Risks and Countermeasures of Chinese Enterprises Investment in Africa Under the Background of Belt and Road Initiative

This article makes an important contribution to the development of the Belt and Road by highlighting China's existing investment network along the Belt and Road. Most of these agreements cover most of the countries visited. These similarities have so far been carried out using three generations of static analysis, which does not reflect reality. There is an important body that supports the use of the most favorable state rules for Chinese investors in modernizing the Belt and Road investment agreement network. This article shows that the Belt and Road Initiative investment agreement already exists with the most favorable National Clause available in Chinese bilateral investment agreements. In addition, the article explains that China's network of contracts is unique (so extensive) and assesses the potential of investment requirements, taking into account the sanctions based on the initiative of belt and highways that were previously involved in investor-state dispute resolution, which coordinates the expected use of Chinese investors. Keywords: Risks and Countermeasures, Belt and Road Initiative DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-16-04 Publication date:August 31st 202

Trade under Global Value Chains in Africa (Lessons from Asia)

A global value chain refers to a globalized manufacturing process in which the tasks for manufacturing the final product are differentiated and performed in different countries. Due to the high transport and coordination costs, globalized production in Africa is very rare. Most of the goods were made in the country or simply in a workshop. Tackling trade in global value chains is on the high-level political agenda of African countries. Despite trading among global value chains, there is a heated debate as to why some African countries are making progress in global markets and others are not. Some authors have noted that Asia has played an important role and performed well within global value chains. The purpose of this article is to understand the importance African countries place on the global value chain and also to explain why trade has succeeded in African global value chains and why some African countries are unable to interact with global value chains. Despite Asian lessons. The data used in this study was collected through 100 questionnaires and six semi-structured and open interviews with managers of African exporting organizations. For quantitative research, a systematic random sampling method was used to select respondents, while respondents were used for qualitative research. SPSS version 21.0 was adopted for the analysis of quantitative data, while the method for reducing qualitative data. The results show that there is no clear understanding and usual meaning for global value chains. Some African countries are now ranked in Africa in terms of foreign direct investment by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) according to the World Investment Report (2018). Keywords: Global Value Chains, Africa, Asia, Trade, manufacturing. DOI: 10.7176/JESD/12-4-03 Publication date: February 28th 202

AGG-Net: Attention Guided Gated-convolutional Network for Depth Image Completion

Recently, stereo vision based on lightweight RGBD cameras has been widely used in various fields. However, limited by the imaging principles, the commonly used RGB-D cameras based on TOF, structured light, or binocular vision acquire some invalid data inevitably, such as weak reflection, boundary shadows, and artifacts, which may bring adverse impacts to the follow-up work. In this paper, we propose a new model for depth image completion based on the Attention Guided Gated-convolutional Network (AGG-Net), through which more accurate and reliable depth images can be obtained from the raw depth maps and the corresponding RGB images. Our model employs a UNet-like architecture which consists of two parallel branches of depth and color features. In the encoding stage, an Attention Guided Gated-Convolution (AG-GConv) module is proposed to realize the fusion of depth and color features at different scales, which can effectively reduce the negative impacts of invalid depth data on the reconstruction. In the decoding stage, an Attention Guided Skip Connection (AG-SC) module is presented to avoid introducing too many depth-irrelevant features to the reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the popular benchmarks NYU-Depth V2, DIML, and SUN RGB-D.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, ICCV202

Asiatic Acid Exhibits Anti-inflammatory and Antioxidant Activities against Lipopolysaccharide and d-Galactosamine-Induced Fulminant Hepatic Failure

Inflammation and oxidative stress are essential for the pathogenesis of fulminant hepatic failure (FHF). Asiatic acid (AA), which is a pentacyclic triterpene that widely occurs in various vegetables and fruits, has been reported to possess antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. In this study, we investigated the protective effects of AA against lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and d-galactosamine (GalN)-induced FHF and the underlying molecular mechanisms. Our findings suggested that AA treatment effectively protected against LPS/d-GalN-induced FHF by lessening the lethality; decreasing the alanine transaminase and aspartate aminotransferase levels, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor-α production, malondialdehyde formation, myeloperoxidase level and reactive oxygen species generation (i.e., H2O2, NO, and O2−), and increasing the glutathione and superoxide dismutase contents. Moreover, AA treatment significantly inhibited mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) signaling pathway activation via the partial induction of programmed cell death 4 (PDCD4) protein expressions, which are involved in inflammatory responses. Furthermore, AA treatment dramatically induced the expression of the glutamate-cysteine ligase modifier subunit, the glutamate-cysteine ligase catalytic subunit, heme oxygenase-1, and NAD (P) H: quinoneoxidoreductase 1 (NQO1), which are largely dependent on activation of the nuclear factor-erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) through the induction of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK3β) phosphorylation. Accordingly, AA exhibited protective roles against LPS/d-GalN-induced FHF by inhibiting oxidative stress and inflammation. The underlying mechanism may be associated with the inhibition of MAPK and NF-κB activation via the partial induction of PDCD4 and upregulation of Nrf2 in an AMPK/GSK3β pathway activation-dependent manner