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The main objective of this study is to analyse Trade Policy of PRC in Sub-Saharan Africa in a comparison with an approach of western countries. Moreover describe causes of dynamically developing Sino-African cooperation in last fifteen years, when China became a strategic business partner of many countries in the region at the expense of western countries which in the past represented traditional business partners of Sub-Saharan countries. First part describes period of economic reforms in China which started remarkable economic growth and helped the country to become one of the world trade superpowers. Then it defines characteristics of Sub-Saharan Africa which influence international trade relations of the region, both in a positive and negative way. Second part summarize trade between Sub-Saharan Africa and China describing history of trade relations and current territorial and commodity structure of the trade. Third part analyses PRC Trade Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa which is based on principles of Beijing Consensus. This part provides a comparison of different approach of China and western countries (their approach is based on Washington Consensus) towards their business partner in Sub-Saharan Africa. Afterwards, it summarizes different tools of China's trade policy in this region, which are then demonstrated on case studies of Angola and Nigeria.

With the change in political and economic situations, increased urbanization and the growing population in China leads to extended housing needs, which results in various problems for the real estate market, such as the pronounced rise of housing price and unreasonable housing supply system. At present, the major issue that the government is facing with is how to improve the housing availability and provide space to the urban residents to solve the problem that many urban residents are unable to afford housing. In order to fully understand the housing market in Beijing city, this paper adopted quantitative methods of Housing Price to Income Ratio, Residual Income, and the Housing Affordability Index to examine the housing affordability of Beijing urban residents from 2004 to 2013, based upon the data collected from Beijing Statistic Yearbook mostly. The analysis revealed that there is a declining trend of housing affordability in Beijing and the gap between residential housing prices and urban households’ incomes and the difference between the poor and the rich is obvious.

In recent decades, water systems worldwide are under crisis due to excessive human interventions particularly in the arid and semi-arid regions. In many cities, the water quantity situation has become more and more serious, caused either by absolute water shortage or water pollution. Considering population growth and fast urbanization, ensuring adequate water supply with acceptable water quality is crucial to socio-economic development in the coming decades. In this context, one key point is to (re-)address various water problems in a more holistic way. This study explores the emerging water crisis events in Beijing Municipality so as to have a better understanding of water systems changes and to make more sustainable water-related decisions. The changes of water quantity and water quality in the region are analyzed in a systems perspective; and opportunities towards improved performance of Beijing’s water systems are discussed. In order to aid in water systems analysis, a conceptual framework is developed, with a focus on identifying the most important interactions of the urban water sector. The results of the study show that the emerging water crisis events in the Beijing region are caused by a variety of inter-related factors, both external and internal. The external factor is mainly the decreasing upstream surface water inflow into the Guanting and Miyun reservoirs. The internal factors include precipitation variation, excessive water withdrawals, increasing water demands for different purposes and a large amount of pollutants discharged to the receiving water bodies. These factors together have caused tremendous water systems changes in Beijing Municipality from both the water quantity and water quality perspectives. In order to alleviate the serious water situation in Beijing Municipality, many further efforts are required in the dynamic socioeconomic and ecological context. Although tremendous work has been carried out by water-related institutions to prevent flood and ensure water supply, water resources development, planning and management must be addressed employing systems thinking and in a more holistic way. This is crucial for balancing the tradeoffs of water quantity and water quality in the Beijing region. Besides the experimental inter-basin water transfer activities, water demand management and pollution reduction and prevention should be the top priority on the agenda of the Beijing government in the long term. Moreover, only at a river basin level may various upstream-downstream conflicts be alleviated by wiser water allocation among administrative regions, as well as taking the ecological water demand into consideration. Finally, considering the current water situation and water management system, the following three aspects of improvement are emphasized in the present study, including a promoted water centric value, institutional capacity building and employing economic principles for water resources management.

In recent decades, the night lights data of the Earth’s surface derived from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) have been used to detect the human settlements and human activities, because the DMSP/OLS data is able to supply the information about the urban areas  and non-urban areas on the Earth which means it is more suitable for urban studies than usual satellite imagery data.   The urban development is closed linked to the human society development. Therefore, studies of urban development will help people to understand how the urban changed and predict the urban change. The aim of this study was to detect Beijing’s urban development from 1992 to 2012, and find the contributions to the urban sprawl from socio-economic factors. Based on this objective, the main dataset used in this thesis was night lights images derived from the DMSP/OLS which was detected from  1992 to 2012. Due to the lacking of on-board calibration on OLS, and the over-glow of the lights resources, the information about the night lights cannot be extracted directly. Before any process, the night lights images should be calibrated. There is a method to calibrate the night light images which is called intercalibration. It is a second order regression model based method to find the related digital number values. Therefore, intercalibration was employed, and the threshold values were determined to extract urban areas in this study. Threshold value is useful for diffusing the over-glow effect, and finding the urban areas from the DMSP/OLS data. The methods to determine the threshold value in this thesis are empirical threshold method, sudden jump detection method, statistic data comparison method and k-mean clustering method. In addition, 13 socio-economic factors which included gross domestic product, urban population, permanent population, total energy consumption and so on were used to build the regression model. The contributions from these factors to the sum of the Beijing’s lights were found based on modeling.   The results of this thesis are positive. The intercalibration was successful and all the DMSP/OLS data used in this study were calibrated. And then, the appropriate threshold values to extract the urban areas were figured out. The achieved urban areas were compared to the satellite images and the result showed that the urban areas were useful. During the time certain factors used in this study, such as mobile phone users, possession of civil vehicles, GDP, three positively highest contributed to urban development were close to 23%, 8% and 9%, respectively.

Housing affordability is the relationship between households’ income and housing expenditure. The public are very concerned about the high price of residential housing in Beijing, which is considered go beyond the income of average citizens. In order to fully understand the China’s real estate market, the paper first analyses the land policy, housing reform and housing finance, etc. Then this paper examine to what the extent the high housing price had led to low levels of housing affordability from 2000 until 2009 among Beijing urban households. The ratio analysis has been conducted to measure housing affordability. Meanwhile, we compute the housing-induced poverty, find maximum affordable housing prices for all the income classes, and suggest the housing assistance that should be provided to urban households in Beijing. Approximately, only 20% Beijing urban residents have purchase affordability for a standardized new residential housing, no matter which approach is used, strong statistical evidences reveal that there is an incessant large gap between residential housing prices and urban residents’ incomes in Beijing.

The objective of my master's thesis, "Sino-American Ideological Clash: Washington Consensus and Beijing Consensus" is to consider two models of economic development, the Washington Consensus and the Beijing consensus. In the first part, I analyze the discourse that evolves around these two concepts, and I also consolidate the definitions of these terms. Washington Consensus was a set of specific rules for macroeconomic policy of the state. As a result of the ending Cold War, the discrediting of alternative models of economic development and direct link of this model to the financial support from international financial institutions, the popularity of the Washington consensus in the 1990s soared. The democratization of the country was perceived as another unwritten rule. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, as well as other crises in developing countries which actively engaged the World Bank and IMF, the term has been largely discredited. It was associated with concepts like 'shock therapy', 'neoliberalism' or 'market fundamentalism'. Meanwhile, the long-term economic growth of China drew the attention of developing countries. In connection with the declining popularity of the Washington Consensus and the global economic crisis, the demand for alternative development policies increased. The...

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