Investment In Information Infrastructure Research Articles

Optimization of maintenance work by implementing an automated information system at a repair facility

The introduction of automated information systems (AIS) in ship repair companies brings numerous advantages, including: AIS allows ship repair companies to increase their competitiveness, improve the quality of service and ensure long-term success in the industry. The successful implementation of AIS requires careful planning, staff training and investments in information infrastructure. It is important to ensure the active participation of management, cooperation of stakeholders and regular monitoring of implementation results. The introduction of AIS into ship repair companies leads to increased efficiency, lower operating costs, improved reliability and safety of ships, and provides valuable analytical information for making informed decisions.

The impact of transportation and information infrastructure on urban productivity: Evidence from 256 cities in China

Improving total factor productivity is an important driving force for achieving high-quality economic development. Based on the panel data of 256 cities in China from 2009 to 2019, this paper investigates the effect of transportation and information infrastructure on urban productivity. The results show that transportation and information infrastructure promote urban productivity, and the effect in eastern regions and megacities is more obvious. The mechanism analysis shows that transportation infrastructure enhances urban productivity by promoting economic agglomeration, and information infrastructure enhances urban productivity by promoting labor mobility, economic agglomeration, financial agglomeration and industrial agglomeration. The spatial spillover effect shows positive spatial autocorrelation of urban productivity. Transportation and information infrastructure have significant positive spatial spillover effects on urban productivity. China should continue to promote the construction of transportation infrastructure, strengthen investment in information infrastructure, and promote the joint construction, sharing, coordination and integration of transportation and information infrastructure.

Problems and countermeasures of online teaching in the post-epidemic era

The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has accelerated the transition of offline teaching to online teaching at colleges and universities in China which are speeding up the construction of information and intelligent education. Offline teaching is conducive to constructing a new type of education and talent training paradigm in the intelligent era. Through literature review and investigations, it is found that in the post-epidemic era, online teaching still has some problems, such as insufficient information technology guarantee, insufficient interaction between teachers and students, single teaching effect evaluation indicators and students’ poor self-discipline. To cope with the above-mentioned challenges, this paper has proposed the following suggestions for online teaching in the post-epidemic era: increase investment in information infrastructure, improve teachers’ information literacy and online teaching ability in an all-round way, update and improve the academic evaluation system and enhance students’ independent learning ability. All those suggestions aim to promote online teaching and create a new model of college education.

Does Fiscal Expenditure Promote the Upgrading of Regional Manufacturing Industry? Empirical Test Based on the Dual Perspective of Infrastructure and Basic Public Services

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee set the tone that China’s manufacturing industry should upgrade to advanced, intelligent and high quality. In the traditional theory of industrial structure upgrading, fiscal expenditure is not the main influencing factor. In the new pattern of “dual circulation” development of Chinese economy, the important role of government in economic development should not be ignored in the study of the high-end upgrading of manufacturing industry. Using the panel data of 28 provinces in China from 2008 to 2016, this paper deeply studies the economic effect of the most important expenditure on basic public services and infrastructure on the upgrading of manufacturing industry, as well as the regional heterogeneity and the nonlinear characteristics of the technological progress stage. It is found that the economic effect of general budget expenditure and basic public service expenditure on the high-end upgrading of manufacturing structure shows the characteristics of strong heterogeneity and marginal decline, which mainly comes from the promotion effect of the two types of fiscal expenditure in the eastern region and the hindrance effect in the central and western regions. Especially in the five western provinces where industrialization is slow and heavily dependent on transfer payments, infrastructure expenditure and basic public service expenditure show negative economic effects around 2010, but this does not completely mean the failure of the policy effect of local governments. Poverty reduction and poverty alleviation in such underdeveloped areas often rely more on the development of labor-intensive manufacturing industry. With the improvement of the level of innovative technological progress, the role of basic public service expenditure in promoting the upgrading of manufacturing industry will be gradually strengthened. This paper holds that under the new pattern, the eastern provinces should increase investment in information infrastructure, promote the reform of affordable housing, and release the restrictions on both the household registration of high-skilled talents and the school district of children’s basic education. The central provinces should give further play to the role of the market in allocating resources, and focus on improving the quality of public services such as education and medical treatment to the eastern region, so as to better undertake the transfer of high-skilled talents and manufacturing industry in the eastern region. For special provinces with slow industrialization and mainly relying on central transfer payments, we can appropriately increase the proportion of special transfer payments, strengthen the guidance of subsidies and financial policies on social capital, and stimulate the vitality of market players. Under the background of “tax cut and fee reduction”, this paper provides empirical evidence for the improvement of government fiscal expenditure efficiency, the regional policy design of the upgrading of manufacturing industry, and the optimization of fiscal expenditure structure.

A Global Investigation of Granger Causality between Information Infrastructure Investment and Service-Sector Growth

Over the past two decades, both developed and developing countries have been investing a significant portion of their resources in the creation of an information infrastructure. However, speculation abounds regarding the efficacy of information infrastructure investments, especially when the opportunity cost for investing in information technology (IT) is measurably high among developing nations. This longitudinal study introduces and explores infrastructure development and service-sector growth as key metrics for IT investment success. It also traces the notional evidence of IT infrastructure development as mediating the causal relationship between information infrastructure investments and service-sector growth. Using data from low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries, the mediating and lagged impact of information infrastructure on service-sector growth reveals that information infrastructure development does play a significant role as a mediator. It points out that information infrastructure investments can be a misleading causal antecedent if countries fail to develop their infrastructure. It also provides evidence of a recursive relationship between infrastructure development and service-sector growth. An exploratory time-series analysis across different country categories suggests that information infrastructures must be properly developed to reconcile the paradox. In addition, exploratory tests reveal a distinct divergence between infrastructure investments and infrastructure development among different country tiers.

IT imperatives beyond strategic alignment: enterprise architecture flexibility and IT delivery efficiency

While researchers across the board have identified significant productivity improvements, and substantial improvements in consumer surplus using information technology in enterprises, there has been little evidence of significant positive impact to sustainable business profitability. While IT systems so far have provided operational benefits and enhanced consumer experience, unless managers take care to go beyond strategic alignment of their information infrastructure investments to ensure architectural flexibility and constantly optimize IT delivery efficiency, they will begin to see diminishing returns from IT as the pace of business changes increases.

Geo-Policy Barriers and Rural Internet Access: The Regulatory Role in Constructing the Digital Divide

A combination of geography, public policy, and commercial investment in information infrastructure combines to create geo-policy barriers that in turn structure the ability of rural citizens to access the Internet. A statistical study of 208 rural telephone exchanges in Texas combined with case studies from rural counties explores the impact of distance and policies aimed at enabling rural telephone connection on the presence of Internet service providers. Market territories, including exchange areas and LATAs, and the distance requirements of expanded local calling policy in Texas can both help and hinder Internet access in remote areas.

Multimedia Utopia? A Geographical Critique of High‐Tech Development in Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor

For all the supposed novelty of the “Information Age”, high‐tech development in Malaysia perpetuates existing patterns of social and spatial inequality. The Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), a 50‐km‐long high‐tech zone stretching southwards from the federal capital, Kuala Lumpur, is imagined in state discourse as part of a transition to a “multimedia utopia” benefiting all Malaysians throughout the national territory. This article seeks to contest such utopian imaginings. In the first place, informational forms of economy and society are dependent upon complex physical infrastructure, the distribution of and access to which is highly uneven. The MSC and other major investment in information infrastructure in Malaysia are overwhelmingly concentrated in the main national city‐region. Second, already marginal groups and individuals are subjected to new forms of social and spatial exclusion. Apart from financial exclusion arising from the privatisation of high‐tech spaces, incorporation into Malaysian high‐tech futures is dependent upon the possession of skills deemed appropriate for an emerging information economy and society. These processes are exemplified by the displacement of plantation workers in the construction of Putrajaya, one of the MSC’s two new “intelligent” cities. While such negative social impacts have a long association with large‐scale modern development projects, the article argues that it is specifically a pervasive discourse of “high‐tech”—and the way in which this has been refracted in the national context—which legitimises the financial and social costs of new high‐tech urban development.

Process systems engineering in an electronic economy: expanding applications and the changing relationship between research and practice

The prospects of the process systems engineering discipline have never been more promising. Continuing improvements in computer hardware and software development tools enable rapid and widespread application of process systems engineering methodologies on a scale undreamed of only 10 or 20 years ago. Furthermore, the massive investments in information infrastructure within industry and the huge societal investments in information generation projects, such as the human genome project, provide many more opportunities for process systems methodologies. This talk will briefly review the variety of applications that are being addressed by these methodologies and will rely on the other conference presentations for in-depth treatment. This review of applications sets the stage for a discussion of the challenges requiring further evolution of methodologies. In particular, the enormous complexity of many systems in practice and under study requires the adoption of experimental methodologies, inductive engineering approaches, a willingness of process systems engineers to develop software debugging and improvement tools, the invention of flexible information architectures that are maintainable and easily incorporate new knowledge, and practical ways to address uncertainty and risk in large-scale problems. Complicating the approaches used to address these methodological needs is the requirement that problems be fixed in short time scales to match the fast pace of the economy. This challenge of solving problems at an accelerated rate stresses the traditional relationship between application and research and industry and academia. We discuss this issue in a technical fashion and frame the nature of the required collaboration in terms of how different organizations need to cooperate to build, deploy, and use complex software machines to serve various process applications. This viewpoint shows that the process systems engineering community has some of the same challenges as the software industry in general, but some of the peculiarities of the physics underlying the problems that we face requires discipline specific contributions. The software machine viewpoint of process systems engineering technology transfer highlights the need for research advances to be viewed in the context of how they can be integrated with other components, the potential properties and uses of software machines that can be built around them, and the required nature of the supply chain that delivers these advances to practice.

Open networks, electronic commerce and the global information infrastructure

During the last two decades, advances in telecommunications and computer technologies have produced one of the most significant economic and social transformations in history. Despite massive investments in information infrastructure, however, many believe that the full promise of this technological revolution remains unfulfilled, both in the realm of economic development as well as in terms of social progress. This is the primary challenge that we all face in building a global information society for the 21st century. Meeting this challenge will require more aggressive strategies aimed at expanding the role of information networks in the modern economy, and maximizing their contribution to the creation of new wealth and employment opportunities. The emergence of electronic commerce, which some predict will grow to a market worth more than $200 billion annually by the turn of the century, will be an important element in forging the foundation for future economic growth. Business and government policy-makers have therefore increasingly turned their attention to determining the conditions that will encourage the widespread deployment of electronic commerce widely throughout the economy. This paper will describe some of the recent work done by Canada's Information Highway Advisory Council to examine the dynamics of the modern knowledge economy, and its strategy for promoting electronic commerce. In IHAC's view, the successful diffusion of electronic commerce depends on a country's capacity to accomplish two goals: (1) to build and to enable a networking infrastructure which supports the commercial applications that are developing and that are expected in the future; and (2) to ensure ease of access to these networks and their availability to all business enterprises in the economy regardless of their size or location. The application of public network standards which assure an open, transparent networking environment is a key factor in achieving these goals. Governments have a number of appropriate policy instruments at their disposal to facilitate the adoption of the necessary networking standards as well as to take other initiatives that will promote the spread of electronic commerce.

Policy Strategies Along the Information Superhighway

Policymakers and politicians have become focused on information infrastructure as a means of achieving economic development. The authors have examined this question in order to assess the impact of publicly induced or financed infrastructure investment in advanced telecommunications as a strategy to spur growth. Their findings, based on case studies, shed new light on why some strategies are more promising than others. They conclude, however, that the formulation of policy strategies rests less on economic theory than on political willingness to seek growth through information infrastructure investments.