IMF AND EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS DURING THE SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISIS

While the European Sovereign Debt crisis presented unprecedented challenges to the European institutions in addressing the vulnerabilities of its financial sector, it gave rise to the effective cooperation between the European Commissions, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), collectively known as the Troika. This paper reviews the interactions between the IMF and the euro area official lenders in three programme countries: Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. A close examination of the lending terms changes revealed an evolving understanding of the crisis by the European institutions. This paper analyzes the impact that the IMF had on the lending term changes to enrich a better understanding of the evolution of the European crisis management framework

Understanding Dynamic Collaboration in Teleconsultation

Information and communication technology (ICT) has been widely deployed in the provision of health care for decades. Teleconsultation, one of these new telemedicine solutions, has been prevalently implemented in numerous countries with its tremendous potential to improve healthcare. However, the clinical utility has remained at a disappointing level. Unlike prior research that focuses on the pre-adoption or implementation stages, our research explores not only the understanding the antecedences of actual usage in post-adoption of teleconsultation service, but also the reasons for low actual usage in clinical practice. We identify specific theoretical attributes that are relevant to our research question, and extend TOE into an integrative theoretical framework. Initial propositions are generated based on theoretical perspectives in each dimension of the framework. Finally, we design a comparative case study as our research methodology, and conduct deductive analysis to test our propositions using data from multiple sources. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future research, are outlined

Analysis on spatio-temporal characteristics and influencing factors of industrial green innovation efficiency—from the perspective of innovation value chain

Green innovation has become an important combination of high-quality economic growth and ecological sustainability. In this paper, the super-efficiency network SBM model was used to measure the two-stage green innovation efficiency of the industrial technology research and development (R&D) stage and achievement transformation stage in China (30 provinces and cities) from 2009 to 2019. The results show the following points. Firstly, in terms of temporal series, the efficiency of technology R&D and achievement transformation has experienced three stages of “upward-declining-revitalized period”. Secondly, in terms of spatial trend, the industrial green innovation efficiency gradually increases from northwest to southeast. The high-efficiency areas are still concentrated in the eastern coastal region, with a clear trend towards balanced development in the central and western regions. Finally, openness, industrial structure, government technical expenditures, enterprise scale, and environmental regulation all have different degrees of impact on the efficiency of green innovation in the two stages. Based on the above, this paper is helpful for the government to formulate laws and regulations and coordinate the level of regional economic development and clarify the spatio-temporal characteristics and influencing factors of the efficiency of green innovation

m-Government in China: Observations and Reflections

Mobile and wireless technologies (MWTs), such as wireless laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones, smart phones, etc., have deeply penetrated our lives. Government agencies use MWTs to enhance their managerial effectiveness and provide high-level services to citizens taking advantage of its characteristics of mobility, ubiquity, provision of other location-based government services, and on-time information delivery. Mobile government (m- Government) is forming diversely within (as well as between) different countries. China currently has 738.57 million mobile phone users and 29 cities are deploying “Wireless City” projects. Within this context, we chose six different cities in China to examine m-Government maturity and assess the deployment of m-Government services. We further explored mobile and wireless technology (MWT) application and implications in conjunction with a special project in Beijing. Results are discussed and conclusions are drawn

ECM-OPCC: Efficient Context Model for Octree-based Point Cloud Compression

Recently, deep learning methods have shown promising results in point cloud compression. For octree-based point cloud compression, previous works show that the information of ancestor nodes and sibling nodes are equally important for predicting current node. However, those works either adopt insufficient context or bring intolerable decoding complexity (e.g. >600s). To address this problem, we propose a sufficient yet efficient context model and design an efficient deep learning codec for point clouds. Specifically, we first propose a window-constrained multi-group coding strategy to exploit the autoregressive context while maintaining decoding efficiency. Then, we propose a dual transformer architecture to utilize the dependency of current node on its ancestors and siblings. We also propose a random-masking pre-train method to enhance our model. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for both lossy and lossless point cloud compression. Moreover, our multi-group coding strategy saves 98% decoding time compared with previous octree-based compression method

The relationship between red blood cell distribution width and metabolic syndrome in elderly Chinese: a cross-sectional study

© 2019 The Author(s). Objective: Metabolic syndrome (MS) is a group of risk factors which includes hypertension, hyperglycemia, abnormal cholesterol levels, and obesity. Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) is a parameter that reflects the heterogeneity of erythrocyte volume. But the relationship between MS and RDW is intricate and remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that high RDW was associated with MS via inflammation. Our study aimed to investigate the association between RDW and MS in Chinese elderly large cohort. If RDW had a strong correlation with MS, RDW could become a predictor of MS? Methods: We recruited 10,887 ostensibly healthy participants aged from 60 to 93 (5795 male, 5092 female). Associations between RDW and other variables were assessed by Pearson correlation. Crude and adjusted odds ratio for MS with 95% confidence intervals was calculated by binary logistic regression models. Results: In elderly Chinese, RDW was significantly higher in males than in females. The prevalence of both men and women decreased with the rise of RDW. For both sexes, RDW demonstrated positive correlations with age, systolic blood pressure (0.070 in males,0.058 in females), high density lipoprotein(0.027in males,0.064 in females), negative correlations with triglycerides (- 0.120 in males,-0.074 in females) and fasting glucose (- 0.048 in males,-0.016 in females). Notably, we detected the associated reduced risks at the the third and fourth quartile of RDW in males. In women, there was no statistical significance. Conclusion: We found the adjusted odds ratios of MS was lower at the third and fourth quartile of RDW in males