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The Chinese tourists market has become the 4th largest inbound market for New Zealand in 2007; it also ranks 6th in terms of expenditure. Chinese visitors spent a total of NZ $352 million to the year December 2006, an average of NZ $3,340 per person (Ministry of Tourism, 2006). The latest statistics released from New Zealand Tourism Research Council show that 122,045 Chinese visited New Zealand by the year ended January 2008. These crucial statistics – market size, length of stay and average spend – indicate the necessity for the New Zealand tourism industry to understand and provide for Chinese expectations and requirements. Auckland is New Zealand's key gateway, and it is vital that Auckland provides a first good impression for the rest of country. Chinese travellers visit New Zealand with great desire and expectations of experiencing an exotic land. They expect Auckland, as the biggest city in New Zealand, to provide them with a memorable city experience in a developed country. The purpose of this research is to study Chinese tourists' expectations and travel experiences, with a particular focus on investigating whether Auckland can provide suitable services and experiences which match their requirements and expectations. The research will build on the study by Bull (1991) and Ryan (1995), which looked at supply demand relationships and at the tourism industry attempts to balance the supply with the actual demands. It will also build on work by Zhao (2006) and Qu (2006) which explored the dimensions of Chinese demand and distribution channel factors at both origin and destination. The goal is to establish which factors are adequate or inadequate. A synthesis of the demand supply situation will enable the development of recommendations. It is envisage that these recommendations could be adopted by local government and the tourism industry, either as actions or as improvements to policy. With regards to the purpose of this research, a qualitative method was decided as the most relevant approach. Qualitative methods are useful for revealing and understanding what lies are behind any phenomenon about which little is known. Grounded theory is a qualitative research method that was developed for the purpose of studying a social phenomenon, and to generate a theory relating to a particular situation (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). The historical bases of the grounded theory approach matches the aim of this research, namely to reveal the relationships between tourists and the tourism industry and to gain a better understanding of Chinese tourists' expectation and satisfaction, and the level of the service which the Auckland tourism industry provides to Chinese travellers needs to match the Chinese market and requirements of travellers. The interviews were conducted with both Chinese travellers and the Auckland tourism industry, including hotel managers, restaurant managers, gift/souvenirs shop assistants, tour guides, and so on. The research shows Auckland is not ready for Chinese market yet. This result comes from three aspects: firstly, most Chinese tourists do not have clear requirements or expectations of Auckland before they come to New Zealand. This is mainly because of the limited promotional materials available in China about Auckland. Secondly, Chinese tourists do not have many opportunities to get to know Auckland's attractions and activities after they arrive in Auckland. Auckland city is New Zealand's most popular urban tourism destination in terms of population and gateway function provides tourism facilities and services to Chinese tourists. However, the findings highlighted most Chinese tourists found Auckland's tourism attractions to be unattractive to them due to the language barrier and itinerary issues. Thirdly, the research also found Chinese tourists have been driven away due to lack of hotel accommodations in Auckland, especially in the shoulder or high seasons. Auckland's accommodation facilities are facing a challenge. The increasing domestic and international visitors' numbers and insufficient hotel accommodations will be the major problem for Auckland for the next decade. Most of the Chinese tourists who were interviewed expressed their hope of knowing more about Auckland, however, these hopes will go unrealised until the city provides better attractions and more services for them.

Background: Pressures from stakeholders drive manufacturers to be more environmental committed. The demand and supply integration (DSI) aims at balancing the demand and supply in order to stay competitive and reduce costs which can help manufacturers decreasing production costs for environmental-friendly products. When a company is integrating and disseminating information, trust is expected to play an important role between the supply chain partners. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, of how environmental commitment and trust can influence DSI within the German textile manufacturing industry. Methodology: The primary data, in this thesis, was conducted using a structured web survey sent out to 982 German textile manufacturers via email, based on the database Orbis. The response rate was 5.6 per cent. The simple linear regression analysis was used in order to investigate the relation of environmental commitment and trust on the extent of DSI. Findings, conclusions: In the German textile manufacturing industry, on the one hand, the results indicated that there is a positive linear relation of environmental commitment on the extent of DSI. Due to the low response rate and the lack of previous studies, further research should be conducted to confirm this relation. On the other hand, trust somewhat influences the extent of DSI, however, no linear relationship is found between them. The result is not in coherence with previous research. Hence, further studies are needed to clarify this relation.

The Chinese tourists market has become the 4th largest inbound market for New Zealand in 2007; it also ranks 6th in terms of expenditure. Chinese visitors spent a total of NZ $352 million to the year December 2006, an average of NZ $3,340 per person (Ministry of Tourism, 2006). The latest statistics released from New Zealand Tourism Research Council show that 122,045 Chinese visited New Zealand by the year ended January 2008. These crucial statistics – market size, length of stay and average spend – indicate the necessity for the New Zealand tourism industry to understand and provide for Chinese expectations and requirements. Auckland is New Zealand's key gateway, and it is vital that Auckland provides a first good impression for the rest of country. Chinese travellers visit New Zealand with great desire and expectations of experiencing an exotic land. They expect Auckland, as the biggest city in New Zealand, to provide them with a memorable city experience in a developed country. The purpose of this research is to study Chinese tourists' expectations and travel experiences, with a particular focus on investigating whether Auckland can provide suitable services and experiences which match their requirements and expectations. The research will build on the study by Bull (1991) and Ryan (1995), which looked at supply demand relationships and at the tourism industry attempts to balance the supply with the actual demands. It will also build on work by Zhao (2006) and Qu (2006) which explored the dimensions of Chinese demand and distribution channel factors at both origin and destination. The goal is to establish which factors are adequate or inadequate. A synthesis of the demand supply situation will enable the development of recommendations. It is envisage that these recommendations could be adopted by local government and the tourism industry, either as actions or as improvements to policy. With regards to the purpose of this research, a qualitative method was decided as the most relevant approach. Qualitative methods are useful for revealing and understanding what lies are behind any phenomenon about which little is known. Grounded theory is a qualitative research method that was developed for the purpose of studying a social phenomenon, and to generate a theory relating to a particular situation (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). The historical bases of the grounded theory approach matches the aim of this research, namely to reveal the relationships between tourists and the tourism industry and to gain a better understanding of Chinese tourists' expectation and satisfaction, and the level of the service which the Auckland tourism industry provides to Chinese travellers needs to match the Chinese market and requirements of travellers. The interviews were conducted with both Chinese travellers and the Auckland tourism industry, including hotel managers, restaurant managers, gift/souvenirs shop assistants, tour guides, and so on. The research shows Auckland is not ready for Chinese market yet. This result comes from three aspects: firstly, most Chinese tourists do not have clear requirements or expectations of Auckland before they come to New Zealand. This is mainly because of the limited promotional materials available in China about Auckland. Secondly, Chinese tourists do not have many opportunities to get to know Auckland's attractions and activities after they arrive in Auckland. Auckland city is New Zealand's most popular urban tourism destination in terms of population and gateway function provides tourism facilities and services to Chinese tourists. However, the findings highlighted most Chinese tourists found Auckland's tourism attractions to be unattractive to them due to the language barrier and itinerary issues. Thirdly, the research also found Chinese tourists have been driven away due to lack of hotel accommodations in Auckland, especially in the shoulder or high seasons. Auckland's accommodation facilities are facing a challenge. The increasing domestic and international visitors' numbers and insufficient hotel accommodations will be the major problem for Auckland for the next decade. Most of the Chinese tourists who were interviewed expressed their hope of knowing more about Auckland, however, these hopes will go unrealised until the city provides better attractions and more services for them.

This thesis aims to study the macroeconomic performance of China. China has been experiencing rapid economic growth and it has been changing gradually from a planned to a market economy since it initiated the well known “open door policy” combined with a “coastal development strategy” in 1978. However, rapid growth has occurred on the background of increasing regional disparity. Meanwhile, unemployment has increased significantly during last two decades, and has become one of the most pressing problems of the Chinese economy today. Moreover, another major challenge facing the Chinese economy is how to deal with various shocks, and to ensure the sustainability and balance of economic growth in the face of the increasing economic uncertainties associated with its deep reform and integration into the world trade and financial system. Based on the above concerns and literature review, this study, firstly, uses an augmented Solow-Swan model of Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) to assess the role FDI plays in underlying regional differences in economic growth across Chinese provinces over the reform period 1978-2008. My analysis indicates that the augmented Solow growth model appears to provide a good description of regional growth patterns in China over the period 1978-2008 and the data display conditional convergence. After controlling for FDI and other determinants of growth, provinces that were initially poor tend to grow faster and the evidence in favour of conditional convergence becomes even stronger after splitting the data into subsamples. I then focus on the study of the relationship between unemployment and growth at both national level and regional level in order to find out how unemployment affects China’s economic growth and economic reform progress overall. I find that Okun’s relationship does not hold in China universally and, furthermore, the nature of the observed relationship has changed during the transition progress. I argue that there are hump shaped relationships both between growth and unemployment and between the speed of transition and unemployment in China. The results are consistent with several theoretical and empirical studies in the literature. Finally, structural VAR methodology pioneered by Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1993) is used to identify and decompose supply and demand shocks to two variables, (the log of) output (annual real GDP) and (the log of) prices (annual GDP deflator). I then compute and discuss the correlation of such shocks across provinces and show how it has evolved over the four main sub-periods of China’s history. Moreover, I investigate which factors contribute to economic integration or divergence in the Chinese economy.

In times of demand shocks, when quantitative forecasting based on historical time series becomes obsolete, the only information about future demand is "advance demand information", i.e. interpreting early customer bookings as an indicator of not yet known demand. This paper deals with a forecasting method which selects the optimal forecasting model type and the level of integration of advance demand information, depending on the patterns of the particular time series. This constitutes the applicability of the procedure within an industrial application where a large number of time series is automatically forecasted in a flexible and data-driven way. The architecture of such a planning system is explained and using real-world data from a make-to-order industry it is shown that the system is flexible enough to cover different demand patterns and is well-suited to forecast demand shocks. (authors' abstract)

This thesis describes a short term water demand forecasting application that is based upon a combination of a neural network forecast generator and a rule based system that modifies the resulting forecasts. Conventionally, short term forecasting of both water consumption and electrical load demand has been based upon mathematical models that aim to either extract the mathematical properties displayed by a time series of historical data, or represent the causal relationships between the level of demand and the key factors that determine that demand. These conventional approaches have been able to achieve acceptable levels of prediction accuracy for those days where distorting, non cyclic influences are not present to a significant degree. However, when such distortions are present, then the resultant decrease in prediction accuracy has a detrimental effect upon the controlling systems that are attempting to optimise the operation of the water or electricity supply network. The abnormal, non cyclic factors can be divided into those which are related to changes in the supply network itself, those that are related to particular dates or times of the year and those which are related to the prevailing meteorological conditions. If a prediction system is to provide consistently accurate forecasts then it has to be able to incorporate the effects of each of the factor types outlined above. The prediction system proposed in this thesis achieves this by the use of a neural network that by the application of appropriately classified example sets, can track the varying relationship between the level of demand and key meteorological variables. The influence of supply network changes and calendar related events are accounted for by the use of a rule base of prediction adjusting rules that are built up with reference to past occurrences of similar events. The resulting system is capable of eliminating a significant proportion of the large prediction errors that can lead to non optimal supply network operation.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Jason S. Bergtold / Tian Xia / Brazil is one of the leading producers of ethanol, sugar, and sugarcane. Increasing demand for biofuels aligned with public policies prompted the expansion of sugarcane into the Brazilian Cerrado, particularly, into the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. The overall purpose of this dissertation, comprised of three essays, is to understand the impacts from the sugarcane expansion on farmers, processors, and the market. At the market level, the first essay, estimates the impacts of public policies and market factors on ethanol and sugar, supply and demand, in Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul, using three-stage least squares. Results show that ethanol supply is sensitive to public policies whereas the sugar supply is sensitive to market prices. Sugar and ethanol were found to be complementary outputs. For ethanol expansion to be sustainable the ethanol market must be developed to the extent that it relies on market factors and is no longer dependent on public policies. At the farmer level, the second essay, examines farmers' willingness to sign a sugarcane contract with a mill in the Brazilian Cerrado. A hypothetical stated choice experiment was conducted with farmers in Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. Respondents choose between three contracts (land rental, agricultural partnership and supply) and two optout options ("keep current contract" or "not grow sugarcane"). A single and a two opt-out random parameters models were estimated. The two opt-out model allowed for a better interpretation of the status quo. Willingness to pay, direct and cross-elasticity measures for contract attributes were calculated. Results showed that farmers prefer contracts with higher returns, shorter duration and a lower probability of late payments. Farmers seemed to prefer to renting out their land to the mill than to produce sugarcane themselves, which could lead to consequences for rural development and the sustainability of sugarcane expansion. At the processor level, the third essay investigates the impact of vertical coordination on input-oriented technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis (first stage) and a Tobit censored model (second stage). 204 Brazilian mills were considered. The second stage controlled for vertical integration as well as other characteristics of the mill. Vertical integration was measured as the percentage of total sugarcane used, supplied by mills. A negative, though minimal, relationship between vertical integration and technical efficiency was found. Hence, technical efficiency is not the major driver of vertical integration. Other vertical coordination strategies may bring more benefits in terms of technical efficiency (e.g. contracts). Drivers of vertical integration seem to vary according to the characteristics of the location of the mill.

The demand-driven and participatory approach to water resource development and management in Tanzania has been both praised and criticized; some see progress where others see increased inequalities. This study focuses on one progressive, demand-driven NGO which has a participatory approach to water resource development and management. This NGO, MSABI, is active in Kilombero Valley in southern Tanzania, and can be considered successful as it manages to keep 91 % of its water points functional, whilst the national average for pump functionality is just above 50 %. To study the performance of MSABI from a user perspective, it was decided that two sites in Kilombero Valley should be investigated in terms of users’ views on water access and quality. The identification of sites is based on population density and landcover change, so that the issues of scale and urban bias, as well as changes in the landscape affecting hydrological processes, are accounted for. In total, 29 interviews were conducted (October to November 2014), 15 at the Ifakara study site, the more densely populated location, and 14 at the Mchombe Ward study site. The interviews were semi-structured, using a participatory approach, focusing on users’ perspectives on water sources and the access to and quality of those water sources in dry and rainy seasons. The information gathered was used to construct definitions for water access and quality. These definitions, as well as the two locations and categorization of participants according to socio-economic status, were then used to sort and analyse the collected material. The results show that MSABI does not manage to make water accessible in an equitable way because of its demand-driven and participatory approach to water resource development and management. However, MSABI offers the only improved water source at the Mchombe Ward study site, except for one improved open well. MSABI manages to counter urban-bias better than any of the other water resource development and management facilitators encountered at the two study sites. The seasons influence water access, especially at the more peripheral locations, where improved water sources are less common and, as open water sources, are more prone to drought and contamination. When participants in Ifakara seasonally migrate for farming, during 4-5 months per year, the majority’s access to improved water sources is lost. At the distant seasonal fields, open water sources are more common and few report that they treat the unsafe water. The migration to peripheral farmlands coincides with the rainy season, causing open water sources to have their lowest water quality when seasonal migrants utilize them. This underlines the importance of securing safe water supply for people at remote locations, and the important role MSABI plays as water resource developer at those locations. In conclusion, if the current demand-driven and participatory approach to water resource development and management is to be retained, regardless of the heavy criticism it has received with regards to equity, this study suggests that the practices of MSABI should be spread further based on MSABI’s ability to increase safe water access at remote locations. Another recommendation is to further look into the effects of seasonal migration on access to safe water. The effect seasonal migration has on water access in Kilombero could exist in other areas in Tanzania or in other countries. The aspect of seasonal migration might show that water access statistics are misleading, as the seasonal water consumption in remote locations risks being omitted in official statistics.

Water provides the lifeblood of Utah's agricultural economy. It Is the subject of much controversy and litigation and yet most opinions on the subject are based on opinions and prejudice rather than upon the basis of sound scientific examination. This paper attempts to provide some of the economic information necessary for sound decisions in the development and use of Utah's water resources with respect to agriculture. Utah has been divided into ten drainage regions (hydrologic subregions) and the presently irrigated and potentially irrigable land according to land class was estimated for each county or portion of a county within each of the regions. Water use factors, crop rotation constraints, costs of production, yields, product prices, and costs of bringing new land into production were also estimated. These values were then used in the linear program demand model to estimate a normalized demand (marginal value product) curve for water to be used in agricultural production within each region. The available level of water was varied in each of the demand curves to estimate the relationship between the quantity of water and its economic value (a demand function).