From Chinese Local State-Owned Enterprise to Global MNE: a Mixed Methods Investigation into pre- and post- Strategic Asset Seeking OFDI in sub-national CMNEs

Over the last several decades, Chinese local state owned enterprises (LSOEs) have become significant forces in Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). I first show, using a quantitative regression model, how LSOEs have a comparatively stronger strategic asset seeking (SAS) orientation. Operating within a diversified external political economy, and possessing unique status and features following decentralization, LSOEs face particular challenges, to which SAS oriented OFDI has arguably been one response. I then investigate the case of China’s Northern Heavy Industries (NHI) Group from Liaoning Province. The group operates in the Tunnel Boring Machinery (TBM) industry and has become one of the world’s most successful TBM players. It has done so through several large foreign strategic asset related acquisitions (one in France and one in the US). I draw from interviews and hand-collected primary information from the parent firm in China, and the acquired subsidiaries in France, the United States and Germany. I explore in particular pre and post SAS related FDI decision making and integration strategies and behaviours. I identify: (1) Local state ownership as an important factor determining pre-OFDI strategic decision making and post-OFDI integration; (2) The Chinese institutional environment as a potential comparative advantage for LSOEs in negotiating with foreign investment targets or partners; (3) the challenges and responses to post FDI SAS integration for local state-owned Chinese businesses. To date we know relatively little in detail about the ways in which local Chinese MNEs have managed to catch-up with developed market counterparts. This research therefore contributes to our understanding of theories like Mathews’ (2006) ‘LLL’ model, the ‘springboard’ perspective of Luo and Tung (2007), and Chinese OFDI determination theory by Buckley et al. (2007). It also sheds important new light on the institutional perspective, particularly the role of local government in spurring Chinese MNEs (CMNE) OFDI related catch-up

Semi-Supervised Learning via Swapped Prediction for Communication Signal Recognition

Deep neural networks have been widely used in communication signal recognition and achieved remarkable performance, but this superiority typically depends on using massive examples for supervised learning, whereas training a deep neural network on small datasets with few labels generally falls into overfitting, resulting in degenerated performance. To this end, we develop a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method that effectively utilizes a large collection of more readily available unlabeled signal data to improve generalization. The proposed method relies largely on a novel implementation of consistency-based regularization, termed Swapped Prediction, which leverages strong data augmentation to perturb an unlabeled sample and then encourage its corresponding model prediction to be close to its original, optimized with a scaled cross-entropy loss with swapped symmetry. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed method can achieve a promising result for deep SSL of communication signal recognition

How Embeddedness Affects the Evolution of Collaboration: The Role of Knowledge Stock and Social Interactions

Science and technology are becoming increasingly collaborative. This paper aims to explore the factors and mechanisms that impact the dynamic changes of collaborative innovation networks. We consider both collaborative interactions of organizations and their knowledge element exchanges to reveal how social and knowledge network embeddedness affects the collaboration dynamics. Knowledge elements are extracted to present the core concepts of scientific and technical information, overcoming the limitations of using predefined categorizations such as IPC when representing the content. Based on multiple collaboration and knowledge networks, we then conduct a longitudinal analysis and apply a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to model network dynamics over different periods. The influence of network features and structures, individual node characteristics, and various dimensions of proximity on collaboration dynamics is tested and analyzed.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure. Conference presentatio

Study on the Socioeconomic Factors Affecting Adoption of Agricultural Machinery

In the context of south Asia, There is enough support for suitable agricultural machinery for small farmers. These kind of agricultural machineries can improve the return of investment in land and labor, although large capital investments are still required that can impede ownership. The growing demand for machinery has resulted in comparatively more developed rental marketplaces for irrigation, tillage and other post-harvest procedures. Numerous small businesses are therefore accepting access to farm machinery that would otherwise be incredibly expensive to buy through service fee arrangements, although there is still room for expansion. In order to facilitate the advancement and investment of such machinery more effectively, it is necessary to better understand the associated factors with the purchase of agricultural machinery and the provision of services. Firstly, current paper reviews country’s policy structure which enabled the existence of such machinery markets. It then uses stratified random sample of 305 wheat producing households for the survey from six districts, identifying variables associated with the adoption of the most common smallholder agricultural machinery e irrigation pumps, threshers, and power tillers. Results of multinomial probit model show that education of farmer, member of farmer’ organization, livestock ownership, farm size and being part of non-farm work activities all were significantly positive in the adoption of farm machinery. Findings also suggest that institutions and policy making authorities not only need to focus on short projects to encourage adoption of machinery, also there must be a continuous attention to improve physical and civilian infrastructure & services, and ensuring the availability of credit to create an favorable  conditions where agricultural machinery is most likely to be used. Keywords: Agricultural machinery, Investment, Productivity, Efficiency. DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-3-07 Publication date: February 29th 202

Immigrants’ Political Participation in Canada

Study Canadian immigrants’ likelihood of voting and participating in noninstitutional political activitie

Males Experiencing Sexual Assault at a Young Age: A Social Policy Evaluation in Canada

The paper aims to examine whether there should be policy intervention in Canada specifically helping males experiencing sexual assault because the current literature about the causes and consequences of male sexual assault victimization was limited in Canada, and sexual assault policies in Canada were mainly for female victims. The secondary study was conducted using the 2014 General Social Survey, Cycle 28: Victimization main file, a dataset created by Statistics Canada. Two binary logistics regressions are conducted to examine the relationship between the sex of the respondent and the relationship between sexual assault victims and attackers, and the male\u27s disability status and the likelihood of being sexually assaulted before age 15. Ordinary least squares regression is used to examine the impact of sexual assault victimization on one\u27s mental health. The results based on the weighted analyses oppose the potential indicators identified by current literature; there is no statistically significant relationship with a 95% confidence level found in all three hypotheses after controlling the potential key indicators. Although the result suggests no policy interventions should target males, males, or males with physical or mental/psychological disabilities, the results may be more accurate by using a more updated dataset with more relevant questions and sociodemographic information available and more advanced statistical models and knowledge about quantitative research. The paper still suggests helping male sexual assault victims; other studies suggest that some face difficulties while seeking help. Anti-sexual assault policies should be created through prevention, reduction, legal responses, and various institutions and levels of authorities cooperating to solve the complex issue

Medical image registration and statistical analysis of its results / by Hongshu Wang.

Precision of medical image registration is very important in clinical diagnosis and treatments. It is usually assessed by visual inspection or by referring to other methods that require special expertise and extensive experience. In this study, we proposed a novel automatic approach based on statistical theory to estimate confidence intervals of the registration parameters, which allows the precision of registration results to be objectively assessed

A General Equilibrium Analysis of Achieving the Goal of Stable Growth by China’s Market Expectations in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a weakening of expectations of market players and local governments. It is necessary to explore some effective paths to stabilize China’s market expectations. This paper draws on computable general equilibrium (CGE) model elasticity indicators and marginal utility indicators to simulate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on market agents and the impact of shocks brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic on various industry sectors. Our results first show that the Keynesian closure is still valid, with the impact values of the COVID-19 pandemic on GDP, urban consumption, rural consumption, investment, imports, and exports being 2.35%, 7.96%, 9.79%, 4.10%, −3.13%, and 6.15%, respectively, with the COVID-19 pandemic shock having a particularly strong impact on rural consumption. Second, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on different industries is comprehensive and non-equilibrium. In consumption, urban and rural residents have the largest changes in consumption demand in the tertiary and primary industries, and the overall change in consumption of rural residents is larger than that of urban residents. In investment, the tertiary industry investment changes most significantly, while the primary industry has a gentle change. The impact of weaker import and export expectations on industry imports and exports is concentrated in the secondary and primary industries. Third, the weakening expectation induces a decline in the multiplier effect, making it difficult for economic growth to return to pre-pandemic levels, which needs to be accompanied by fiscal policies such as reducing taxes, lowering fees, and raising fiscal spending to achieve growth targets. In addition, while fiscal policy significantly boosts import and export trade, it has a significantly greater impact on exports than imports