A Council of State is a governmental body in a country, or a subdivision of a country, with a function that varies by jurisdiction. It may be the formal name for the cabinet or it may refer to a non-executive advisory body associated with a head of state. In some countries it functions as a supreme administrative court and is sometimes regarded as the equivalent of a privy council..
The security of China’s strategic critical mineral supply chains directly impacts economic resilience and industrial competitiveness, necessitating systematic vulnerability and risk assessments. This paper develops a global supply chain framework covering four stages—acquisition, trade, transportation, and demand—and three segments: export, logistics, and import. Using two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Coherent-Data Envelopment Analysis (CoDEA), it evaluates risks in China’s nickel ore import supply chain from 2013 to 2022, with the 2020 Indonesian export ban as a shock event for resilience measurement. Results show: (1) Significant volatility and persistently high risks from 2013 to 2022; (2) Distinct risk drivers across stages: resource acquisition showed intense fluctuations, trade exhibited strong variability, transportation had intermittent spikes, and demand initially rose then declined; (3) High resilience due to diversified import policies. The “risk identification-resilience measurement” method combines ex-ante and ex-post perspectives, fully considers the relationships among all stages of the supply chain, effectively identifies vulnerabilities, and provides decision-making support for ensuring supply chain security under geopolitical interference.
Written for students working in a range of disciplines, this textbook provides an accessible, balanced, and nuanced introduction to the field of public international law. It explains the basic concepts and legal frameworks of public international law while acknowledging the field's inherent complexities and controversies. Featuring numerous carefully chosen and clearly explained examples, it demonstrates how the law applies in practice, and public international law's pervasive influence on world affairs, both past and present. Aiming not to over-emphasize any particular domestic jurisprudence or research interest, this textbook offers a global overview of public international law that will be highly valuable to any student new to the study of this very significant field.
This article focuses on place leadership in non-core localities struggling to renew their opportunity spaces when local industries giants fall. The research questions are as follows: What does it take in non-core localities to connect to the geography of opportunities? What role does place leadership play in this process? What is achieved by place leadership? The study analyses place leadership in two Finnish industrial subregions: Salo and Varkaus, and concludes that place leadership is a cause and a consequence of the local capacity to act in times of adversity, and therefore a central element of the local capacity to renew opportunity spaces.
Tourism is responsible for more than 10% of the global gross domestic product, the growth rate of China's tourism industry is one of the highest in the world. With the continuous prosperity of domestic tourism in China, tourism in China creates large amounts of embodied carbon emissions between regions according to its immense industrial infrastructure and multi-regional mobility. In the context of global climate change and China's "dual carbon target", the continuous monitoring and analysis of carbon emissions associated with tourism in China are becoming more pressing. This study applied the emissions embodied in the bilateral trade (EEBT) model and structure decomposition analysis (SDA) to analyze the spatial-temporal pattern and driving mechanism of tourism embodied carbon transfers (CETT) between 30 provinces in China. It has been found that the CETT of 30 provinces in China between 1997 and 2012 increased from 33.652 Mt to 164.345 Mt, three times more than previously directly estimated, more provinces in China have become a "net destination" of CETT. Tourism risks becoming an "accelerator" of regional carbon emissions, because of the trend of carbon emissions growing faster than economic growth. Based on carbon-intensity analysis, the main driving forces of net CETT were explored: low-carbon technology of tourism products and services, tourist origin structure, and tourist market scale. Technology driving force and structure driving force reduced net CETT outflows by 64.98 Mt and 646.30 Mt, respectively, 1997 to 2012, while the scale driving force increased by 714.28 Mt. This study puts forward specific implements on the regulation and control of CETT in China's from tourism route, supply chain, and government regime by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. This study proposed a research framework of "measure-intensity-driver-regulation" for CETT and connected with the forefront of global climate change research, in order to effectively guide the low-carbon transformation and development of tourism with new tools and methods, and provide a reference for low-carbon green development in the post-pandemic era for the world.
Valuing air quality can help governments better evaluate the economic benefits of policies related to air pollution. However, many studies ignore heterogeneity and spatial effects within cities, which may render the results inaccurate. To fill these gaps, this study attempted to examine individuals' marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for air quality across locations and buyers in Beijing by utilizing hedonic price, spatial regression and quantile regression models. The results showed: (1) a concentration of PM2.5 is significantly negatively correlated with housing prices. Specifically, the value of the MWTP for a 1% improvement in PM2.5 is US$327, and this figure is US$177 after considering the spatial effects. (2) The MWTP for air quality is heterogeneous across locations. MWTP for air quality is lower the farther away the location is from the central business district (CBD) and the nearest employment center, the lower the MWTP for air quality. (3) Buyers of high-priced housing display a higher MWTP for air quality. These findings show that developing countries facing environmental issues should re-examine the traditional development model of "sacrificing the environment for economic growth" and develop a sustainable model. Moreover, further joining of air pollution control and a differential, location-specific scheme coupled with an individual-specific scheme for developing new communities is necessary.
