This article investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected home and host countries’ FDI margins. Heckman estimation of monthly bilateral FDI data indicates the following: (1) The pandemic reduced both the FDI margins. (2) COVID-19 mortality in home countries reduced extensive FDI margin. (3) FDI was more sensitive to host countries’ pandemic situation for both OECD and emerging countries; moreover, in emerging countries, FDI was affected by its domestic pandemic control because they were typically the host countries. (4) The service sector’s FDI was severely affected by the pandemic than other sectors’ FDI.

The business of international trade has never been identified as zero-sum. Yet, dependence on regional agreements to provide alternate means for countries to overlook shortcomings persists. China’s recent rise up the trade value-chain has fostered an assumption that the regional agreement provides various advantages to exports from Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA) impact on ASEAN export efficiency into the Chinese market, in pre and post eras. Using a structured gravity approach to estimate potential export pattern at aggregate and industry level, this research indicates that though not consistent across years, the ACFTA offers improvements to ASEAN exports to China. No clear effects of the ACFTA can be extrapolated from the years surrounding the initial signing (Article 8—2004). However, following its full enactment (2010), the ACFTA resulted in more sustainable trade from ASEAN members towards China, at both the industry and country levels. While seeing improvements in export efficiency during its era, ACFTA’s facilitation of efficiency measures with China came at no expense to other major export destinations.

As a major destination of waste products, China implemented the National Sword Policy (NSP) to regulate the high pollution of waste imports. The existing literature primarily focuses on the motivations behind China’s waste imports and the policy implications of the NSP on China’s waste imports and the global recycling market. This study innovatively focuses on the extensive, intensive, price, and quantity marginal effects of the NSP on China’s waste imports using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach with 26 categories of waste products for 150 countries and regions from 2007 to 2021. The findings indicate that: (1) The NSP has led to declines in the intensive and quantity margins of regulated waste imports, while the price margin has increased. (2) In the years following the implementation of the NSP, the impacts continued to intensify. (3) The NSP has reduced the motivation for exporters to export highly polluting waste to China in search of a “Pollution Haven”. (4) Orientations implementing policies that place the responsibility for products’ environmental impact and encourage waste sorting can effectively alleviate the inhibitory effects of the NSP. These results suggest that the Chinese government needs to strengthen the control of high-polluting and low-value product imports. Waste-exporting countries should encourage enterprises to take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of products and promote waste sorting and treatment facilities. Enterprises should strengthen the environmental impact assessment of the entire product lifecycle and consider materials that are easy to sort and recycle.

Motivations behind a country’s importation of waste are categorized into the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) and the resource hunting hypothesis (RHH). The importation of wastes can lead to environmental sustainability concerns, requiring governments to intervene when the market fails to reduce the negative externalities by strengthening and implementing environmental regulations. Motivated by China’s position within a rapidly growing but environmentally damaging sector of trade, this paper has three goals: (1) to classify the primary hypothesis that governs China’s flow of traded wastes; (2) to verify the heterogeneous impact of the pollution paradise motivation and resource demand motivation of waste imports from developed and developing countries, and across industries; (3) to assess the impact of domestic environmental regulations on the motives behind China’s waste imports. Using 28 imported waste-varieties from 20 of China’s major trade partners across 24 years, findings indicate that the flow of Chinese waste imports is relatively unresponsive under the pollution haven effect. However, the resource hunting effect from developing countries is significantly greater than what originates from developed countries, despite the laws of 2011 and 2017 established to restrict resource hunting activities. These results have important implications for improving the efficiency of China’s waste sorting and recycling systems.

Recently, the world-wide human genome related projects have been vigorously launched and implemented. Genesequencing techniques play a critical role in disease diagnosis, prediction, population stratification relying on efficiently mining genetic features in the gene pool. Exploring the association between the sites of the genetic mutation and the disease based population classification becomes a hot topic, which beneficially supports disease diagnosis and treatment on the molecular level. However, there are numerous variable sites even on a single chromosome in the human gene pool, and hence the traditional classifiers are not able to dig out all single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites without clearly excavating characteristic SNP sites, termed as tagSNPs, in SNP clusters. By applying big data mining techniques, in this paper, we first of all propose a principal component analysis (PCA) based algorithm for reducing the gene data dimension in order to cluster SNP sites in the low dimensional space. Moreover, an oriented graph theory based tagSNPs selection algorithm is designed. Finally, relying on realworld 1000 Genomes Project dataset, we can achieve fewer tagSNPs than traditional methods by invoking the complete process of our designed SNP classifier.