• Energy Research
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AbstractThe penetration of financialization into the biocultural geographies of islands builds upon processes of commodification and privatization of environments, entailing enclosures of resource commons, environmental destruction and displacement of people, their livelihoods, knowledge and practices, with implications for sustainability. Against this background I critique the growing literature on acronym models of island development, arguing for more careful consideration of issues concerning democracy, human rights and sustainability. Drawing on the ‘right to the city’ literature, I highlight the importance of the ‘right to the island’ in an effort to move beyond the policy imperatives of MIRAB, SITE and PROFIT. Exercising the right to the island involves cultivating radically pluralistic democracy through struggles for alternative island futures. In so doing it problematizes what it means to develop and achieve sustainability.

The objectives of this study are to: estimate African countries’ Government Openness Index (AGOI) to see the updated progress of open government in those countries, examine which areas African countries should further improve for sustainable development, and compare the performance of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) member countries to that of non-OGP countries in forming AGOI. This study developed the AGOI with 32 selected countries and four factors (ACC (accountability), TRA (transparency), CPF (citizen participation and freedom) and ICT (information and communication technology)) for the period of 2006–2019. The results show that African countries have continuously increased the values of AGOI for the period. ACC has barely changed, but TRA has increased slightly. Both CPF and ICT have increased at higher growth rates during the period. The OGP group reached much better scores than their non-OGP counterparts, with positive differences in AGOI, ICT, CPF, and TRA, except ACC. The results of this study suggest that the constantly increasing CPF and ICT levels in countries that have similar conditions as African countries should be further improved to function well enough to build accountability and transparency. It is also recommended that countries join the OGP in order to move towards improving government openness and creating sustainable development.

This study integrated a focus on geographical, physical, and commercial characteristics to explore the commercial gentrification phenomenon and its related statistical summaries in the area of Garosu-gil in Seoul’s Sinsa-dong ward. In particular, this study first collected parcel and building data and corresponding attribute information and mapped the resulting datasets in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. We then examined gentrification issues per building and conducted statistical analyses to investigate spatial patterns of commercial gentrification, which were used to develop criteria for determining degrees of gentrification. Third, this study conducted correlation and regression analyses to quantify the strength of the linear relationship between pairs of variables associated with primary factors contributing to commercial gentrification, and used a geographically weighted regression model (GWR) to help understand and predict spatial relationships between significant variables. The results showed positive correlations between several variables and commercial gentrification in the study area, namely neighborhood-convenience facilities, building ages, store rents, new franchise and restaurant businesses, distance to subways, and the presence of multiple roads. Based on its finding, there are key contributions of this study as follows. The first significant contribution of this study is developing measurement of gentrification levels that can be used by policy makers at each of four stages of the gentrification process. Furthermore, this paper develops a comprehensive approach for spatially identifying gentrifying neighborhoods across multiple time periods in 2- and 3-dimensions. It eventually helps urban planners implement preventative or supportive programs to protect lower-income residents and small businesses and thereby engender more sustainable community development.

This study examines the World Heritage List inscription’s tourism impact continuity through Hahoe Village’s tourists’ perception changes between 2014 and 2018, and it tries to verify the direction of future management and development plans for a sustainable community. Of all the perceptions verified in this study, two noteworthy issues, such as (1) World Heritage as a tourists’ brand and (2) future management of Hahoe Village as a World Heritage Site for maintaining brand equity, are discussed. In conclusion, the title “World Heritage” has excelled in its role as a tourism brand. Based on this role, the immediate outburst of tourism after the World Heritage List inscription affected Hahoe Village. However, even though the title World Heritage is a powerful brand that has great effect on the tourism industry, it still needs appropriate management to maintain brand equity. In the case of World Heritage, the target object of management is located at a trade-off point of interests between preserving heritage value and improving service convenience for tourists.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the economic value of Geomun Oreum (GO), a parasitic volcanic sieve, for sustainable management by using the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method. To address the exaggeration tendency of willingness to pay (WTP), the contingent valuation method’s (CVM’s) traditional threshold, respondents’ WTP answers were reconfirmed to screen only true responses for our analysis. In addition to estimating the economic value, the causal relationship between the tour guide’s quality of explanation and the respondents’ payment intention is examined in the study. The results reveal that the estimated preservation value of GO is 35,881 KRW (33.28 USD), and the quality of the tour guide’s narrative is statistically related to the respondents’ payment intention.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data are among the most popular emerging fields of computer science today. IoT devices are creating an enormous amount of data daily on a different scale; hence, search engines must meet the requirements of rapid ingestion and processing followed by accurate and fast extraction. Researchers and students from the field of computer science query the search engines on these topics to reveal a wealth of IoT-related information. In this study, we evaluate the relative performance of two search engines: Bing and Yandex. This work proposes an automatic scheme that populates a sustainable optimal rank list of search results with higher precision for IoT-related topics. The proposed scheme rewrites the seed query with the help of attribute terms extracted from the page corpus. Additionally, we use newness and geo-sensitivity-based boosting and dampening of web pages for the re-ranking process. To evaluate the proposed scheme, we use an evaluation matrix based on discounted cumulative gain (DCG), normalized DCG (nDCG), and mean average precision (MAPn). The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves scores of MAP@5 = 0.60, DCG5 = 4.43, and nDCG5 = 0.95 for general queries; DCG5 = 4.14 and nDCG5 = 0.93 for time-stamp queries; and DCG5 = 4.15 and nDCG5 = 0.96 for geographical location-based queries. These outcomes validate the usefulness of the suggested system in helping a user to access IoT-related information.

Medical tourism is a growing niche market with huge potential as the 6th industry of medical services, including an unforgettable trip. Due to these advantages, Uzbekistan hopes to be a leader in central Asia concerning medical tourism. Contrary to this ambitious goal, Uzbekistan patients still prefer going abroad for medical services. Therefore, in order for Uzbekistan to be a hub for medical tourism, the sustainable governance factors of medical tourism need to be found for local patients going overseas. Under this research motivation, this study evaluates how the medical, tourism, and information sharing factors influence behavioral intention based on the structural equation model (SEM) with a random sample of 498 residents in Uzbekistan. Perceived value and behavioral intention are used as a mediating variable and a dependent variable, respectively. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, the medical factor and information sharing are very important factors for behavioral intention, with high coefficient values of 0.399 and 0.516, respectively, while the tourism factor is not influential on the behavioral intention statistically. This implies that Uzbekistani patients do not consider tourism factors as a core condition, instead focusing on the service quality of the medical operation and convenience for foreign patients. Second, in the indirect model, we found that perceived value takes a fully mediating role between medical factors and behavioral intention, while it takes a partially mediating role between information sharing and behavioral intention, implying that strong promotion policies are required for the advantages of tourism and enhanced access to information.

Recently, a new organizational form of syndicate—multiple lead underwriter (MLU) initial public offerings (IPOs)—has emerged in IPOs. In addition to the increased deal complexity, lead underwriters in MLU IPOs face a new competition between them after underwriter selection, which is not present in single lead underwriter (SLU) IPOs. It is therefore questionable whether recommendations by analysts from lead underwriters of the MLU IPOs are as sustainable as those of the SLU IPOs. We examine IPO recommendations to capture how this new syndicate structure affects analyst behavior in terms of analyst optimism and investment value. In contrast to the popular conflict of interest perspective, our findings point to the notion that the new syndicate structure suppresses bias in recommendations and that reputation upholding incentive dominates pressure from competition. MLU-affiliated analysts are not more optimistic and provide more informative research coverage whose informativeness, however, fades away shortly after the recommendation releases. Our findings overall indicate the existence of sustainability in the MLU IPO recommendations.