ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 has impacted the social economy of various provinces in China to varying degrees. How to quickly restore the social economy has become the most concerned issue of the Party, the country and all sectors of society. This paper combines the entropy weight method and TOPSIS method-technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution, taking the financial policy transmission mechanism as the theoretical basis, and selects the data of 29 provinces in China to obtain the contribution of finance in the socio-economic resilience under the pandemic situation. The empirical analysis results show that the weights of financial policy, pandemic situation and financial basis are different. It can be clearly seen from the weight data that the financial basis is crucial to the socio-economic resilience. Although the COVID-19 pandemic will cause huge losses to the whole society and will also seriously hinder the socio-economic recovery, the effective implementation of financial policies and the good trend of the pandemic situation have a significant promoting effect on the socio-economic recovery. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
ABSTRACT
In the post-COVID-19 era of green economic recovery, this paper analyses the elderly care environment of cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region and investigates the future development direction of the elderly care industry based on comparative advantages and resource endowment. Firstly, an evaluation index system of the elderly care environment is constructed, then the entropy weight method is used to calculate the weight, and finally the comprehensive evaluation index of the elderly care environment in each city is obtained by weighted calculation. The development directions of the elderly care industry for each city in the YRD region are proposed based on the results. The study shows that the suitable development direction of the elderly care industry differs among cities. Cities suitable for residential elderly care are mainly distributed in the central and western regions, cities fit for the leisure and tourism of elderly care are mainly located in the southeast, and cities suitable for the treatment and rehabilitation of elderly care are mainly provincial capitals and cities with better economic development levels. Additionally, Wenzhou City in Zhejiang Province is eligible for the development of a comprehensive elderly care industry. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
ABSTRACT
The Chinese government adhered to the "dynamic clearance” epidemic prevention strategy from August 2021 to December 7, 2022, during the post-epidemic era (this study started in March 2022 and ended in September 2022). People are gradually resuming their daily routines, and demand for travel is rising again. Nonetheless, the epidemic occasionally breaks out on a smaller scale, causing social concern. As a social reaction, the essential issue is how to avoid COVID-19 hot-spots effectively by offering secure travel options for local residents who tend to travel privately. Two travel route planning models are proposed to avoid COVID-19 hot-spots based on the invalid road sections which are affected by epidemic. Specifically, the static model aims at generating the shortest travel distance after detours, with the constraint of avoiding COVID-19 hot-spots;the dynamic model takes real-time data into account, which includes epidemic risk levels, road grades, and real-time traffic information on road selection. Shenzhen, China, is illustrated as an example of the research area in this paper. To assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the suggested approaches, data regarding the road network, the prevalence of epidemics, and traffic congestion are collected. The experimental results demonstrate that 1) the proposed two route planning models can effectively bypass areas with high levels of epidemic risk. 2) The static route planning model increases the travel distance by 12.24% and 13.03%, while the dynamic route planning model increases the travel distance by 24.33% and 27.69% compared with the conventional shortest route, given the same origin and destination and the same impact radii of the COVID-19 hot-spots (300 and 500 m respectively). When taking detour routes to avoid COVID-19 hot-spots, the average increase in trip distance does not surpass 50%, which is acceptable psychologically for travelers. 3) The static travel route planning model is suitable for the severe epidemic situation for it can strictly avoid the epidemic hot-spots;The dynamic travel route planning model is applicable to the situation where the epidemic situation is relatively mild. Ultimately, the route planning models can be utilized to develop a framework to provide travelers with detour options, which would make a practical difference to ensure travelers' safety during traveling and contribute to preventing the spread of the epidemic. © 2023 The Author(s)
ABSTRACT
Purpose>The catastrophic state of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has seized off all the operations along with the globe. It has not only distressed the socio-economic structure of the world but also mounted enormous pressure on the governmental bodies to save the lives of the people. Despite this, severe impacts of the same have been observed on the small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMME) practices, resulting in the economic downturn. The purpose of this study is to facilitate the SMME’s with circular economy (CE) practices to overcome the negative impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on their supply chain (SC) operations.Design/methodology/approach>The presented work identified seven critical impacts as criteria of the novel COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian SMME and seeks to identify the relief measures in the CE paradigm by identifying 13 prominent enablers to CE as alternatives. Experts’ opinions have been engaged to detect CE enablers’ proficiency to overpower the pandemic impact through a questionnaire-based survey. The obtained data have been clustered and analyzed through a hybrid approach of entropy weight method and grey relational analysis to find an organized ranking of the enablers.Findings>Current work spotlights the SMME’s losses due to SC disruptions and declined consumption patterns. The waste augmentation during the pandemic era has also been grouped in this study, primarily associating with the SC’s waste generation. The result of the performed analysis shows that the CE enabler “waste reduction and its transformation into a resource (E1)” have achieved the highest rank among all the considered enablers, governing a higher demand toward reusing waste for better handling the post COVID era state of affairs.Originality/value>The presented study aimed to suppress the pandemic impact and generate anticipation of the CE concept, which might help the managers and policymakers identify its urgent need to achieve a stable and resilient SC system in a post COVID period. Presented work is peculiar, aiming to accelerate the CE adaption with green material usage in the industrial sector to suppress the present miserable condition and to achieve industrial and social sustainability for a better-foreseen future.
ABSTRACT
Due to the seriousness of COVID-19, masks are considered to be as a key and effective device to cut off the spread of viruses and are widely used by people, such as doctors and patients. Hundreds of millions of masks used worldwide in daily life will inevitably cause huge pollution and damage to the environment. However, existing research has not yet provided a method to simultaneously evaluate the economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainable design of masks, which brings great barriers and challenges for designers to make sustainability decisions on masks and consumers’ behavioral decisions on mask purchases. Consequently, on the basis of principles of sustainability evaluation of masks, this work evaluates ten masks of different materials (including two newly designed masks) by using a novel hybrid of rank-sum ratio and entropy weight method. The results indicate that some disposable masks also show better sustainability than reusable masks, and in addition, the integrated rank-sum ratio and entropy weight method can effectively realize the sustainability evaluation of masks. The main contribution is to furnish an effective decision-making reference for sustainability evaluation of masks while greatly reducing the negative impacts of masks on the environment during the epidemic.
ABSTRACT
The food cold chain is a special type of cold chain that refers to a system in which refrigerated and frozen food is always kept in the specified low-temperature environment in all links from production, storage, transportation, sales, distribution to consumption, so as to ensure food quality and to prevent food deterioration caused by temperature fluctuation. In recent years, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought a great impact on people's life and the social economy and also threatened the large-scale food cold chain. Through the effective identification and evaluation of high-risk factors in the food cold chain, this article has found the major risks that have a great impact on the entire food cold chain and proposes the specific measures of risk management and control to solve the problems of food cold chain and reduce risks quickly and efficiently to ensure the stability and safety of food cold chain and avoid the serious food safety accidents. The contribution of this article is reflected in three aspects, namely, (1) applies the expert system based on professional knowledge and rich experience and constructs a classification and identification system structure of food cold chain risk indexes, which lay a foundation for further identifying and evaluating the major risks of the food cold chain; (2) designs a comprehensive index weighting method combining the AHP method and entropy weight method to quantitatively evaluate the major risks. This comprehensive method combines a hierarchical structure system, evaluation algorithm, subjective factor correction algorithm, and so on. The evaluation results are more accurate, have a high matching degree with reality, and have good theoretical and practical significance; (3) analyzes and explains the major risks of the food cold chain in the non-epidemic situations and COVID-19 situations. Proposals and measures for risk management and control are put forward, which have wide practical significance.
ABSTRACT
The global spread of COVID-19 epidemic has aroused great attention of the whole society to urban health problems, so it is of practical significance to carry out health city evaluation for improving urban health level, preventing sudden urban problems and improving living environment. In this study, the entropy weight method and Moran index are used to evaluate the healthy cities of 10 prefecture-level cities in Shaanxi Province and the results show that: ①Differences in urban development conditions affect the health level of cities, and index factors have different effects in different cities;②The strength of urban economy and traffic connection affects the level of regional healthy development;③Medical facilities and public transportation are important supporting systems to deal with sudden public health incidents. In spatial planning, planning and construction based on healthy city evaluation has scientific guiding significance. © 2022, Editorial Office of Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology. All right reserved.
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The pandemic COVID-19 which has spread over the world in early 2020 has caused significant impacts not only on health and life, but also on production activities and freight work. However, few studies were about the effect of COVID-19 on the performance of cities' logistics. Hence, this study focuses on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and compares the changes in logistics performance from a spatial perspective caused by COVID-19 that are reflected on the highway freight between its 18 node cities in 2019 and 2020 of the same periods for 72 days. This study uses the entropy weight method to reflect the impact that COVID-19 has caused to the logistics level. Based on the modified gravity model, the impact on the logistics spatial connection between node cities was analyzed. These two aspects have been combined to analyze the logistics performance. The results show that the node cities have been affected by COVID-19 dissimilarly, and the impact has regional characteristics. The logistics level and spatial connection of Wuhan are the most seriously declined. The decline in logistics level has the same spatial variation law as the confirmed cases. The logistics connection between Wuhan and the surrounding node cities and the three-node cities in the northeast of China are also severely affected by the pandemic because of the expressway control policies. The regional distribution of logistics performance has differences, and the correlation of the logistics level and logistics spatial connection decreases. Besides, this study puts forward different recovery suggestions and policies for different belts in the BRI, such as focusing on restoring areas and giving full play to the role of the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration and logistics corridor. Finally, further provides corresponding suggestions for reducing the impact of emergencies from the perspectives of logistics hubs.
ABSTRACT
The pandemic caused by coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) continues to disrupt the global supply chain system, bringing new risks and challenges. The uncertainty created by COVID-19 makes it is difficult for various industries to deal with the pandemic. Since the pandemic, the supply chain's resilience has been discussed and examined in some studies. However, most existing works start from a single industry perspective or pay more attention to the disturbance caused by changes in the production side. Supply chain networks of different industries, mainly transport networks, are relatively limited under the epidemic's impact. In this paper, from the perspective of highway freight transport, a comprehensive competitiveness evaluation framework was proposed to reveal and the disruption and resilience of the supply chain under the outbreak based on nine indexes with five dimensions, including efficiency, capacity, activity, connectivity, and negotiability. Based on the availability of the data(Large-scale truck trajectory), we sorted out seven categories of Chinese industries(related to highway transport) and divided them into four categories respectively: (a) Slight disruption and worse resilience; (b) Slight disruption and remarkable resilience; (c) Serious disruption and worse resilience; (d) Serious disruption and remarkable resilience. The measurement results of supply chain network performance show that the industries (cold-chain, general products, and other industries) dominated by "Efficiency - Negotiability - Connectivity" are slightly disrupted (about 33%), forming a spatial diffusion with Wuhan(the city where the pandemic first broke out) as the disrupted center, spreading outward in a circle structure. Simultaneously, five urban agglomerations surrounding it have been impacted. By contrast, due to the strict isolation measures, the industries (building materials, construction, engineering, and high-value products industry) more vulnerable to be disrupted seriously (about 82%) tend to be the pattern of "Capacity - Activity". However, a large-scale centralized disruption was observed in the Triangle of Central China urban agglomeration was presented, resulting in almost stagnation of industry development. Meanwhile, as the future of the pandemic remains uncertain, the supply chain represented by the engineering industry, construction industry, etc are deserved to be paid more attention in line with they are prone to large-scale centralized damage due to the disruption of a single city node.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The catastrophic state of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has seized off all the operations along with the globe. It has not only distressed the socio-economic structure of the world but also mounted enormous pressure on the governmental bodies to save the lives of the people. Despite this, severe impacts of the same have been observed on the small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMME) practices, resulting in the economic downturn. The purpose of this study is to facilitate the SMME’s with circular economy (CE) practices to overcome the negative impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on their supply chain (SC) operations. Design/methodology/approach: The presented work identified seven critical impacts as criteria of the novel COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian SMME and seeks to identify the relief measures in the CE paradigm by identifying 13 prominent enablers to CE as alternatives. Experts’ opinions have been engaged to detect CE enablers’ proficiency to overpower the pandemic impact through a questionnaire-based survey. The obtained data have been clustered and analyzed through a hybrid approach of entropy weight method and grey relational analysis to find an organized ranking of the enablers. Findings: Current work spotlights the SMME’s losses due to SC disruptions and declined consumption patterns. The waste augmentation during the pandemic era has also been grouped in this study, primarily associating with the SC’s waste generation. The result of the performed analysis shows that the CE enabler “waste reduction and its transformation into a resource (E1)” have achieved the highest rank among all the considered enablers, governing a higher demand toward reusing waste for better handling the post COVID era state of affairs. Originality/value: The presented study aimed to suppress the pandemic impact and generate anticipation of the CE concept, which might help the managers and policymakers identify its urgent need to achieve a stable and resilient SC system in a post COVID period. Presented work is peculiar, aiming to accelerate the CE adaption with green material usage in the industrial sector to suppress the present miserable condition and to achieve industrial and social sustainability for a better-foreseen future. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
With the rapid development of society, especially the advent of intelligent technology of life services, the ability of the elderly to adapt to modern digital life is getting weaker and weaker, the dilemma of the "digital divide" for the elderly has aroused heated public debate. In the era of aging and information superposition, in-depth study of the multi-dimensional impact of the digital divide on the elderly has become an effective content of China's active aging strategy. Based on the micro-data of the Chinese General Social Survey in 2017, this paper uses the entropy right method to construct the digital divide index system for the elderly over 60 years of age from the perspective of essential equipment, Internet utilization degree, and Basic Internet usage skills. At the same time, this paper constructs China's comprehensive index of active aging from three aspects: health, social participation, and guarantee of the elderly, to study the impact of the digital divide on China's active aging. The following conclusions have been drawn: the digital divide among the elderly significantly inhibits China's active aging. The digital divide reduces the level of physical and mental health and social participation of older persons and inhibits the level of guarantee of older persons, thus impeding their active aging. In addition, it also reduces the overall life satisfaction of the elderly. The use of the Internet, skills, and other digital technology abilities of the elderly have effectively promoted active aging. The more Internet access devices older people have, the higher their level of social participation. The higher the Internet frequency of the elderly, the healthier the body and mind. Furthermore, the greater the level of physical and mental health and social participation of older groups who use online payments. The digital divide among the elderly inhibits the process of China's active aging, and the unique course and stage characteristics of the development of the aging of the Chinese population require us to pay full attention to the relationship between the digital divide and active aging and how to construct a "digital-friendly" aging system is an essential issue for China's social development to consider.