Economic Take-off Research Articles

PREDICTION FOR TOTAL MOISTURE CONTENT IN WOOD PELLETS BY NEAR INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY (NIRS)

Mankind consumes as many fossil fuels per year as nature produced during a million years. Furthermore, energy consumption has tripled in the last 60 years, and is expected to be doubled in 2050, due to the technological and economic takeoff of large emerging powers. In light of this scenario, a change in energy policies should be aimed to promote energy efficiency and the use of sustainable energy resources, such as bioenergy, safely and environmental friendly. Biomass fuels take a main role in the EU's energy and climate policies, aimed at reducing CO2 emissions and combating Climate Change. Quality control of biofuels and knowledge of their characteristics reach a large relevance in any industrial application based on the energy use of biofuels. NIRS technology (near infrared spectroscopy, Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy) is based on the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and material, and now is presented as an encouraging technological tool for quality testing of solid biofuels, since it is a non-destructive and much faster and cheaper analytical technique than traditional ones, which are based on current ISO standards. That interaction appears as spectral vibrations (energy absorption or absorbance) that are properly processed, allowing to measure the most important physical-chemical properties of solid biofuels in a fast, simple and non-destructive way. Wood pellet is the highest quality solid biofuel in the current biomass market, which is regulated by ENplus® certification scheme in the European-wide, ensuring the quality of product to consumers. Low heating value is the most important parameter of solid biofuel, and is strongly linked to total moisture content, so the control of moisture is key factor during pelletizing process. The original research carried out in this work allows to present the development of a NIRS prediction model for total moisture in wood pellets, in the range of values of 5 – 10 %, providing a much faster and more automated methodology for product quality control, both in production plants of wood pellets and in power plants with wood pellets as fuel. Keywords: near infrared spectroscopy, wood pellets, quality control, moisture, prediction model

Hong Kong breaking into the international league: Cathay Pacific's extension to long-haul routes, 1970s–1980s

AbstractThis article studies the process by which British politicians and corporate executives, in both Hong Kong and London, handled the colony's elevating economic status and negotiated its flagship carrier's penetration of international aviation networks. Through Cathay Pacific's extending reach, Hong Kong translated its economic success into an expanded presence in the world of commercial aviation. As the colonial government channeled Hong Kong's burgeoning financial prowess to fund an infrastructure upgrade, the colony's budding airline capitalized on the commercial availability of jumbo jets to leapfrog into the long-haul market. Such groundwork primed Hong Kong to take advantage of the opening skies as deregulation transformed the airline industry. As the colony's economy flourished, Cathay Pacific broke free from its regional configuration and arrived at faraway ports in Australia, North America, and Europe. The Hong Kong carrier's extended reach was but the material manifestation of the city's economic takeoff and growth into a global metropolis.

Global migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the unstoppable force of demography

This paper sheds light on the global migration patterns of the past 40 years, and produces migration projections for the 21st century. To do this, we build a simple model of the world economy, and we parameterize it to match the economic and socio-demographic characteristics of the world in the year 2010. We conduct backcasting and nowcasting exercises, which demonstrate that our model fits very well the past and ongoing trends in international migration, and that historical trends were mostly governed by demographic changes. Then, we describe a set of migration projections for the 21st century. In line with the backcasts, our world migration prospects are mainly governed by socio-demographic changes. Using immigration restrictions or development policies to curb these pressures requires sealing borders or triggering unprecedented economic takeoffs in migrants’ countries of origin. Increasing migration is thus a likely phenomenon for the 21st century.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s10290-020-00402-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sustainable spatial development: a story of Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk agglomerations

Under the conditions of market-economic reforms that have been taking place in Russia over the past 30 years, the sectoral and territorial structure of the country’s economy has changed dramatically. The economy of some regions, that were successful during the Soviet times sagged and failed, while other regions experienced an actual economic take-off. This paper discusses the main aspects of the spatial organization of the Russian Federation and the development of the Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk agglomerations, which are the largest economic centers of Western and Eastern Siberia. To answer the main question of the study-whether thirty years of economic restructuring in the country could affect the leading position of Novosibirsk and make Krasnoyarsk the new regional leader of Siberia, the authors perform the comparative socio-economic analysis of both agglomerations.

Crowdfunding Adoption in Benin: Influencing Factors and Recommendations towards an Adapted Model

To face the problem of lack of funds, many developed countries have adopted the crowdfunding system. Despite the fact it has been established that the lack of proper funding institutions is a barrier to African countries’ economic take-off, nothing sustainable has so far been done to tackle the issue. This paper aims to investigate factors influencing crowdfunding establishment as a substitute to formal financial organism in Benin republic, and give recommendations toward an adapted model to the country. To thoroughly conduct this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. In Benin, some scholars in the domain of Finance and some people that have a good view of the current state of Benin economy were interviewed to know what they think about crowdfunding and the kind of models of crowdfunding they think may be adopted by Beninese. This helped to draw a final framework of the study, a questionnaire that served to collect first-hand data that were analyzed with SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) Statistics 26 through various tests. The study has revealed significantly positive correlation between each independent variable and the dependent variable which is the crowdfunding implementation. It also came out that to implement a sound and sustainable crowdfunding system particular care should be on a well-built regulatory framework, a well-managed technology transfer and a well-structured organizational environment. Notwithstanding the importance of all the variables, we came to notice that for people to accept and adopt crowdfunding as the study would like, some variables like “Payment System”; “Financial Consumer Protection”; “Security Trust”; “Cyber Security”; “Creditworthiness”; “Licensing”; “Complexity”; “Accessibility”; “Availability”; “Availability”; “Regulatory Framework” are of primordial importance, then follow the other variables. Suitable recommendations were given to a more customized and sustainable crowdfunding system.

Japanese Colonial Land Survey Project and Korean Economic Take-off

The mystery of the newly industrialized countries (NICs)s success, including Korea’s take-off, can be addressed by using the concept of a property representation system, as initiated by de Soto (2000). This property representation system, which has been further described as the mystery of capital formation, was supposedly established in Korea during the Japanese colonialization of 1910-1945. The Korean industrialization in this period has been well described by the ‘developmental state’ approach, but the property representation system can reveal the key role of property rights as an institution in the economic take-off, focusing on its incentive function.

Research on Mechanical Design Based on Rationalization of Mechanical Manufacturing Process

The advancement of science and technology in China has promoted the economic take-off. As an important part of the secondary industry, machining and manufacturing play an irreplaceable and important role, which is widely used in major fields. Many industries are moving towards the production of fully automobile machinery. The use of advanced automobile mechanical manufacturing technology has greatly improved the productivity, reduced manpower input and costs while ensuring product quality, and achieved the goal of maximizing economic benefits.

Lessons from South Korean Development and Its Future Challenges

A few decades ago, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. However, astonishingly, in a few decades South Korea has become one of Asia's tigers economies . It is now also recognized as a developed country by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Additionally, South Korea is a provider of high technology and it exports its pop culture to the culture. (Tom,2011) South Korea's economic take-off was known as the ‘Miracle on the Han River’. This paper gives insights in the development of South Korea. It explains the following questions : how can South Korea achieve its current achievements? What are the challenges that South Korea may face in the future?And are there approaches available for South Korea to solve those challenges ?

Legal system for the development of marine renewable energy in the USA: a thorough analysis

Energy has gained great attention and extensive demand as an important element of the development of human society over the globe. As the representative of the traditional energy use, coal and oil have made a significant contribution to the economic take-off. However, their negative effects are becoming increasingly obvious simultaneously. On the one hand, the world is facing severe energy depletion crisis as the energy consumption increases. Eventually, the development and use of energy at large lead to a deteriorating environment. Facing these dual effects, States have begun to attach importance to the exploitation of renewable energy. Marine renewable energy (hereinafter MRE) has become the gateway to energy revolution based on its particular advantages. This paper pays attention to the American institutional framework and legal system for the development of MRE, along with its advantages, prerequisites, opportunities, and barriers, followed by various pertinent recommendations, as the U.S. is the leading country in this field. It is concluded that the U.S. has a comprehensive legal system for the development of MRE. However, it has to timely intersect with the opportunities and barriers in the light of the administrative or legal framework and enhance its institutional structure for the successful implementation as well as to be competitive for the attainment of required goals.

Public Infrastructure and Economic Takeoff

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the role of public infrastructure investment on economic takeoff process in underdeveloped and emerging economies in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We use a two-period overlapping generations model, and consider two types of technologies (traditional and modern) that are used to produce the final output of firms. This paper confirms that economic takeoff is possible only when the capital per labor unit exceeds a certain threshold level. Thus, the takeoff process depends on the productivity race between traditional and modern technologies with increasing public infrastructure investment, while public infrastructures foster the productivity of both technologies. Similarly, an effective tax rate supports the takeoff process by stimulating the wage rate which in turn increases the capital per labor along with the saving rates. Hence, we clarify the conditions required for succeeding in the takeoff of an economy. In addition, we review some empirical evidence related to the output elasticity of public infrastructures.

Quality-adjusted Population Density

Quality-adjusted population density (QAPD) is population divided by land area that has been adjusted for geographic characteristics. We derive weights on these geographic characteristics from a global regression of population density at the quarter-degree level with country fixed effects. We show, first, that while income per capita is uncorrelated with conventionally measured population density across countries, there is a strong negative correlation between income per capita and QAPD; second, that the magnitude of this relationship exceeds the plausible structural effect of density on income, suggesting a negative correlation between QAPD and productivity or factor accumulation; and third, that higher QAPD in poor countries is primarily due to population growth since 1820. We argue that these facts are best understood as results of the differential timings of economic takeoff and demographic transition across countries, and particularly the rapid transfer of health technologies from early to late developers.

Variation of Labor Share During Grand Transformations: Theory and Evidence

We provide new evidence on the long-run relationship between economic growth and labor share in national income, based on a comprehensive panel data set for 144 countries from 1950 to 2017. Our primary finding is that labor share follows a cubic relationship with real GDP per capita over the long process of development. At the beginning of the modern economic growth process, the share of labor in national income first decreases until an initial threshold is reached. After that, labor share keeps increasing until the country’s GDP per capita reaches a second threshold, before falling again. We find that these dynamics apply not only to the less developed countries in the postwar years, but also to the advanced countries like the U.K. and the U.S. during their early economic take-offs, which started in the late 18th and 19th century, respectively. Then we propose a two-sector CES-type growth model with structural transformation during which labor reallocates from the old traditional sector to, together with capital gradually getting accumulated in the new modern sector. Calibration and Simulations of the model generate results which are consistent with the nonlinear pattern of movements in labor share.

A Late Maoist Industrial Revolution? Economic Growth in Jiangsu Province (1966–1978)

AbstractAccording to the conventional wisdom, the promise of the Chinese revolution of 1949 went unfulfilled in the Maoist era. Instead of taking off, the economy grew slowly, and widespread rural poverty persisted. The economic turning point was instead the famous political climacteric of 1976–78. But this metric of aggregates is the wrong criterion by which to judge China's economic record because industrial revolutions have regional beginnings. They invariably take place against a backcloth of slow aggregate growth and stagnant material living standards. Accordingly, we should dwell neither on China's slow overall growth nor its widespread poverty before 1978 but look instead for evidence of an emerging regional growth pole. This article argues that Jiangsu was such a growth pole in the late Maoist era, and that its record bears comparison with that of Lancashire and Yorkshire during the early years of Britain's industrial revolution. This holds out the intriguing possibility that a Chinese economic take-off, diffusing out of the Yangtze Delta, would have occurred even without post-1978 policy changes.

Economic growth, innovation, institutions, and the Great Enrichment

A number of factors are held up as causes of the economic takeoff of the early 1800s in northwest Europe and North America and later Asia, though certain popularly believed factors such as geography and capital accumulation do not have much empirical support. Nor do other commonly held factors such as trade, plunder, and colonization. It is better understood today that productivity enhancing innovation, new venture and new market creation enabling consumption by a wider range of consumers yield firm and economic growth, as well as improved standards of living. In this overview, these literatures are summarized and examined. In addition the evidence regarding the effect of institutions on economic growth is discussed as well as the role of international business in the transfer of positive institutions and organizational routines.

The environment, humankind, and slow violence in Chinese science fiction

This essay takes an analytical approach to examine some Chinese science fiction narratives with the themes of climate change, terraforming, and environment degradation—written from the mid-20th century to the early years of the 21st century. My broad reading of the texts treats these narratives as archive—textual sources that document a historical development of the impact of human activities on nature. On one hand, these narratives are all closely related to the country’s modernization, its economic takeoff, and the rhetoric of building a powerful China. On the other hand, they form one set of what can be understood as an emerging body of Chinese fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene. This body of literature offers a venue for explaining and exploring how economics, technological developments, and government policies have transformed the ecology, environment, and climate in the Anthropocene. These narratives also echo the concept of slow violence dubbed by Rob Nixon in 2011. These terraforming and climate narratives reveal an attritional violence of environmental degradation, climate change, and the consequential social and political problems that permeate so many of our lives. My close reading of Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide ( Huangchao, 2013) specifically portrays a slow and attritional violence—namely, the ways in which the electronics recycling industry have caused severe environmental and occupational impacts on nature and humans—through exploration of the complex relationships among technology, the economy, and the environment.

Measurement Research on Risk Spillover Effects of China’s Listed Commercial Bank

The development of China’s financial market and introduction of financial products in developed countries could spur China’s economic take-off and bring many unknown potential risks. American sub-prime crisis could set off the alarm bell and was regarded as an example for improvement of financial regulatory mechanism. Because Banks lend massive loans unconditionally to stimulate consumption it was very burdensome for the majority of people to bear loans so that banks could not get in huge amount of cashes in time, disrupting capital chain and stirring up systemic risks of banks and financial institutions and banks successively. The economic bubble of mortgage loan market would fall on financial market and the surplus can impact the real economy so as to result in real economic depression. This article relies on the bank’s risk spillover effects research to have the grasp of what banks will have such influences in China’s commercial banks and to put forward some schemes to lower the effects of risk spillover.

Massive Return Migration Emerging in China

After decades of large-scale rural-to-urban migration, a massive wave of return migration has emerged in China, signalling China’s entry to a new stage of economic and social development. Behind the new trend are the economic take-off of China’s hinterland and the ageing of the first-generation migrant workers. While potentially a benign transformative force for rural China, return migration also risks becoming a way to “dump” ageing, unproductive or laid-off migrant workers in the vast countryside.

The Colonial Land Survey Project and the 'Mystery of Capital' in the Korean Take-Off

This paper tries to apply the scheme of the “mystery of capital” suggested by de Soto(2003) to the economic take-off of Korea, focusing on its colonial history before 1945. Thereby the mystery of the newly industrialized countries (NICs)s success could be also addressed. The question is how could the four tigers-NICs get out of the “middle income trap”, while other developing economies could not. This study reviews the social and economic aspects of the Colonial Land Survey Project carried by Japan in Korea and asks whether it can meet the preconditions for the “property representation system” by de Soto. This study finds that the Korean industrialization in the colonial period has been well described by the ‘developmental state’ approach, but the property representation system can reveal the key role of property rights as an institution in the economic take-off, focusing on its incentive function.

Engineering Rapid Industrial Revolutions for Impoverished Agrarian Nations

Being able to emulate the Industrial Revolution has been the dream of many developing countries in the past one hundred plus years. However, the mainstream economics has not been able to preciously figure out what a nation should do to detonate its desired economic takeoff. Based on the recent research development in the area of development economics, this paper presents a detailed procedure on how to engineer the occurrence and evolution of industrial revolutions for an impoverished agrarian nation. This procedure is developed on top of two theorems that are first intuitively seen through the systemic yoyo model and then rigorously proven by using game theory. So, other than its theoretical value to economics, what’s presented in this paper is expected to be able to bring tangible economic benefits for developing nations in the years to come.

The impact of oil resources on the macroeconomic variables of the Algerian economy

The correlation between the achievement of development in Algeria andunstable oil resources due to the dominance of the hydrocarbon sector, whichrepresents 60% of the general budget and about 40% as a contribution to theGDP turnover shows the fragility of the economy, as an economy of singleproduction and resource, and given the scale of the financial resources of oil,especially in the period 2000-2014, and despite the improvement inperformance of the Algerian economy in terms of achieving internal andexternal macroeconomic balances, but it was momentary and did not contributeto stimulate growth and create conditions for economic take-off. Theimprovement of these effects has required the allocation of large sums of moneywithout creating productive sectors of value added. In the light of theinstability, the question of the need to work to reduce the degree of dependenceon the oil sector and to activate non-oil sources of income as an inevitablenecessity to achieve development is asked.