Band 7, Heft 6

The empirical investigation that examines the dynamics including the interaction between consumption of energy and economic progress has long been assessed. However, the interaction of these two in developing countries in general and Bangladesh, in particular, is a less explored subject. Hence, with this notion, this study examined the causal relationship among economic growth and energy consumption in Bangladesh. For this purpose, the study used energy consumption, gross domestic product (GDP), labor force, and capital data from 1981 to 2017 from different sources and data is analyzed by augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test, Johansen co-integration test and Granger test of causality. Results determine that energy consumption and economic growth have long term bi-directional relationship. The econometric model is estimated using generalized least squares (GLS) model. It is concluded that, consumption of energy and economic growth positively correlated and economic development highly depend on energy consumption in Bangladesh.

Against the background of the rapid growth of Chinese tourists to Japan, by observing the changes in the patterns of Chinese visitors to Japan and probing into the insufficiency of researches in the past studies, it is believed that online travel reviews can be used to present the current situation of tourism industry and be of value to provide the basic data for long-term sustainable research after analysis, including how to increase Chinese tourists’ satisfaction continuously and how to promote the service level of related industries. In this study, the unknown information caused by the cultural and regional differences in the reviews of Chinese visitors’ to Japan is taken as the prediction object and the local tourists’ travel comments as a reference group. Then, the factor decomposition technology and text mining technology are applied to predict the standards of services and projects that can meet the characteristics and demands of Chinese tourists. The comments of Chinese and Japanese tourists who stayed at hotels in the Hakone scenic area from May 2018 to April 2019 (time span: one year) are taken as the samples in this study. Thus, the disparity in the purpose of travel between Chinese tourists and Japanese local tourists in this scenic spot can be effectively displayed. Besides, it also clearly points out that due to a lack of understanding of Japanese food culture, Chinese visitors were in urgent need of relevant services and assistance. Therefore, this method will provide guidance for the growth of the local tourism industry and also demonstrate the feasibility of research methods. In the end, a complete analysis and calculation method for online comment text mining is established, which also provides guidance on improving the satisfaction of Chinese visitors to Japan. Besides, this method can also be considered to apply in more tourists with the same cultural background.

Nonlinear constrained optimization problem (NCOP) has been arisen in a diverse range of sciences such as portfolio, economic management, airspace engineering and intelligence system etc. In this paper, a new multiobjective imperialist competitive algorithm for solving NCOP is proposed. First, we review some existing excellent algorithms for solving NOCP; then, the nonlinear constrained optimization problem is transformed into a biobjective optimization problem. Second, in order to improve the diversity of evolution country swarm, and help the evolution country swarm to approach or land into the feasible region of the search space, three kinds of different methods of colony moving toward their relevant imperialist are given. Thirdly, the new operator for exchanging position of the imperialist and colony is given similar as a recombination operator in genetic algorithm to enrich the exploration and exploitation abilities of the proposed algorithm. Fourth, a local search method is also presented in order to accelerate the convergence speed. At last, the new approach is tested on thirteen well-known NP-hard nonlinear constrained optimization functions, and the experiment evidences suggest that the proposed method is robust, efficient, and generic when solving nonlinear constrained optimization problem. Compared with some other state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithm has remarkable advantages in terms of the best, mean, and worst objective function value and the standard deviations.

The occupational identity of nonexecutive directors exerts a considerable influence on their way of designing and distributing executive pay as well as ordinary employee pay in the focal firm. Integrating the status characteristics theory into the corporate governance literature, I theorize that status contest effect comes into play in the process of setting executive pay in the focal firm, specifically when its nonexecutive directors serve as executives on stakeholders. More often than not, such executive identity triggers the status competition with focal firm executives, which motivates nonexecutive directors to reduce the focal firm executive pay so as to secure and aggrandize their own status within the focal firm. However, since ordinary employees pose no threat to nonexecutive directors in the focal firm, they tend to increase ordinary employee pay. Basing upon the empirical test which adopts the data of China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed firms, I find that the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the less will be the top executives’ pay in the focal firm; the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the greater will be ordinary employees’ pay in the focal firm; the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the smaller will be the pay gap between top executives and ordinary employees in the focal firm. In addition, I also find that ownership power and gender can moderate the relationship between nonexecutive director ratio and executive pay: top executive ownership can alleviate the negative relationship between focal firm’s nonexecutive directors and top executives’ pay; female nonexecutive directors are more likely to increase focal firm’s ordinary employee pay than their male counterparts.

Investigating the indirect tax burden of residents is an important way of understanding the effect of tax on income distribution and the tax burden transfer. In this paper, a long term MRIO model is constructed by using the regional input-output tables in China. We simulate the flow of value-added tax, consumption tax and business tax in different departments of 30 provinces (except Tibet) in mainland China from the perspective of rows in the IO table, we obtain the real burden of three indirect taxes on urban residents, and discuss the transfer of tax burden among regions. The conclusions are as follows: There are large differences in tax burden among regions. The real tax burden shifted from the eastern region to the middle and the western regions. Indirect tax aggravates the income inequality of urban residents in different regions. The indirect tax in China has a certain degree of regression. Based on the empirical analysis, we think the government should make the following policy changes: 1) Giving more consideration to the consumption terminals; 2) Adjusting preferential policies of regional taxation; 3) Increasing the amount of preferential policies for the western region.

Currently, most of the policies for the dynamic demand vehicle routing problem are based on the traditional method for static problems as there is no general method for constructing a real-time optimization policy for the case of dynamic demand. Here, a new approach based on a combination of the rules from the static sub-problem to building real-time optimization policy is proposed. Real-time optimization policy is dividing the dynamic problem into a series of static sub-problems along the time axis and then solving the static ones. The static sub-problems’ transformation and solution rules include: Division rule, batch rule, objective rule, action rule and algorithm rule, and so on. Different combinations of these rules may constitute a variety of real-time optimization policy. According to this general method, two new policies called flexible G/G/m and flexible D/G/m were developed. The competitive analysis and the simulation results of these two policies proved that both are improvements upon the best existing policy.