This paper provides a comprehensive review of ecosystem services and their economic valuation in China. The main objective of this review is to introduce the findings of the various valuation studies, and explore the challenges that emerged in these studies. This paper shows that ecosystem...

The water footprint is an indicator of freshwater consumption that looks not only at direct water consumption of a consumer or producer, also at the indirect water consumption. The water footprint can be regarded as a comprehensive indicator of freshwater resources appropriation, next to the...

Humanity faces the important challenge of understanding and integrating human and natural processes, including agriculture. In China, the scarcity of arable land (0.09 ha per capita), increasing population, and migration of the workforce to cities pose a significant challenge for food...

In comparison with all data for rural China, deficiencies of animal protein and fat intake were identified using the method of Gerbens-Leenes et al. ([Gerbens-Leenes, P.W., Nonhebel, S., Iven, W.P.M.F., 2002. A method to determine land requirements relating to food consumption patterns....

As one of the important non-grain energy crops, sweet sorghum has attracted the attention of scientific community and decision makers of the world since decades. But insufficient study has been done about the spatial suitability distribution and ethanol potential of sweet sorghum in China. This...

This article describes the Bees Algorithm in standard formulation and presents two applications to real-world continuous optimisation engineering problems. In the first case, the Bees Algorithm is employed to train three artificial neural networks (ANNs) to model the inverse kinematics of the...

This study examines the financial consequences of the moral hazard of the controlling shareholder. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies during the 2003–2009 period, we find that companies characterized by a wider divergence between the controlling shareholder's control and cash flow...

Inferences on the area under a receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) are usually based on a fully parametric approach or a fully nonparametric approach. A semiparametric empirical likelihood method is proposed to construct confidence intervals for AUC by assuming a density ratio model...

Purpose – Moving production lines are widely used in many manufacturing factories, such as automotive and general industries. However, industrial robots are hardly used to perform any tasks on the moving production lines. One of the main reasons is that it is difficult for conventional...