Research

This study examines how a local internet hospital pilot in Ningxia evolved into China's national telemedicine policy, showing how cross-boundary policy entrepreneurship can drive regulatory reform. It highlights the roles of local governments, hospitals, technology firms, and policy entrepreneurs in overcoming institutional barriers through coalition-building, framing, and persuasion. The study suggests that policymakers should support cross-sector pilots, create pathways for scaling successful local innovations, and adapt regulatory systems to balance digital health innovation with accountability and effective governance.

This study examines how bilateral geopolitical ties shape international research collaboration and innovation, showing that cross-border collaboration improves patent quality while stronger bilateral relations increase scientific cooperation through researcher mobility and high-tech trade. However, geopolitical ties have limited effects on technological originality and radicalness. The study highlights the complex relationship between geopolitics and innovation, suggesting that policymakers should adopt targeted approaches that balance scientific openness with national security, strengthen international research partnerships, and support researcher mobility and high-tech cooperation to sustain global innovation.

This paper examines how data governance can enable Artificial Intelligence to address climate change, highlighting challenges including fragmented data, unequal access, algorithmic bias, AI’s carbon footprint, and weak institutional mechanisms. It reviews emerging solutions such as open data platforms, data trusts, and public-private partnerships, emphasizing sound data governance as essential to unlocking AI’s climate potential. The study suggests strengthening global data standards, improving digital infrastructure, promoting inclusive AI, and developing multi-stakeholder governance to balance AI’s climate benefits with its environmental and social risks.

This study examines how scientific knowledge flows from academia to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), revealing a strong concentration of policy-relevant research among a small group of highly cited scientists. It identifies transnational co-authorship networks, faster IGO citation uptake, and standardized policy-oriented language as key drivers of this concentration, with mature fields showing stronger effects. The study highlights persistent geographic and network inequalities, suggesting that IGOs should strengthen transparent citation monitoring, broaden participation from underrepresented regions, and establish inclusive mechanisms to prevent entrenched biases in emerging policy domains.

This study addresses verification challenges around ultra-low-yield nuclear tests under the CTBT, differentiating banned supercritical tests from permitted subcritical experiments via 6,000 numerical simulations of neutronics, isotope evolution and photon transport. It builds an on-site gamma spectroscopy verification method using fission product and plutonium-239 gamma intensity ratios, quantifies how plutonium fission yield, inspection timing and assembly criticality shape detection precision, and validates reliable identification of supercritical tests above 38g TNT yield with limited pre-test data. The work fills a technical gap in post-test on-site inspection for tiny-yield nuclear activities, and supplies actionable technical insights for CTBT compliance monitoring and global nuclear disarmament governance.

This study examines factors shaping willingness to use personalised health apps and share sensitive data in London and Hong Kong, finding that data literacy, granular data control, trust in medical experts, and comfort with sharing health or location data strongly influence adoption. Men and London respondents show higher willingness, while Hong Kong participants are more cautious about government or corporate data access. The findings highlight the need for stronger data protection, clearer standards for AI generated advice, improved digital health literacy, and user empowering privacy features to build trust across diverse contexts.

This study examines how external knowledge absorption shapes SMEs’ adoption of proactive eco innovations in resource intensive EU sectors, finding that public environmental awareness, national economic complexity, and public sector R&D positively influence uptake, while external collaboration and industry agglomeration hinder it. The results highlight significant cross country heterogeneity and emphasize the need for policies that enhance public awareness, expand targeted public R&D, improve knowledge diffusion, and redesign meso level collaboration and agglomeration frameworks to better support proactive eco innovation and circular economy transitions.

This study splits corporate environmental innovation into radical clean and pollution abatement categories, drawing on 1991–2020 manufacturing firm patent data across 17 EU nations to contrast the innovation impacts of market-based and command-and-control regulatory tools. It finds flexible market instruments deliver sustained incentives for transformative clean tech advancement while rigid command-and-control rules fail to drive breakthrough innovation, with empirical results confirming market policies strongly boost both clean tech adoption and radicalness. The work fills gaps in directional environmental policy research and expands theoretical understanding of long-term sustainability transitions, also outlining practical mixed-policy guidance for regulators prioritizing breakthrough green innovation.

This study leverages the synthetic control method and DEA model to analyze how China’s pilot emission trading schemes shape urban green development efficiency over 2003–2020. It finds ETS lifts overall urban green efficiency by 10%–15% with notable regional gaps, identifies technological innovation and industrial restructuring as core working mechanisms, and validates stable policy impacts via robustness checks. The research addresses unexamined institutional constraints and external implementation disruptions, fills evidence gaps in holistic ETS green benefit assessment, and delivers actionable empirical backing for the maturation of China’s national carbon market to drive broad urban low-carbon shifts.

This study develops a consumption-based emission accounting framework to address the flaws of conventional location-based methods that misattribute cross-border cloud computing carbon footprints. Analyzing 2017–2022 data from three major EU cloud hubs including Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, the research categorizes cross-border data flows and identifies distinct operational and emission profiles across regions. It quantifies cross-national gaps in electricity and carbon intensity, evaluates regional energy efficiency variations, and verifies that cloud workload relocation significantly alters overall carbon emissions via sensitivity tests. Complementing existing territorial climate regulations, the study offers targeted policy strategies including differentiated data center supervision, consumption-based energy planning, cross-regional low-carbon workload allocation, and mandatory carbon disclosure mechanisms, while filling the research gap of unmeasured transboundary digital carbon emissions and supporting fair international climate responsibility allocation.

This study adopts a relational perspective to investigate how gendered social structures shape women’s disproportionate climate and disaster vulnerability, stemming from unequal power dynamics, restrictive cultural norms, resource inequities and gendered labor divisions. Moving beyond framing women as passive disaster victims, the research highlights their untapped capacity as local knowledge stewards, community leaders and active adaptation agents. It explores how institutional reform, inclusive communication and women-led initiatives can transform constraining gendered relations, enhance individual agency, and convert structural vulnerability into community climate resilience. The findings advance gender-inclusive disaster governance theory and provide actionable policy pathways for equitable, participatory and gender-transformative climate risk reduction.

This study examines how formal and informal intergovernmental interactions influence Chinese provincial climate policy adoption using panel data from 31 provinces (2003–2018). It finds that formal authority interactions—such as central directives and interdepartmental coordination—strongly promote policy uptake, while informal competitive interactions follow an inverted N shaped pattern that ultimately inhibits adoption and weakens the positive effects of formal mechanisms. The findings highlight the need to strengthen formal coordination, better align competitive incentives with climate goals, and establish structured learning channels to ensure intergovernmental dynamics effectively support climate policymaking.

This study examines how intangible cultural heritage supports climate resilience in UNESCO rice terraces in Ifugao and Bali, showing that community cooperation, shared labor systems, spiritual practices, and strong social networks help farmers cope with droughts and extreme rainfall. These intangible assets shape adaptive capacities rooted in physical, social, and spiritual environments. The findings highlight the need for culturally grounded adaptation strategies that strengthen indigenous knowledge, empower local institutions, improve rural infrastructure, and support community based initiatives to preserve traditional rice farming while enhancing resilience to climate pressures.

This study develops a reflexive framework for selecting green building technologies that integrates technical, economic, environmental, and social criteria while incorporating stakeholder perspectives often overlooked in conventional models. Applying the framework to Hong Kong’s dense, highly regulated, subtropical context shows that context attuned choices improve technical feasibility, social acceptance, and adoption for both retrofits and new builds. The findings highlight the value of stakeholder engagement and locally aligned solutions—such as space efficient insulation and energy efficient HVAC systems—to support more sustainable, user centred decision making and advance Hong Kong’s long term decarbonization goals.

This historical demographic study examines long-term gender equality trajectories in Lesotho by analyzing marital age homogamy and female agency across over a century. Drawing on 3,575 historical church marriage records from 1880–1939 and modern 2004–2024 DHS survey data, the study compares cross-temporal spousal age gaps and Girlpower-Index outcomes. It empirically refutes the dominant modernization-centric narrative by demonstrating that Lesotho’s notable female autonomy is historically rooted rather than a recent societal outcome, despite minor generalizability limitations from church-restricted datasets. The research revises conventional understandings of gendered demographic transitions and offers context-based empirical evidence for designing localized gender empowerment and anti-early-marriage policies across Southern Africa.

This qualitative comparative study employs collective policy entrepreneurship theory to examine county-level integrated care reforms addressing systemic fragmentation within China’s health system. Drawing on field evidence from Deqing and Zhijiang counties, the analysis identifies two distinct local reform models: consensus-based technocrat coalitions and crisis-driven top-down leadership. Though both cases utilize cross-regional policy learning and bundled global budgets to unify county, township, and village medical facilities, they adopt different organizational structures shaped by regional economic and healthcare conditions. The study illustrates how local policy entrepreneurs navigate fragmented bureaucratic structures to advance incremental healthcare integration, offering practical, context-specific lessons for tailored health system consolidation and scalable care governance reforms across decentralized health regimes.

This qualitative study draws on self-determination theory to comparatively examine the mental health challenges faced by local and international ethnic minority university students in Hong Kong. It identifies overlapping stressors across both groups, including academic pressure, financial strain, and language-linked career limitations that undermine student competence and autonomy. Meanwhile, the two cohorts exhibit distinct social struggles: international minority students experience acute loneliness and social exclusion, whereas local ethnic minorities confront persistent ethnic segregation and discrimination. The study addresses contextual research gaps in non-Western minority student mental health, exposes systemic shortcomings in campus support services, and delivers differentiated policy guidance for culturally inclusive mental health intervention, targeted social integration initiatives, and equitable campus environment optimization.

This study uses nationally representative 2021 CGSS data from 1,305 Chinese respondents to examine the understudied negative relationship between trust in online health information and subjective well-being, validated via instrumental variable and propensity score matching analyses. It pinpoints three key mediating pathways: excessive health-searching habits, skewed self-perceived health literacy, and elevated depressive symptoms, with weaker physical health and inadequate medical insurance worsening these harms. Heterogeneity analysis shows low-socioeconomic, rural-resident and less developed region populations bear disproportionate risks from digital health inequities tied to limited literacy. The findings outline targeted regulatory, literacy-building and healthcare access expansion strategies to curb misinformation-driven harm and shield vulnerable groups from the online health information trust trap.

This study quantifies Hong Kong’s land development policy intensity from 1997 to 2023 via the ERNIE large language model paired with time-series analysis to assess its fiscal outcomes across the city’s transition period. It finds tightened land policies lower total land revenue yet maintain its steady fiscal share due to institutional path dependence, with time-varying causal patterns: bidirectional links in the first year, unidirectional policy dominance in the second, and diminishing effects by the third year. The research tracks land governance’s shift from revenue maximization toward social welfare goals bounded by entrenched fiscal constraints, and advises fiscal diversification, timeline-aligned differentiated regulation, expanded public housing supply and systematic policy evaluation to reduce long-term land revenue reliance.

This study pairs 40m multispectral SDGSAT-1 nighttime light satellite data with over 4 million geotagged Weibo posts nationwide to investigate how artificial light wavelengths shape public sentiment across China. Fixed-effect regression results indicate blue light increases negative sentiment by 15.9% while moderate green light lifts positive mood by 5%, with pronounced risks in eastern commercial districts and distinct spatial, seasonal, and temporal variations across RGB bands. Simulations confirm adjusting correlated color temperature reduces sentiment risks by 89.7%, vastly outperforming basic brightness dimming and highlighting the underappreciated mental health benefits of spectral lighting design. The findings inform targeted urban lighting policies including blue-light restrictions for commercial zones, seasonal adaptive lighting schemes, sentiment-aware nightscape planning, and updated LED standards that reconcile energy efficiency with residents’ emotional wellbeing.

This study draws on 9,052 valid 2015 official travel survey samples from Abu Dhabi, applying the Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model and 3Ds built-environment framework to deliver the first systematic analysis of trip-chaining behavior in a Middle Eastern city. It evaluates how individual socioeconomic traits, household characteristics and urban built environment features shape travel chain complexity alongside subgroup heterogeneity, identifying that car-centric mobility, limited public transit access, local cultural norms and demographic makeup jointly define resident travel patterns. Filling regional research gaps, the work supplies empirical evidence for local transport demand management and recommends inclusive gender-sensitive planning, expanded public transit networks, transit-oriented mixed land-use development, improved active travel infrastructure and targeted congestion policies to curb private car reliance and build equitable, sustainable urban transport systems for comparable Middle Eastern cities.

This study integrates bibliometric performance and network analysis with a systematic literature review to synthesize global research on red‑light camera (RLC) traffic safety effects spanning 1975 to 2024. It maps the field’s knowledge structure, thematic evolution, and key scholarly contributors, while critically evaluating methodological inconsistencies, unresolved challenges, and ongoing controversies surrounding RLC effectiveness in reducing intersection violations and crashes. The analysis further identifies emerging technological opportunities, including vehicle‑to‑infrastructure integration, and highlights prevailing research gaps and future development priorities. By consolidating decades of empirical evidence, the study provides comprehensive theoretical and practical insights to inform evidence‑based RLC deployment, intelligent traffic governance, and continued academic advancement in road intersection safety management.

This study examines factors shaping interprofessional interaction in multidisciplinary teams providing case management for older adults in Hong Kong, using Lejano and Kan’s relational theory as an analytical framework. It identifies professional training gaps and institutional barriers that hinder effective coordination among social workers, nurses, and PT/OT specialists. The findings underscore the need for strengthened in service training on interprofessional practices and enhanced organizational support structures to improve collaboration and service integration in geriatric care.

This introduction traces the evolution of health messaging in the Philippines from colonial-era “medical propaganda” to contemporary pandemic responses, showing how visual strategies and simplified narratives have long served both public health aims and political legitimation. It highlights continuities across colonial, postcolonial, and digital eras, where messaging often obscures structural inequalities while shaping public perceptions of health and authority. The findings underscore the need for communication approaches that move beyond spectacle, address historical power dynamics, and strengthen critical health literacy to build trust and support more equitable, transparent public health governance.

This study examines how the Nutribun, a USAID-developed nutritional product, became politically repurposed by the Marcos family, turning a public health intervention into a nostalgic symbol that reframed authoritarian rule as an era of prosperity. By tracing shifting political and emotional meanings of the Nutribun, the study shows how nostalgic health messaging can obscure structural problems and shape collective memory. The findings highlight the need for transparent, non politicized nutrition programs and public health communication that promotes critical historical literacy to prevent the manipulation of health narratives for partisan ends.

This study analyzes whether India’s emergence as the world’s most populous country will translate into economic overtaking of China, using multidimensional demographic projections and a productivity weighted labor force measure. It finds China will maintain an economic advantage for decades due to higher education levels and greater female labor force participation, while India’s prospects hinge on improving these areas. The findings highlight the importance of expanding education and women’s employment in India, and of China adapting to population aging through continued educational gains, delayed retirement, and automation—underscoring human capital as the key driver of long term growth.

This study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on China’s 1980 one child policy to examine whether being an only child lowers fertility ideals in urban China. Analyzing Chinese General Social Survey data, it finds that only child individuals express significantly lower ideal family size and are less likely to desire two or more children, supporting the low fertility trap hypothesis. The findings highlight the need for policymakers to move beyond short term fertility incentives and instead pursue structural reforms—such as hukou and pension changes—and holistic support that addresses young people’s barriers to family formation.

This study examines China’s state led urbanization through skyscraper development from 2006 to 2014, showing that local governments provided average land price discounts of 40% to developers, driven by political career incentives and monetary easing. While unsubsidized skyscrapers generated positive spillovers such as higher land prices and business formation, subsidized projects delivered minimal long term economic benefits due to poor locations, weak developers, and inadequate infrastructure. The findings highlight the need to reduce reliance on subsidies, strengthen project oversight, and ensure that skyscraper development aligns with local conditions and complementary public investment to achieve sustainable urban growth.

This study examines the long term effects of China’s Imperial Examination System using Jinshi density as a proxy and 2SLS estimation, finding that historically higher examination success significantly increases modern wages through enhanced human and social capital. The impacts are strongest in labor intensive and high tech firms and extend to better fringe benefits and public services. The findings highlight the value of leveraging the cultural legacy of education by investing in training, educational infrastructure, and social welfare in historically advantaged regions to amplify enduring productivity and development gains.