Harnessing the Forces of Urban Expansion - The Public Economics of Farmland Development Allowance

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land development has consistently exceeded land conversion. In a model featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use and development, along with a land development allowance policy instituted in 1998, we show that a land development allowance policy can harness the forces of urban expansion to encourage agricultural land development.land development allowance, fiscal decentralization, inter-jurisdictional competition, agricultural development, Community/Rural/Urban Development, H11, H77, P35, R5, R14, O18,

Liuzhou Fantastic Stones Museum

The natural beauty of its landscapes and rivers underpin China’s culture. For thousands of years the rivers along with other geological forces have fashioned natural artifacts that capture this cultural history. The Hongshuihe is a magical river that flows across northern Guangxi Province into the Liujiang River just south of Liuzhou City. The unique physics of this River produce natural art in the form of ornamental stones. Because these stones served traditionally as tribute, they became part of the context of Chinese history and cultural development. Interest in these natural treasures rekindled in Liuzhou in the wake of the “Cultural Revolution” and since then the city has been dedicated to finding, preserving and making these natural cultural treasures available to its people, and the people of China and the world. The poster looks briefly at the overall classification of ornamental stones then explores the cultural aspects of appreciation and play by introducing some of Liuzhou’s finest water stones

Proteomic and metabolomic analyses reveal metabolic responses to 3-hydroxypropionic acid synthesized internally in cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Comparison of cell growth of the WT and the engineered Synechocystis strains in this study