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ABSTRACTSeveral well-maintained long-distance trails (LDTs) have been developed over the past 40 years since the establishment of the first country park in Hong Kong. These LDTs attract over 11 million visitors from Hong Kong and overseas annually. Most visitors enjoy hiking in the country parks and it becomes the most popular outdoor activity. This study evaluates the values of these hiking trails. Secondhand data from previous studies and reports are used to evaluate the values of long-distance hiking trails. The recreational, economic, social, and conservation values of these trails in country parks are explored and examined. The findings of this study highlight LDTs in the country parks offering enormous benefits for the community particularly during the post-Covid 19 that the LDTs provide an important recreational opportunity for local residents. Policy and management implications for the protection and development of protected areas are discussed, and suggestions for improvement are made.

With a recent surge in the outward movement of the population, a new wave of emigration has been suggested to have started in Hong Kong. It is speculated that recent socio-political changes in Hong Kong may have contributed to this phenomenon. Therefore, five socio-political variables—mobility, sense of place, trust and confidence in the law and the legal system, global citizenship, and perception of inequality—are employed in this study as proposed determinants to investigate the intention of Hong Kong residents to migrate to mainland China and to other international destinations. A random telephone questionnaire survey representative of the local population was conducted, with a total of 801 valid samples collected. Stepwise multiple regression analysis was carried out. The results showed that all five proposed socio-political variables successfully predicted people’s migration intention to mainland China and to foreign countries, with important variations between the two choices. Our results carry strong implications for understanding people’s concerns behind their intention to emigrate. Further, our findings present a challenge for Hong Kong; society may gradually be failing to accommodate individuals with diverse perceptions and values, particularly in terms of trust and confidence in the law and the legal system, and individuals’ sense of global citizenship.

ABSTRACTEcotourism has developed rapidly in recent decades. Many ecotourism-related vocational training has been organized to train and prepare qualified personnel for this special tourism industry niche. This paper investigates participants’ motivations to enroll in ecotourism vocational training courses in Hong Kong. The results of the study indicated that three motivational factors, namely, career facilitation, knowledge enhancement and social interaction, motivated participants to enroll in ecotourism vocational training courses. The training participants indicated that knowledge enhancement and career facilitation were the most and the least important motives, respectively. This result indicated a significant difference from the motivations of other vocational training participants. In addition, the findings revealed that social interaction was also a vital motive for the participants and has been seldom identified in previous studies. This study's findings offer important information for ecotourism vocational training organizers as they re-design training course content and fine tune their marketing strategies to attract potential participants.

Maximum likelihood estimators for the parameter matrix X in the generalized multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) model E(Y) = AXB, are used in developing test procedures for testing the general linear hypothesis HO: DXE = Q. Applications of these results are applied to the data from a recent environmental study.

This paper shows how the presence of simple equicorrelation in a sample from a multivariate normal population affects the confidence coefficients of the confidence set for the mean of multivariate normal population and difference of means of two multivariate normal populations with equal dispersion matrices.

It is well known that the linear model y = Xγ + ɛ, with γ restricted by a set of linear constraints, may be expressed as an unrestricted model with a singular covariance matrix. The problem of estimation in the general linear model y = Xγ + ɛ has received recent attention in the literature when the covariance matrix of ɛ is assumed to be of arbitrary rank. One approach to this problem is to perform a linear transformation to obtain a linear model of smaller dimensions with full rank covariance matrix and then estimate the parameters using the "smaller" model. More recently, Ahlers and Lewis (1972) showed that in the unrestricted general linear model, estimators may be calculated directly without the need of this linear transformation. In this paper, their result is extended to obtain a minimum variance estimate of γ with γ restricted by linear restrictions which, at most, are assumed to be consistent, and with the covariance matrix of ɛ assumed to be of arbitrary rank.

A class of two-sample nonparametric tests for location and scale shift, simultaneously, is proposed. The asymptotic distribution of the proposed class is obtained both under the hypothesis and alternative. Using this result it is shown how the asymptotic relative efficiency of tests in the proposed class can be obtained.