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The Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) is one of the most aggressive invasive species globally, and it has spread widely in Asia and Europe. Its unique morphological and physiological characteristics enable it to survive in high-temperature and hypersaline environments. The invasion of the Chinese mitten crab can damage the local aquatic ecology, including flora and fauna, necessitating the implementation of monitoring and control measures. Consuming the invasive crab is a potential strategy to prevent its further spread worldwide. This chapter documents the success of transforming this invasive species into a valuable food source in China. Notably, there is a significant demand for Chinese mitten crabs in China, with potential markets in several other Asian countries. However, natural Chinese mitten crabs often grow in polluted water, accumulating undesirable substances (e.g., pathogens and heavy metals). These substances could pose significant health hazards when consumed by humans. Therefore, adhering to proper cultivation techniques is essential to ensuring the safety of the crabs for human consumption.

In 2014, Shanghai Husi Food Company Ltd. (Husi) was found guilty of supplying reprocessed and expired meat to their western fast food clients operating all over China. The company lied about production and expiration dates and provided false guarantees about the storage life of their products. Many Western fast food clients such as McDonalds and Starbucks were affected by the scandal. The case discusses the scandal, whistleblowing, and food safety issues in the People’s Republic of China.

Singles’ Day, a Chinese tradition which was started in 1993 in Nanjing University, has developed from a party of single students into one of the biggest mass consumption events on the planet. The case discusses the moral, social, and environmental implications of this event in which a billion boxes are sold in China every year.

In the downward phase of the economic cycle, there is an abnormal phenomenon that the sales of luxury goods increase instead of decrease, which is generally believed to be caused by the influence strategy of luxury goods. However, this view—luxury sales are less affected by the economic cycle and should maintain a slow growth trend year by year, cannot explain the reason why luxury sales show a significant growth trend in the downward phase of the economic cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, this paper puts forward the alternative theory, which believes that people’s consumption behavior is inevitable, but there can be differences in consumer goods. When they are able to consume A or B, they choose consumption B instead of consumption A for various reasons. It can be considered that the alternative theory has played an important role. The growth rate of luxury consumption in China from 2011 to 2019 is proposed and combined by the least square method to obtain the theoretical growth rate in 2020 and 2021. The comparison shows that the theoretical growth rates in 2020 and 2021 are significantly higher than the real growth rates. Finally, using the alternative theory, this paper expounds on the reasons for the increase of luxury consumption in the downward stage of the economic cycle from the aspects of psychological needs, consumption motivation, and the impact of COVID-19.

This paper deals with the problem of optimal consumption and portfolio for a generalized Black and Scholes market where the volatility is driven by a standard Brownian motion and by a fractional Brownian motion in the same time.

We consider the optimal investment and consumption policy for a constant absolute risk averse investor who faces fixed and/or proportional transaction costs when trading a stock and maximizes his expected utility from intertemporal consumption. We show that the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE with free boundaries can be reduced to an ODE, which greatly simplifies the problem. Using the stochastic impulse and singular control techniques, we then derive the optimal investment and consumption policy. In particular, when there are both fixed and proportional costs, it is shown that the optimal stock investment policy is to keep the dollar amount invested in the stock between two constant levels and upon reaching these two thresholds, the investor jumps to the corresponding optimal target level.

The following sections are included:

• INTRODUCING MACROECONOMICS
• MEASURES OF INCOME AND PRODUCTION
• PROBLEMS IN CALCULATING GDP AND NATIONAL INCOME
• DIFFICULTIES WHEN COMPARING LIVING STANDARDS
• CATEGORIES OF THE GDP
• SUMMARY
• QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 1
• POVERTY AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF NATIONAL INCOME
• SUMMARY OF APPENDIX
• QUESTIONS ON APPENDIX
• CONNECTIONS: ACCOUNTING FOR NATIONAL ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

Leisure and consumption have become key features of post-Mao China being associated with economic reform, political change and stability, the legitimacy of the Communist Party and notions of modernity and post-modernity in China. This chapter offers an overview of the key characteristics of leisure and consumption in contemporary China with important historical contextualization. It identifies and introduces some of the most common analyses and understandings of consumption in China showing how they are often linked together. The chapter suggests that we need to treat the notion of consumption in China with caution to avoid oversimplification and neglect of the increasing complexity and diversification of Chinese leisure and consumption practices.

It is suitable to think of the theoretic aspects of finance as financial economics. In this regard, main areas of finance have had strong linkages to economics, including microeconomics, where the foundations of optimal consumer and investor choices are laid. Many of the economics giants in the late 1800s and well into the last century laboured on mathematical results prescribing optimal consumption and investment choices building on fundamental axioms of rationality and non-satiability in human wants. One key construction is that of a utility function of consumption. A more positive utility number to a bundle of consumption goods than another bundle is simply another expression for preference by the individual of the former bundle compared to the latter. A celebrated study by mathematicians Von Neumann and Morgenstern produces the useful result that when probability estimates are introduced into consumption outcomes or utilities, then an individual will prefer a risky gamble to another provided the expected utility of the former is larger. Therefore, we can perform optimisation on a set of gambles or choices based on expected outcomes of utility functions of consumption goods…