The social profitability of rural roads in a small open economy: Do urban agglomeration economies matter?

The effects of a rural roads programme depend on labour mobility, how the programme is financed, and agglomeration economies. If financed by a rural poll tax and cross-price effects and agglomeration economies are sufficiently small, the wage will rise, with some return migration. Taxes on trade act as countervailing distortions, yielding urban households some relief. Rural-urban commuting promotes the exploitation of agglomeration economies; taxes on international trade are then inferior to a poll tax. The change in the value, at producer prices, of the rural sector's net supply vector can be a poor measure of the programme's social profitability.     

农村综合能源系统多层协同优化运行方法

农村综合能源系统通过多种能源的协同互补,在满足农村用户多元化用能需求的同时,能有效提升能源利用效率和用能经济性。首先,在考虑适应农村典型场景的基础上,提出了一种三层协同自律的农村综合能源分层协同运行优化框架。然后,基于农村综合能源系统典型设备,建立了三层农村综合能源系统源-储-荷联合优化调度模型以及相应的优化调度流程。调度模型中冬季通过对沼气发电机组的余热回收与空气源热泵协同对用户供热;夏季对沼气发电机组余热进行回收,并通过溴化锂制冷机与空气源热泵联合对农村用户供冷。最后,对农村综合能源系统多层协同优化方法进行了算例分析,结果表明该优化方法提高了农村居民用能的经济性,验证了所提方法的有效性。     

光纤有线电视在乡村振兴中的作用

2018年初,我国提出“乡村振兴”战略,此战略目的是增强农村农业发展的新活力,从而加速推进其现代化进程。光纤有线电视因具有损耗小、传输距离远、频带宽、传输容量大、抗电磁干扰等实用优势,并在贯彻及落实着“社会效益优先,两个效益统一”的原则下在社会、经济及文化等方面助力着乡村的振兴。     

中国天然气市场可持续发展分析

承接2016年回暖之势,2017年中国天然气市场迎来爆发式增长,全年天然气消费量达2 335×10~8 m~3、年消费增量达353×10~8 m~3。为此,有必要剖析推动中国天然气市场爆发式增长的主要因素并预测其未来发展的可持续性。研究结果表明:(1)2017年爆发式增长主要受益于宏观经济形势好转、大气污染防治措施深入实施、化工等大宗产品价格回升、华东地区天然气发电负荷增加、管道天然气供应价格相对较低、LNG汽车市场整体呈现回暖态势等因素;(2)经济发展形势、"煤改气"的推进、政策实施方向、油气价格趋势等外部因素将能继续支持天然气市场的快速增长;(3)但天然气产业的自身条件、资源和基础设施条件将对市场发展造成制约。结论认为:(1)2020年之前我国天然气市场需求量仍会保持快速增长的趋势,但难以维持每年300×10~8 m~3的增长规模;(2)工业燃料和发电是天然气市场发展的主要方向;(3)环渤海等地区是未来天然气需求量增长的主要区域。为了保持我国天然气市场的发展态势,提出如下建议:(1)千方百计扩大天然气供应规模,在认真做好国产非常规天然气资源开发的同时,积极落实进口天然气资源;(2)毫不松懈地建设基础设施,管道要超前建设,LNG接收站要加大力度建设,地下储气库等调峰设施要鼓励建设;(3)科学合理地理顺天然气价格,居民价格与非居民价格并轨首当其冲,确立价格是平衡供需关系的杠杆作用,减少行政干涉。     

天然橡胶期货市场回顾及后市展望

2019年天然橡胶期货市场起起落落,沪胶价格继续低位震荡。2020年天然橡胶供大于求的局面仍不会发生根本性改变,由极端天气引发的天然橡胶市场行情变动可能会减小,汽车行业可能会在政策支持下再次振兴,尤其重型卡车市场会成为亮点,轮胎企业继续寻求扩大出口。2020年上半年,天然橡胶期货市场可能还会受到2019年异常天气和病害等的余波作用,胶价会达到一个相对的高点,价格底部抬升,但很难出现持续性上涨的市场行情。2020年下半年,随着天然橡胶产量的季节性增长,胶价可能会再次回落。     

Machine learning methods for short‐term bid forecasting in the renewable energy market: A case study in Italy

In liberalized markets, there usually exists a day‐ahead session where energy is sold and acquired for the following production day. Owing to the high uncertainty of its production, renewable energy (wind in particular) can significantly influence the network imbalance of the following day. In this work, we consider the problem of predicting the sum of the bid volumes for wind energy of all the producers inside the day‐ahead energy market. This is a valuable tool to be used by an energy provider in order to determine the imbalance of a market zone and, thus, properly size its bids. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the possible relationship between the meteorological forecasts and the wind power offered on the market by the companies for a market zone. We propose a machine learning model which is used to compute a 1‐day‐ahead forecast. The input‐output mapping is obtained by support vector regression. The input feature vector is defined by a suitable feature extraction technique since the meteorological forecasts are given on a lattice of thousands of geographical points. The computational experiments are performed considering the Italian market as a case study (years 2012‐2016). The results show that the proposed feature extraction technique, selecting only some geographical zones, manages to reduce the error attained using all the features. Moreover, classical statistical methods are shown to be outperformed by machine learning models. The analysis reveals also some weaknesses of the model, which may be due to other nonmeteorological factors at play.     

后生产主义视角下的香港乡村复兴研究

20世纪50年代后，随着香港城市化不断推进，新界乡村居民大规模迁徙到市区，乡村人口锐减、经济衰退、物质景观逐渐衰败。90年代后，香港开始通过不同方式推动乡村转型，取得良好成效，可为内地乡村复兴提供有益参考。从近现代香港乡村演化路径切入，以转型发展中的荔枝窝、盐田仔、大澳村以及南丫岛为例，基于“后生产主义”理论视角探讨乡村复兴的不同驱动方式，包括由精英阶层“多方联合”推动，由本地居民自发保护，由政府或村民开展的“零碎型”保护，以及由中产阶级迁入而推动的“乡村绅士化”等4类乡村复兴方式。香港乡村经历了从“生产主义”向“后生产主义”发展的演化路径，乡村职能从农业生产逐渐转变为乡村消费，城市资本对乡村社会经济空间结构进行重构。香港乡村复兴主要由民间力量推动，政府参与度较低。乡村转型亟待综合性保护规划的制定， 并通过因村施策、多方合作等方式，实现传统文化保护、经济发展等多维度的复兴。     

Binary whale optimization algorithm: a new metaheuristic approach for profit-based unit commitment problems in competitive electricity markets

This article presents a metaheuristic approach, the binary whale optimization algorithm (BWOA), to solve complex, constrained, non-convex, binary-nature profit-based unit commitment (PBUC) optimization problems of a price-taking generation company (GenCo) in the electricity market. To simulate the binary-nature PBUC problem, the continuous, real-value whale position/location is mapped into binary search space through various transfer functions. This article introduces three variants of BWOA using tangential hyperbolic, inverse tangent (arctan) and sigmoidal transfer functions. The effectiveness of the BWOA approaches is examined in test systems with different market mechanisms, i.e. an energy-only market, and energy and reserve market participation with different reserve payment methods. The simulation results are presented, discussed and compared with other existing approaches. The convergence characteristics, solution quality and consistency of the results across different BWOA variants are discussed. The superiority and statistical significance of the proposed approaches with respect to existing approaches is also presented.     

A general framework to study the price‐color relationship in paintings with an application to Mark Rothko rectangular series

We propose a general framework to study the relationship between the price of a painting and its color‐related attributes. To this end we focus on four key aspects: dominant colors, features of the color palette, color harmony, and color emotions. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with an example based on Mark Rothko's post‐1950 paintings (the “rectangular” series), and auction data from the 1994 to 2018 period. We identify two distinct price‐color regimes in Rothko's market: (a) [1994‐2005], a period in which prices are explained mainly by the growing popularity of the artist regardless of the color attributes of the paintings sold; and (b) [2006‐2018], a period in which color‐related attributes explain most of the prices. Furthermore, we find that in this second period, the dominant colors and the diversity of the color palette, are by far the most relevant attributes that influence the price; color harmony and color emotions hold almost no explanatory power during this period. Finally, we propose a new metric based on the Herfindahl Index to describe color diversity; this metric seems to be promising at characterizing the effect of the color palette on the price of a painting.