This paper extends the debate on the environmental performance of developing countries by focusing on a new factor. Theoretically, financial development has capitalization, technology, income, and regulation effects on the environment. Using the provincial panel data of China, the econometric analysis provides some evidence of a linkage between financial development and industrial pollution discharges. In recent years, the environmental performance of China has been significantly improved by financial development and some environmental protection schemes. This relationship offers new implications for policy makers in developing countries.

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In this paper, we divide the process of educational development into two aspects: the change in educational structure and the expansion of educational scale. Based on this hypothesis, we analyze the relationships between each of the two aspects and employment respectively. In this paper, the factors and the transmission mechanism of the influence that education has on employment are also explained. Then, the theoretical models of the relationship between education and employment are built up. Finally, we use the empirical data collected in China to test the theoretical models and give explanations to the status quo of the unemployment structure within various educational levels. It suggests that: the development of education in China at present is beneficial to the increase in the employment rate, the increase in the proportion of the laborers with junior school education has negative effects on employment, and the development of higher education creates positive effects on the employment, but no evidence shows any significant correlation between the proportion of the laborers with senior high school education and the unemployment rate.

Precise characterization of reinforcing bars (rebars) in a concrete structure is of significant importance for construction quality control and post-disaster safety evaluation. This paper integrates ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) methods for simultaneous estimation of rebar diameter and cover thickness. A prototype of GPR-EMI dual sensor is developed, and a calibration experiment is conducted to collect a standard EMI dataset corresponding to various rebar diameters and cover thicknesses. The handheld testing cart can synchronously collect both GPR and EMI data when moving on the concrete surface, from which a data processing algorithm is proposed to simultaneously estimate the rebar diameter and cover thickness. Firstly, by extracting the apex of the hyperbolic reflection from the rebar in the preprocessed GPR profile, the rebar position is determined and further used to extract the effective EMI curve. Then, the rebar diameter and cover thickness are simultaneously estimated from the minimum mean square error between the measured and calibrated EMI data under the constraint of the GPR-estimated cover thickness. A laboratory experiment is performed using four casted concrete specimens with 11 embedded steel rebars. The results show that the diameters of 10 rebars are correctly estimated out of the 11 rebars, and the maximum estimation error for the cover thickness is 6.7%. A field trial is carried out in a newly-constructed building, and the diameters of four tested rebars are all accurately estimated while the estimation errors of the cover thickness are less than 5%. It is concluded that the developed GPR-EMI dual sensor and the proposed algorithm can estimate the rebar diameter and cover thickness accurately by a single scan.