pilot in agricultural price reform is a leading indicator of reform in China's agricultural production and rural finance architecture. State procurement of staple crops is now ending, and an interim governance structure is in place for the transition to market prices. This article assesses the historical institutional development of three key economic institutions in Chinese agricultural production: agricultural prices, insurance and futures. It examines government plans to move from a centrally procured to a provincially variable agricultural production model, examines the provincial sectoral target-price mechanisms constructed in 2016-2018 as interim price-setting mechanisms, looks at the emergence of government mandated agricultural insurance as a measure to cover the subsidy previously served by the minimum purchase price system and assesses the prospects for institutional development of futures contracts, commodities exchanges and price formation institutions in China

Eurasianism and Post-Soviet Political Geography

Books review: Bassin M. The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Cornell University Press, 2016. 400 p.; Bassin M., Pozo G. (eds). The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 384 p.; Clover Ch. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism.Yale University Press, 2017. 360 p. The review considers three works on Eurasianism, the theoretical geography of Lev Gumilev and contemporary Russian ethnonationalism. It places the reviewed works in the context of the historical ideological evolution of Eurasianism. The principal argument in all three reviewed texts is that there are three forms of Eurasian ideology: classical Eurasianism, Gumilevian Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism. This essay argues that instead of a rank appropriation of Eurasian ideology into contemporary Russian ethnonationalist discourses, there remains a great intellectual and theoretical power in Gumilevian Eurasianism that could yet be applied to contemporary Eurasian and Russophere geographies in a more positive and empowering manner than the current misappropriated form of Russian ethnonationalist Eurasianism. While neo-Eurasianism is a misappropriation of Gumilevian Eurasianism, a revival of a new fork of neo-Gumilevian Eurasianism could diffuse the contemporary Russian misappropriation and return to a more objective and inclusive Eurasian ideology

Towards immersive generosity: The need for a novel framework to explore large audiovisual archives through embodied experiences in immersive environments

This article proposes an innovative framework to explore large audiovisual archives using Immersive Environments to place users inside a dataset and create an embodied experience. It starts by outlining the need for such a novel interface to meet the needs of archival scholars and the GLAM sector, and discusses issues in the current modes of access, mostly restrained to traditional information retrieval systems based on metadata. The paper presents the concept of ``generous interfaces" as a preliminary approach to address these issues, and argues some of the key reasons why employing Immersive Visual Storytelling might benefit such frameworks. The theory of embodiment is leveraged to justify this claim, showing how a more embodied understanding of a collection can result in a stronger engagement for the public. By placing users as actors in the experience rather than mere spectators, the emergence of narrative is driven by their interactions, with benefits in terms of engagement with the public and understanding of the cultural component. The framework we propose is applied to two existing installations to analyze them in-depth and critique them, highlighting the key directions to pursue for further development.Comment: This is the pre-published version (after peer-review

Is the Iron Silk Road Really So Important? Rail Freight Use on China’s “Silk Road Economic Belt”

CR Express containerised rail transport between Europe and China is a flagship project of China’s “Belt and Road”. Yet operational and financial details of the project remain scarce. Due to poor governance and logistics transparency, the actual quantity of containers and goods transported is essentially unknowable. The authors doubt the efficacy of the CR Express intercontinental rail system and test its real and possible capacity throughputs. In the article they compare China public media statements with European Union statistics and reveal discrepancies between the number of trains supposedly departing China and the number of trains arriving in the European Union. This article provides numerous data sources and estimates on China–Europe rail freight traffic and demonstrates that the actual transported quantity of goods is probably lower than anticipated or reported. The article also analyses the political development of the CR Express rail freight system and China’s wider “Transport Power” policy. It concludes that while the political concept of the CR Express rail freight system is progressive, and the economic development of creating new cumulative causation systems is theoretically possible, that the evidence for actual economic use is underwhelming. This research helps European Union, Russian, and Central Asian policymakers better assess the viability of participating in the continued rollout of China’s CR Express intercontinental rail freight system. The authors warn that while the CR Express system has potential to be an economic good for Central Asian development it exposes the Eurasian economies to China's political and financial risk. For China the CR Express system fulfils only geopolitical and geoeconomic functions, and ultimately participation in the policy is of minimal utility to European Union economies

Non-Natural Linker Configuration in 2,6-Dipeptidyl-Anthraquinones Enhances the Inhibition of TAR RNA Binding/Annealing Activities by HIV-1 NC and Tat Proteins

The HIV-1 nucleocapsid (NC) protein represents an excellent molecular target for the development of antiretrovirals by virtue of its well-characterized chaperone activities, which play pivotal roles in essential steps of the viral life cycle. Our ongoing search for candidates able to impair NC binding/annealing activities led to the identification of peptidylanthraquinones as a promising class of nucleic acid ligands. Seeking to elucidate the inhibition determinants and increase the potency of this class of compounds, we have now explored the effects of chirality in the linker connecting the planar nucleus to the basic side chains. We show here that the non-natural linker configuration imparted unexpected TAR RNA targeting properties to the 2,6-peptidyl-anthraquinones and significantly enhanced their potency. Even if the new compounds were able to interact directly with the NC protein, they manifested a consistently higher affinity for the TAR RNA substrate and their TARbinding properties mirrored their ability to interfere with NC-TAR interactions. Based on these findings, we propose that the viral Tat protein, sharing the same RNA substrate but acting in distinct phases of the viral life cycle, constitutes an additional druggable target for this class of peptidyl-anthraquinones. The inhibition of Tat-TAR interaction for the test compounds correlated again with their TAR-binding properties, while simultaneously failing to demonstrate any direct Tat-binding capabilities. These considerations highlighted the importance of TAR RNA in the elucidation of their inhibition mechanism, rather than direct protein inhibition. We have therefore identified anti-TAR compounds with dual in vitro inhibitory activity on different viral proteins, demonstrating that it is possible to develop multitarget compounds capable of interfering with processes mediated by the interactions of this essential RNA domain of HIV-1 genome with NC and Tat proteins