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Sustainability requires developing the capacity to manage difficult tradeoffs to advance human livelihoods now and in the future. Decision-makers are recognizing the ecosystem services approach as a useful framework for evaluating tradeoffs associated with environmental change to advance decision-making towards holistic solutions. In this dissertation I conduct an ecosystem services

Sustainability requires developing the capacity to manage difficult tradeoffs to advance human livelihoods now and in the future. Decision-makers are recognizing the ecosystem services approach as a useful framework for evaluating tradeoffs associated with environmental change to advance decision-making towards holistic solutions. In this dissertation I conduct an ecosystem services assessment on the Yongding River Ecological Corridor in Beijing, China. I developed a `10-step approach' to evaluate multiple ecosystem services for public policy. I use the 10-step approach to evaluate five ecosystem services for management from the Yongding Corridor. The Beijing government created lakes and wetlands for five services (human benefits): (1) water storage (groundwater recharge), (2) local climate regulation (cooling), (3) water purification (water quality), (4) dust control (air quality), and (5) landscape aesthetics (leisure, recreation, and economic development).

The Yongding Corridor is meeting the final ecosystem service levels for landscape aesthetics, but the new ecosystems are falling short on meeting final ecosystem service levels for water storage, local climate regulation, water purification, and dust control. I used biophysical models (process-based and empirically-based), field data (biophysical and visitor surveys), and government datasets to create ecological production functions (i.e., regression models). I used the ecological production functions to evaluate how marginal changes in the ecosystems could impact final ecosystem service outcomes. I evaluate potential tradeoffs considering stakeholder needs to recommend synergistic actions for addressing priorities while reducing service shortfalls.
ContributorsWong, Christina P (Author) / Kinzig, Ann P (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Kai N. (Committee member) / Muneepeerakul, Rachata (Committee member) / Ouyang, Zhiyun (Committee member) / Vivoni, Enrique (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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In the last two years, China’s booming of Internet Finance Platform made significant impacts on three dimensions. Compared with the conventional market, Internet Finance is asserted to open a revolutionary pathway of lending where by small and mid-sized companies may overcome the financing dilemma on credit accessibility and high cost.

In the last two years, China’s booming of Internet Finance Platform made significant impacts on three dimensions. Compared with the conventional market, Internet Finance is asserted to open a revolutionary pathway of lending where by small and mid-sized companies may overcome the financing dilemma on credit accessibility and high cost. In other words, Internet Finance is hyped to be able to reduce information asymmetry, enhance allocation efficiency of resources, and promote product and process innovations for the financial institutions. However, the core essence of Internet Finance rests on risk assessment and control – a fundamental element applies to all forms of financing. Most current practice of internet finance on risk assessment and control remains unchanged from the mindset of traditional banking practices for small and medium sized firms. Hence, the same problems persisted and may only become even worse under the internet finance platform if no innovations take place.

In this thesis, the author proposed and tested a credit risk assessment model using data analytics techniques through an in-depth cases study with actual transaction data. Specifically, based on the 30,000 observations collected from actual transactional data from small and medium size firms of China’s home furnishing industry. The preliminary results are promising in spite of the limitations. The thesis concludes with the findings of relevance to improve the current practices and suggests areas of future research.
ContributorsZhang, Qi (Author) / Pei, Ker-Wei (Thesis advisor) / Gu, Bin (Thesis advisor) / Cui, Haitao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016