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The healthy development of the city has received widespread attention in the world, and urban resilience is an important issue in the study of urban development. In order to better provide a useful reference for urban resilience and urban health development, this paper takes 56 cities in China as the research object, and selects 29 indicators from urban infrastructure, economy, ecology and society. The combination weight method, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and spatial measurement model are used to explore the spatial distribution of urban resilience and its influencing factors. From 2006 to 2017, the urban resilience of prefecture-level cities in the four provinces showed a wave-like rise. During the study period, the urban resilience values, measured as Moran’s Is, were greater than 0.3300, showing a significantly positive correlation in regard to their spatial distribution. Regarding the local spatial correlation, the urban resilience of the study area had spatial agglomeration characteristics within the province, with a significant distribution of "cold hot spots" in the spatial distribution. From the perspective of the factors that affected urban resilience, the proportion of the actual use of foreign capital in GDP and carbon emissions per 10,000 CNY of GDP had a negative impact and GDP per square kilometer, the proportion of urban pension insurance coverage, the proportion of the population with higher education, and expenditure to maintain and build cities had a positive impact. The development strategy of urban resilience must be combined with the actual situation of the region, and the rational resilience performance evaluation system and the top-level design of urban resilience improvement should be formulated to comprehensively improve urban resilience.

States can seemingly defy the dictates of globalization. In practice, although being pressured by their competitors, states rarely engage in the race to the bottom by downgrading labor rights laws that are politically costly to pursue. I argue that states’ resistance is made possible by adopting more viable policy alternatives, i.e., concluding preferential trade agreements (PTAs). PTAs can generate considerable economic gains in a less politically costly way than does reducing legal labor protection. As a result, it is expected that a pair of states is more likely to form a PTA in the face of policy pressure to lower legal labor protection. I also argue that facing such pressure, these states are more likely to include strong labor provisions in PTAs. Finally, in the face of the policy pressure, states may feel that signing a PTA is a bit less urgent when they are able to diminish practical labor protection. Applying structural equivalence technique to a new global labor rights dataset to capture the policy pressure to lower legal labor protection, I find robust evidence in support of these conjectures.

Nitrification driven by ammonia oxidizers is a key step of nitrogen removal in estuarine environments. Spatial distribution characteristics of ammonia-oxidizers have been well understood in mudflats, but less studied in the agricultural soils next to mudflats, which also play an important role in nitrogen cycling of the estuarine ecosystem. In the present research, we investigated ammonia oxidizers’ distributions along the Yangtze River estuary in Jiangsu Province, China, sampling soils right next to the estuary (mudflats) and the agricultural soils 100 m away. We determined the relationship between the abundance of amoA genes of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and the potential nitrification rates of the mudflats and agricultural soils. We also identified the environmental variables that correlated with the composition of the ammonia oxidizers’ communities by 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing. Results indicated that agricultural soils have significantly higher potential nitrification rates as well as the AOA abundance, and resulted in strong phylogenetic clustering only in AOA communities. The ammonia oxidizers’ community compositions differed dramatically among the mudflat and agricultural sites, and stochasticity played a dominant role. The AOA communities were dominated by the Group 1.1a cluster at the mudflat, whereas the 54D9 and 29i4 clusters were dominant in agriculture soils. The dominant AOB communities in the mudflat were closely related to the Nitrosospira lineage, whereas the agricultural soils were dominated by the Nitrosomonas lineage. Soil organic matter and salinity were correlated with the ammonia oxidizers’ community compositions.

Leftist governments tend to tax corporations heavily. However, they are unable to do so all the time. In this study, I posit that whether leftist governments can enact this preferred tax policy is conditional on the policy environment. When leftist governments are pressured by their economic competitors to reduce labor rights protection, instead of giving in, they choose to cut corporate tax rates, because the former is more politically harmful than the latter, and the latter is equally effective in achieving the policy goal the former is intended to accomplish. Using novel global data on labor rights from 1994 to 2012 and the structural equivalence technique to capture the policy pressure to restrict labor rights, I find robust evidence for the argument. This finding suggests that facing globalized economic competition, leftist governments make strategic compromise by adopting market-oriented policies in issue areas that deviate from their desirable ideological positions but are less costly than simply yielding to the pressure to alter policies in those issue areas that directly hurt their core constituencies.