Asian Americans’ Cancer Information Seeking, Fatalistic Belief, and Perceived Risk: Current Status and Relationships with Cancer Prevention and Detection Behaviors

This study pursues four research goals: (1) to examine Asian Americans and Asian ethnic groups’ (i.e., Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese) information seeking, fatalistic belief, and perceived risk of cancer, in comparison to non-Hispanic Whites; (2) to identify characteristics of Asian Americans who seek cancer information, hold fatalistic cancer belief, and perceive cancer risk; (3) to assess cancer prevention and detection behavior gaps between Asian Americans and Whites, and (4) to explore whether such gaps can be explained by cancer information seeking, fatalistic belief, and perceived risk. Data from 2011-2014 Health Information National Trends Surveys (HINTS) were analyzed. Asian Americans and most Asian ethnic groups were less likely to seek cancer information and perceive their cancer risk as lower than Whites. However, Asian Americans were less likely to hold some fatalistic beliefs (i.e., everything causes cancer, there are too many cancer prevention recommendations) than Whites. Asian Americans’ odds of engaging in breast cancer screening, physical activity, vegetable intake, and sun protection increased when cancer information seeking, fatalistic belief, and perceived risk of cancer were controlled

China’s new exchange rate regime, optimal basket currency and currency diversification

We build an optimising framework to analyse a class of economies that adopt an ECU-type basket currency while in transition to increased flexibility of the exchange rate regime. Instead of conventional basket pegging, such an economy uses an ECU-type currency index as a benchmark for monitoring and assessing exchange rate movements. This provides an anchoring device for the nations exchange rate regime and allows the home currencys exchange rate to fluctuate. Under the assumption that the central bank is chiefly interested in maintaining stability, the optimal structure of the basket currency is based on its contribution to minimizing the volatility of the countrys external account. A currency invariance index is applied to capture the effect of the countrys exit from exclusive linkage with the US dollar. The approach is illustrated by Chinese exchange rate policy. We find it advisable and viable for China to form a basket currency with a diversified portfolio of currencies. While the portfolios weighting scheme could favour the dollar, euro and Japanese yen, we show that the composition of the basket is open to a wide range of possibilities. Moreover, contrary to general fears, there is considerable potential for China to engage in currency diversification, which will not necessarily affect the dollars position.basket currency; currency diversification; China

Advanced research methods and their applications on the nexus of energy efficiency and environment: evidence from five RCEP economies

Using efficient and cleaner energy is environmentally friendly and is vital for combating the negative effect of emissions on the environment. Focusing on both developed and developing nations, it is important to report their environmental conditions while targeting economic and energy-related factors. In this regard, the current study is an attempt to investigate the influence of energy efficiency (ENEF), financial inclusion (FIN), economic growth (GDP), environmental-related technological innovation (ERTI), and human capital index (HCI) on the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for the five selected nations of RCEP. The variables are found associated in terms of long-run cointegration relationships. The panel quantile regression estimator is utilized for empirical estimations, which provide highly significant estimates across the three selected quantiles (25th, 50th and 75th). The results report that FIN and GDP significantly aggravate environmental degradation by enhancing the CO2 emission level, among which the strongest CO2 emission growth is found in the second quantile. Besides, the ENEF, ERTI and HCI significantly reduce CO2 emission. Based on the empirical findings, this study provides practical implication focusing on the improvement of energy efficiency policies and revising financial inclusion policies in promotion of green investments

An enhanced and highly efficient semi-implicit combined Lagrange multiplier approach with preserving original energy law for dissipative systems

Recently, a new Lagrange multiplier approach was introduced by Cheng, Liu and Shen in \cite{cheng2020new}, which has been broadly used to solve various challenging phase field problems. To design original energy stable schemes, they have to solve a nonlinear algebraic equation to determine the introduced Lagrange multiplier, which can be computationally expensive, especially for large-scale and long-time simulations involving complex nonlinear terms. This paper presents an essential improved technique to modify this issue, which can be seen as a semi-implicit combined Lagrange multiplier approach. In general, the new constructed schemes keep all the advantages of the Lagrange multiplier method and significantly reduce the computation costs. Besides, the new proposed BDF2 scheme dissipates the original energy, as opposed to a modified energy for the classical Lagrange multiplier approach in \cite{cheng2020new}. We further construct high-order BDF$k$ schemes based on the new proposed approach. In addition, we establish a general framework for extending our constructed method to dissipative systems. Finally several examples have been presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Energy stable and maximum bound principle preserving schemes for the Q-tensor flow of liquid crystals

In this paper, we propose two efficient fully-discrete schemes for Q-tensor flow of liquid crystals by using the first- and second-order stabilized exponential scalar auxiliary variable (sESAV) approach in time and the finite difference method for spatial discretization. The modified discrete energy dissipation laws are unconditionally satisfied for both two constructed schemes. A particular feature is that, for two-dimensional (2D) and a kind of three-dimensional (3D) Q-tensor flows, the unconditional maximum-bound-principle (MBP) preservation of the constructed first-order scheme is successfully established, and the proposed second-order scheme preserves the discrete MBP property with a mild restriction on the time-step sizes. Furthermore, we rigorously derive the corresponding error estimates for the fully-discrete second-order schemes by using the built-in stability results. Finally, various numerical examples validating the theoretical results, such as the orientation of liquid crystal in 2D and 3D, are presented for the constructed schemes

China’s new exchange rate regime, optimal basket currency and currency diversification

We build an optimising framework to analyse a class of economies that adopt an ECU-type basket currency while in transition to increased flexibility of the exchange rate regime. Instead of conventional basket pegging, such an economy uses an ECU-type currency index as a benchmark for monitoring and assessing exchange rate movements. This provides an anchoring device for the nation’s exchange rate regime and allows the home currency’s exchange rate to fluctuate. Under the assumption that the central bank is chiefly interested in maintaining stability, the optimal structure of the basket currency is based on its contribution to minimizing the volatility of the country’s external account. A currency invariance index is applied to capture the effect of the country’s exit from exclusive linkage with the US dollar. The approach is illustrated by Chinese exchange rate policy. We find it advisable and viable for China to form a basket currency with a diversified portfolio of currencies. While the portfolio’s weighting scheme could favour the dollar, euro and Japanese yen, we show that the composition of the basket is open to a wide range of possibilities. Moreover, contrary to general fears, there is considerable potential for China to engage in currency diversification, which will not necessarily affect the dollar’s position

China’s new exchange rate regime, optimal basket currency and currency diversification

We build an optimising framework to analyse a class of economies that adopt an ECU-type basket currency while in transition to increased flexibility of the exchange rate regime. Instead of conventional basket pegging, such an economy uses an ECU-type currency index as a benchmark for monitoring and assessing exchange rate movements. This provides an anchoring device for the nation’s exchange rate regime and allows the home currency’s exchange rate to fluctuate. Under the assumption that the central bank is chiefly interested in maintaining stability, the optimal structure of the basket currency is based on its contribution to minimizing the volatility of the country’s external account. A currency invariance index is applied to capture the effect of the country’s exit from exclusive linkage with the US dollar. The approach is illustrated by Chinese exchange rate policy. We find it advisable and viable for China to form a basket currency with a diversified portfolio of currencies. While the portfolio’s weighting scheme could favour the dollar, euro and Japanese yen, we show that the composition of the basket is open to a wide range of possibilities. Moreover, contrary to general fears, there is considerable potential for China to engage in currency diversification, which will not necessarily affect the dollar’s position

China’s new exchange rate regime, optimal basket currency and currency diversification

We build an optimising framework to analyse a class of economies that adopt an ECU-type basket currency while in transition to increased flexibility of the exchange rate regime. Instead of conventional basket pegging, such an economy uses an ECU-type currency index as a benchmark for monitoring and assessing exchange rate movements. This provides an anchoring device for the nation’s exchange rate regime and allows the home currency’s exchange rate to fluctuate. Under the assumption that the central bank is chiefly interested in maintaining stability, the optimal structure of the basket currency is based on its contribution to minimizing the volatility of the country’s external account. A currency invariance index is applied to capture the effect of the country’s exit from exclusive linkage with the US dollar. The approach is illustrated by Chinese exchange rate policy. We find it advisable and viable for China to form a basket currency with a diversified portfolio of currencies. While the portfolio’s weighting scheme could favour the dollar, euro and Japanese yen, we show that the composition of the basket is open to a wide range of possibilities. Moreover, contrary to general fears, there is considerable potential for China to engage in currency diversification, which will not necessarily affect the dollar’s position