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China's institutional settings and policies have played a crucial role in shaping China's energy system. Drawing upon interviews and secondary source materials, this paper reviews the development of China's energy institutions and policies over the past five decades and identifies factors that have influenced this development. This review shows a changing role of government in the energy sector—from complete control to decentralized control—with the government focusing increasingly on improving the effectiveness of regulatory oversight and less on the operational aspects of energy production. The commitment of the government to promote energy efficiency and the subsequent policies and programs have been and will continue to be important for improving the efficiency of energy use and restructuring the energy system. The key remaining issues are the optimal extent of government involvement and the most appropriate and effective means of intervention. This paper finds that Chinese institutions and policies have been very responsive to shortterm energy needs but do not necessarily support effective long-term strategies. Some institutional changes and policies displayed conflicting and perverse effects from a longterm perspective. Incremental adjustments in policy implementation during the transition from a planned economy to a market economy reduced the risk of serious mistakes in policy making and implementation, but distorted market signals in energy production, distribution, and utilization activities. The coordination issues among government agencies and between local and central governments in China have always been complicated and challenging, limiting the efficiency of policy implementation in China's energy sector. Development, environment, and security concerns in the 1990s encouraged policies to promote cleaner and more efficient use of energy, with particular attention to the use of coal and the development of oil, natural gas, and electric power. This shift has led to a number of strategic changes and ...

Since signing the Montreal Protocol in 1991, China has complied with the Protocol's procedural requirements and has satisfied its substantive obligations for reducing ozone-depleting substances by meeting the 1999 freeze targets and making progress towards reaching the 50 percent reduction goals for 2005. The Protocol's Multilateral Fund has played a key role in China's compliance. The sector-based approach to funding, which approved sector-level funding and targets for reduction of ozone-depleting substances, has been much more effective in changing government and industry behavior than the previous project-by-project approach, which required an application and approval procedure for each individual project. Other factors contributing to China's success include the use of market-based policies and regulations, positive government leadership and capacity building, and the participation of local environmental protection bureaus in implementing the Protocol.

There are surprisingly few representative data sets available on particulate matter (PM) and inorganic pollutant gas concentrations for indoor environments. Meanwhile, there is an increasing trend to use low-cost sensors in air quality studies, which may introduce new kinds of investigations. It is, however, unclear whether low-cost instruments can provide enough precision and long-term stability to quantify the comparatively low pollutant concentrations encountered in office and residential indoor environments. This work reports test measurements of PM2,5, CO, NO, NO2 und O3 with a commercial instrument based on low cost sensors in three private homes in Berlin, Germany.

One of customer relationship management (CRM) activities involves soliciting customer feedback on product and service quality and the resolution of customer complaints. Inevitably, companies must deal with large number of CRM messages from their customers either through e‐mails or from work logs. Going through those messages is an important but tedious task for managers or CRM specialists in order to make strategic plans on where to place the resources to achieve better CRM results. In this paper, we present a methodology for making sense out of CRM messages based on text clustering and summary techniques. The unique features of CRM messages are the short message length and frequent availability of correlated CRM ratings. We propose several novel techniques including organizational concept space, Web mining of similarity relationships between concepts, and correlated analysis of text and ratings. We have tested the basic concepts and techniques of CRM Sense Maker in a business setting where customer surveys are used to set strategic directions in customer services.

Blockchain has become a new frontier of venture capitals that has attracted the attention of banks, governments, and other business corporations. The recent blockchain related attempts included legal blockchains by Fadada.com and Microsoft and pork tracking blockchains by Walmart and IBM. Blockchain is poised to become the most exciting invention after the Internet; while the latter connects the world to enable new business models based on online business processes, the former will help resolve the trust issue more efficiently via network computing. In this paper, we give an overview on blockchain research and development as well as introduce the papers in this special issue. We show that while blockchain has enabled Bitcoin, the most successful digital currency, its widespread adoption in finance and other business sectors will lead to many business innovations as well as many research opportunities.

"This book generates a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in concepts, technologies, and applications that enable advanced business process management in various enterprises"--Provided by publisher

Background: Local, state, and federal governments have started exploring the potential of crowdfunding in transforming conventional financing methods used previously to fund public projects and services. While crowdfunding has been applied to improve government financing methods in recent years, little is known about how this new model can be extended and applied in international collaboration among governmentincentivized projects. Methods: In this paper, we explores what roles crowdfunding can play as a financial intermediary to support government-incentivized multinational projects in the context of the One-Belt, One-Road initiative. Results: We conjecture that crowdfunding can offer an efficient mechanism to improve participatory budgeting and facilitate private-public collaboration while providing a high level of transparency in the budget decision process. Conclusions: The paper also discusses research issues and challenges, including features of the crowdfunding platforms that can affect the adoption and use of the crowdfunding platforms in multinational initiatives.