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Abstract: In recent years, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), due to its increasing scale and impressive results, has significantly influenced China's outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). While existing literature focuses primarily on economic factors and natural resource endowments as the main influences on China's OFDI, these factors alone do not explain China's varying investment across different countries. OFDI is essentially a two-way issue, entailing China's choice to invest and prospective recipients' decision to accept the investment. On the one hand, Sino–US competition significantly impacts China's investment choices. China is more inclined to invest in BRI countries when Sino–US relations deteriorate in order to seek more international support. On the other hand, in the context of power transition, US pressure affects the target country's decision to accept China's OFDI. Countries with close economic interactions with the United States tend to adopt hedging strategies, balancing interests on both sides and diversifying funding sources and are thus likely to accept China's OFDI. The authors, therefore, propose that an analysis derived from a perspective of the interaction between China, BRI countries and the United States helps to enhance our understanding of the political and economic factors affecting China's OFDI in BRI countries. The authors utilise panel data of China's direct investment in BRI partner countries from 2011 to 2019, and employ fixed effects and differential system GMM models to verify the significant roles that bilateral relations, BRI countries' political and economic dependence on the United States, and Sino–US relations play in shaping China's OFDI.

Many countries use tax competition tools to stimulate enterprises to improve innovation efficiency. Consequently, in China, does tax competition have an incentive effect on the improvement of enterprise innovation efficiency, and what is the existing mechanism? Considering the characteristics of industrial enterprises engaged in various innovative activities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and taking the panel data of industrial enterprises in 31 provinces and regions of China from 2011–2018 as the research object, this paper empirically studies the influence of tax competition and its mechanism on the innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises. It is shown that excessive tax competition in China hinders the improvement of the innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises, in which capital flow plays a partially mediating role. Further research shows that after the implementation of an innovation-driven development strategy, the degree of tax competition in China was reduced, which alleviated the adverse impact of excessive tax competition on the innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises, and capital flow also reduced this negative effect. The results reflect the good effect of implementing an innovation-driven development strategy in China, and it also shows that excessive government intervention is not conducive to the effective allocation of market resources. Tax Competition is a double-edged sword; therefore, it is necessary to promote the innovation efficiency of industrial enterprises by combining promising government and an effective market. The conclusions are important for the appropriate shaping of fiscal policy.

Abstract. Taylor's power law (TPL) describes the scaling relationship between the temporal or spatial variance and mean of population densities by a simple power law. TPL has been widely testified across space and time in biomedical sciences, botany, ecology, economics, epidemiology, and other fields. In this paper, TPL is analytically reconfirmed by testifying the variance as a function of the mean of the released energy of earthquakes with different magnitudes on varying timescales during the Wenchuan earthquake sequence. Estimates of the exponent of TPL are approximately 2, showing that there is mutual attraction among the events in the sequence. On the other hand, the spatio-temporal distribution of the Wenchuan aftershocks tends to be nonrandom but approximately definite and deterministic, which highly indicates a stable spatio-temporally dependent energy release caused by regional stress adjustment and redistribution during the fault revolution after the mainshock. The effect of different divisions on estimation of the intercept of TPL straight line has been checked, while the exponent is kept to be 2. The result shows that the intercept acts as a logarithm function of the time division. It implies that the mean–variance relationship of the energy release from the earthquakes can be predicted, although we cannot accurately know the occurrence time and locations of imminent events.