Taking the modified Anderson health behavior model as the analysis framework and relying on 1136 empirical research data of S District in Foshan City, Guangdong Province of China, this study explores the influence of predisposing factors, enabling factors and need factors on the utilization of community-based health services among older adults in China. The results show that three variables have a significant impact on the use of family health services, which are whether the pension is the main source of living, income surplus, and major expenditure items. Seven variables have a significant impact on the use of preventive health services, which are household registration type, the basic endowment insurance coverage, the nature of the working unit before retirement, the self-rated health status, chronic diseases, self-care ability in daily life, and preventive health care needs.
Background: This study makes an effort to examine the impact of home and community-based services on maintaining cognitive function and understand the mediating effect of social participation on the relationship of community services and older adults’ cognitive function in China. Method: The empirical data comes from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS). A total of 38,582 (person-time) respondents were gathered for this study. The two-way fixed effects regression model is used to estimate the associations between independent variables, mediating variables and cognitive ability after controlling for socio-demographic, family responsibility, and time variables. Result: This study has confirmed that participating in daily and social activities is associated with the cognitive functions of Chinese older adults. Social participation can stimulate cognition. Active participation in outdoor activities, doing housework or taking care of kids, daily playing cards or mah-jong, reading books and newspapers, watching TV, and listening to the radio can significantly promote the cognitive ability of older adults. In addition, the findings have indicated the importance of community services for older adults. This study shows personal daily care services, legal aid services, health education services, as well as dealing with family and neighborhood disputes have a positive effect on maintaining older adults’ cognitive functions. Meanwhile, the provision of door-to-door medical services hurts their cognitive functions. This study also illustrates that community-based services can increase the level of older adults’ social participation, and then enhance their level of cognitive function. Conclusion: This study can inform service provision agencies to develop targeted programs to support older adults’ continued engagement.
Given the increasing scarcity of urban land, the Chinese government has been initiating large-scale redevelopment of urban villages that are commonly regarded problematic for their low land use efficiencies and negative externalities. During this process, the emerging neo-urbanism in China demonstrates the heterogeneity of institutional arrangements, with different levels of transaction costs incurred. To explore the transaction costs incurred in different institutional arrangements of urban village redevelopment projects, this study anatomizes three projects in Guangzhou from the perspective of neo-institutional economics. The project duration and level of conflict are taken as two key variables to evaluate the efficiency and equality of the projects. With this research design, this study illustrates that institutional arrangements significantly affect the project outcomes. The conclusion suggests that the local and central governments alter the existing institutions with a view to lowering the transaction costs.
1 September 2020 in Journal of Urban Planning and Development
This paper analyses urban village redevelopment projects (UVRPs) in contemporary China using a case-based analysis method. Based on the data collected from 394 UVRPs in Zhejiang province, we reveal that the top-down institutional arrangement is the dominant method for redevelopment of urban villages. Wenzhou city is picked as an example to explore the drivers, policies, and barriers for UVRP implementation under the top-down institutional arrangement. According to the secondary data of government policies and documents, striking the balance of social, economic, and ecological benefits to achieve more sustainable and new-type urbanization is found to be the main stimulus. Grounded in the original fieldwork conducted in 26 urban villages in Wenzhou, this study unravels how the policies for UVRPs are formed and implemented. As for the barriers, from the perspective of villagers, social disputes are caused by the unclear definition of legal property rights, the demand for the construction of temporary relocation housing for the elderly, and the high construction costs of relocated high-rise buildings. The government blames the unruly villagers or nail householders for their excessive requests which increase the transaction costs for settling these issues. Besides, poorly designed policies impede policy implementation. In view of the high costs of policy alteration, the lock-in effects or policy continuity preferred by the government echo the institutional equilibrium put forward by North.
Urbanization aims to promote citizenization, in which people’s social and spiritual needs must be satisfied. However, vulnerable land-lost farmers face many difficulties during the urbanization process. This is partly caused by the GDP-oriented policies that specifically target land-lost farmers. The government must change its governance from GDP (land) oriented to people oriented to improve its management performance. Central government is encouraging urbanization. However, only a few studies have investigated the entrepreneurial activities of land-lost farmers at the micro-level in China, which engenders ineffective policies for promoting such activities during urbanization. Based on grounded theory, this study develops a consciousness-situation-behavior model to explain the entrepreneurship mechanism of land-lost farmers. The authors discovered that entrepreneurial awareness motivates entrepreneurial behavior through the perceptions of desirability and feasibility. Land acquisition plays a mediating role in the relationship between entrepreneurial consciousness and behavior. For various situation factors, land location and entrepreneurship policy significantly mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial consciousness and behavior, whereas the settlement of land-lost farmers produces an insignificant effect on such relationship. A higher compensation can also lower the possibility of entrepreneurship. Based on these findings, practical policies are proposed.