Nowadays, many big cities are suffering from heavy air pollution and continuous haze weather. Compared with the threat on physical health, the influence of haze on people’s mental health is much less discussed in the current literature. Emotion is one of the most important indicators of mental health. To understand the negative impact of haze weather on the emotion of the people, we conducted an investigation based on historical weather records and microblog data in Tianjin, China. Specifically, an emotional thesaurus was generated with a microblog corpus collected from sample data. Based on the thesaurus, the public emotion under haze was statistically described. Then, through correlation analysis and comparative study, the relation and seasonal variation of haze and negative emotion of the public were well discussed. According to the study results, there was indeed a correlation between haze and negative emotion of the public, but the strength of this relationship varied under different conditions. The level of air pollution and weather context were both important factors that influence the mental effects of haze, and diverse patterns of negative emotion expression were demonstrated in different seasons of a year. Finally, for the benefit of people’s mental health under haze, recommendations were given for haze control from the side of government.

Satisfying the growing care demands of the elderly has become a major policy issue under the trend of rapidly aging of the population, especially in developing countries. Although the market-oriented transformation on the supply side is a sustainable way to cope with the pressing demands of elderly care in the long term, the conflict between private and public interests seriously impedes the transformation process in its early stage. From the perspective of maximizing social welfare, this study took the specific situation of China as an example and applied a Stackelberg game model to explore the optimal transformation policy that can balance such conflict of interests. By comparing the effects of two forms of subsidy in China, the results first theoretically verified the importance of subsidy in stimulating the private supply of elderly care, and then emphasized that the size of the gap between supply and demand is the fulcrum of differentiated subsidy, which determines the optimal policy for the development of the elderly care market (ECM) in each aging region. Additionally, the study showed that in the process of market-oriented transformation, the government’s positive response to the demands and preferences of the public, the establishment of market supervision measures, and the increase in the elderly’s affordability all play important roles in improving social welfare. These findings not only have policy implications for the marketization of elderly care in China, but also provide meaningful references for other developing countries in the word that are experiencing or about to experience elderly care problems.

Background: Government procurement of elderly care services from market-oriented private providers has become an important way to respond to the growing demands of elderly care. However, the government cannot accurately identify the actual quality efforts of these providers, and the government pursues social benefits while the providers pursue economic interests. The existence of asymmetric information and goal divergence increases the quality risk of services. From the perspective of maximizing the government’s net benefits, this study aimed to analyze how to reduce the quality risk through ex ante policy design. Methods: On the basis of the principal-agent theory, this study defined the asymmetric information of market-oriented private providers’ efforts on quality as a random variable, and constructed the theoretical model in the case of asymmetric information to compare with the one in the reference case of complete information, in both of which the government is the principal and market-oriented private providers are the agents. And the models also introduced several parameters to describe key factors that affect the contract results, including the physical health of the elderly, the spillover benefits to the government and market-oriented private providers, and the market risks. Results: The optimal results of the models in the two cases were obtained respectively, and the validity of the theoretical models was verified in a numerical example. Taking the case of complete information as the basic frame of reference, the difference of the optimal results in both cases showed the extent of negative impacts of asymmetric information, and highlighted the role of ex ante policy design in minimizing asymmetric information and reducing its negative impacts. Some ex ante policies that can improve the supervision of market-oriented private providers and their quality efforts, as well as have positive effects on key factors, were also recommended. Conclusions: The government should attach importance to ex ante policy design to reduce the quality risk of elderly care services supplied by market-oriented private providers in government procurement. Our study provides main framework and critical directions for ex ante policy design, which is conducive to the realization of real and sustained quality improvement.

China’s resource-based cities have made tremendous contributions to national and local economic growth and urban development over the last seven decades. Recently, such cities have been in transition from resource-centered development towards human-oriented urbanization to meet the requirements of long-term sustainability for the natural environment and human society. A good understanding of urban expansion and evolution as a consequence of urbanization has important implications for future urban and regional planning. Using a series of remote sensing (RS) images and geographical information system (GIS)-based spatial analyses, this research explores how a typical resource-based mining city, Datong, has expanded and evolved over the last two decades (2000–2018), with a reflection on the role of urban planning and development policies in driving the spatial transformation of Datong. The RS images were provided and processed by the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Spatial cluster analysis approaches were employed to examine the spatial patterns of urban expansion. The results indicate that the area of urban construction land increased by 132.6% during the study period, mainly along with the Chengqu District, the Mining Area, and in the southeast of the Nanjiao District, where most new towns are located. Reflection on the factors that influence urban expansion shows that terrain, urban planning policies, and social economy are driving Datong’s urban development.

Climate change governance has attracted increasing academic interest. However, holistic reviews on the dynamic complexity and stability of climate change governance have received little attention. This study addresses this research gap by conducting a structurally comparative analysis between China and the United States based on the “polity–policy–politics” framework. Three analytical facets are identified for each dimension of the framework, including institutional settings, the nature of policy mechanisms used in climate change practices, and the degree of multi-actors’ involvement under two governance scenarios. Results show that climate change governance in the two countries differs substantially. The process of climate governance in China is driven by strong leadership at the national level alongside policy continuity, whereas well-functioning market mechanisms and robust regulatory systems are still lacking. A more meaningful involvement of social forces is also critically needed when addressing increasingly complex and uncertain climate change. By contrast, the US federal climate policies are considered inadequate compared with sub-national actions and persistent efforts of non-state actors, to which the success of climate practices is largely attributed. This study systematically uncovers the divergence of climate mitigation under different political–institutional contexts, and evaluates the effectiveness of governance arrangement in the two countries, which helps policymakers to understand the potential of improving the performance of climate change governance.

To address the low performance of health care service delivery in the half-market system, the Chinese government has begun to advocate the medical alliance (MA) recently. Instead of strict regulations on the procedure of diagnosis and treatment, flexible resource sharing among medical institutions of different grades inside each MA is encouraged. By now, many attempts have been made for MA establishment from different perspectives, but there is no effective model maturely developed. For the promotion of the spatial accessibility to medical services at different levels, it is important to organize the hierarchial medial services according to the distributions of different grades of health care facilities in a city. With the city proper of Tianjin as the study case, we explored the optimal establishment of MAs using the geographic information system (GIS). By means of the Voronoi Diagrams, the service regions of different medical institutions were precisely defined and the organizational structure of hierarchical medical services in MAs was determined. Through interpolation analysis, accessibility to different levels of medical services was measured, and on this basis, discussions were conducted on the service efficiency of the MAs. According to the results from Tianjin, (1) under the proposed organizational model for MAs, the fit of the service regions of the first grade and the other two higher grades of medical institutions was good. but the fit of the second and the third grade medical institutions was insufficient. (2) Although the overall service efficiency was excellent, there were still deficiencies in a number of the MAs. (3) Increasing the number of second and third grade medical institutions in specific regions near the city’s edge, as well as the number of first grade institutions, could further improve the performance of hierarchical medical services.