Income Inequality, Rapidly Rising Housing Prices and Overdevelopment of Houses in China

Four phenomena can be observed in China’s housing market in the past 16 years. First, the vacancy rate of new condominium properties has increased significantly. Second, housing prices have been increasing very rapidly. In fact, the prices have rarely decreased even when strict housing policies have been mandated. Third, housing transactions are active, as indicated by the new condominiums that have been recently developed and have been sold very quickly. Finally, new construction/development had also been very active. Phenomena 2, 3, and 4 are inherently consistent, but the coexistence of phenomena 2, 3, and 4 with phenomenon 1 is very perplexing. Thus, the following research questions can be raised. 1. How can housing prices keep increasing despite high vacancy rates? 2. How can new condominiums be sold quickly when vacancy rates are high? 3. How can construction activities continue when vacancy rates are high? This is a puzzle. This puzzle is connected with another puzzle, the excessive liquidity in China’s housing market has been oddly coexisting with insufficient demand in China’s consumer market over the past 16 years. The second puzzle can is easily observed even though it has been largely ignored over past 16 years. The following hypotheses are put forward: Hypothesis 1: At a certain time point, higher-income households will spend a lower proportion of their income on consumption compared with lower-income households. If this hypothesis can be verified, then severe income inequality will lead to an overly-high aggregate savings rate and an extremely low aggregate consumption rate; Hypothesis 2: Overly-high aggregate savings rates and extremely low aggregate consumption rates caused by severe income inequality will induce high investment demand in the virtual sector rather than the real sector. As a result, the virtual sector will boom while the real sector will decline. Hypothesis 3: Given a declining real sector, investors will prefer houses as investments as opposed to other assets in the virtual sector due to their unique features. This leads to rapidly rising housing prices and overdevelopment. Testing the three hypotheses above is a big challenge because the typical measure for income inequality for a country, the Gini Coefficient, announced by China’s government is not trustworthy. The data about GDP and per capita disposable income are also not reliable. For this research, a significant amount of effort was exerted to collect primary data on these variables. These efforts include establishing rapport with officials in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, obtaining special access to the database of academic and non-profit research institutes and buying data from private institutes in China. Through these efforts, improved quarterly data of GDP, housing policy, and monetary supply for 70 cities from 2000 to 2016 were obtained

Impedance effects of metallic ground plane on the CTHA antenna

As with the fast-paced development of the communication industry, antennas have become an indispensable part of daily life. However, everyone may have experienced the malfunction of a communication system or radio due to a nearby human body or building or automobile. Then comes the question of how adjacent objects influence the antenna. This thesis has concentrated on the study of these effects on the impedance of the CTHA (contrawound toroidal helical antenna).;The results of this study indicate the CTHA\u27s input impedance changes as a damped sinusoid function of the distance between it and the metallic ground plane. For equivalent distances between the antenna and the metallic ground plane, the CTHA\u27s impedance has been shown to be less affected than the impedance of a vertical dipole, a horizontal dipole, or a horizontal loop antenna. This has been shown by both simulation and experiment and is demonstrated by the plot of the magnitude of the relative impedance change. It indicates that the CTHA will have a smaller increase of the SWR than the other antennas when foreign objects are in the vicinity of the antenna.;This study has also confirmed that NEC (numerical electromagnetic code) is an effective numerical tool for modeling dipoles and loop antennas. The inability for NEC to accurately model the CTHA seems to be caused by the inability to include effects of the core material with dielectric constant other than 1 of the CTHA. Another numerical method, XFDTD (X-window finite difference time domain method), has shown better accuracy in calculating the CTHA\u27s impedance than NEC when comparing with the experimental results

Solving the e-Portfolio Certificate Problem

ePortfolios are of particular interest as a means of supporting and encouraging life-long learning and continuing personal development. A current problem in this context concerns the inclusion of certification of attainment – the electronic equivalent of paper award certificates. At its heart is an interesting problem of three party trust extended over the lifetime of the student. This paper outlines the key issues, offers a proposed solution, and indicates how work is proceeding on an on-going UK-funded project which will deliver and evaluate a demonstrator to test the effectiveness of this solution