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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the degree of corporate financial distress (DOFD) and relationship between ownership structure and the DOFD in China. Design/methodology/approach – The authors estimate the DOFD across a sample of 378 Chinese-listed companies that got into financial distress between 2000 and 2008. The DOFD reflects long-term solvency capability, short-term liquidity capability, development capability, risk level, profitability capability, operating capacity, and cash flow capability. The authors analyze the relationship between ownership structure and the DOFD in these companies, using the panel data analysis method. Findings – The authors find that a concentrated ownership structure is negatively related to the DOFD. Further, the results indicate that a state-owned status helps firms in decreasing their DOFD and that the separation of cash-flow rights and control rights is positively related to the DOFD. The authors also found that the Chinese special treatment (ST) system needs further improvement. The reason is that ST firms can be classified into “value” ST firms and “garbage” ST firms. They have different DOFD and change trend, so they should not be treated equally. Originality/value – This paper find that Chinese ST system and previous research are not helpful for risk-seeking investor to distinguish and evaluate “value” ST firms and “garbage” ST firms. It is unfair to warn and punish this two kinds of firms equally, so ST system should be improved. The authors also suggest that risk-seeking investor can choose ST firms that have a concentrated ownership structure and are controlled by the state or local government. These findings are not observed in previous studies.

China is one of the disaster-prone countries in the world. Constructing a rapid and effective relief logistic system is important for disaster-responding at country level. Strategic prepositioning of emergency items, especially the decision of appropriate emergency warehouses location, has significant impacts on rapid disaster response to ensure sufficient relief supplies. The emergency warehouse location decision is a complex problem, where a wide variety of criteria need to be considered and the preference information of decision makers (DMs) may be imprecise or even absent. In this paper, we identify key effectiveness-oriented criteria used to evaluate the alternative emergency warehouse locations and make an attempt to propose a new multicriteria ranking method to solve the problem of inaccurate or uncertain weight information based on stochastic pairwise dominant relations and the pruning procedure of ELECTRE-II method. The proposed method extends the conventional ELECTRE-II method by incorporating inaccurate information and broadens its application to emergency warehouse location field. The feasibility and applicability of the proposed method are illustrated with a simulated example.

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