Women’s rights and development

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question by focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men’s conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women’s property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.     

China’s efforts to contain Renminbi’s depreciation and the relating impacts

China began to face Renminbi (RMB) depreciation pressure since 2014Q2, and the 8/11 reform in 2015 exacerbated the RMB depreciation pressure against USD. To contain the depreciation pressure, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) adopted three methods. Firstly, PBC tried to stabilize the exchange rate by selling USD and purchasing RMB, which resulted in the fast shrinking of China’s foreign exchange reserve. Secondly, PBC strengthened the regulation of capital outflows, which caused the stagnation of RMB internationalization. Thirdly, PBC frequently changed the pricing mechanism of the daily fixing of RMB to USD, which led to the reverse of the liberalization of RMB exchange rate. Under the new environment of RMB depreciation pressure and much lower foreign exchange reserve, Chinese government changed its strategies and became more cautious and pragmatic in outward foreign direct investment, RMB internationalization, and Belt & Road Initiative construction.     

Sraffa’s Constructive and Interpretive Work,and Marx

ABSTRACT

This article provides a summary account of Piero Sraffa’s constructive and interpretive work on the classical approach to the theory of value and distribution and its relationship with Marx’s contributions. It is shown that in the early phase of his constructive work Sraffa developed his equation systems by adopting a ‘physical real cost’ approach and a strictly objectivist point of view, and completely eschewed Marx’s labour-based approach and the related Marxian concepts. Only at a later stage did he explore systematically the relationship between his own modern re-formulation of the surplus approach to the theory of value and distribution and Marx’s contribution. He considered Marx’s most important analytical contribution to the further development of the surplus approach to consist of the re-integration of circular production relations, which allowed him to see the existence of a maximum rate of profits and its role in an analysis of accumulation and technical change.     

Differential effects of mother’s and child’s postnatal WIC participation on breastfeeding

We evaluate the effect of postnatal participation in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programme on breastfeeding decisions using the data from the IFPS II. We find that the infant’s WIC participation positively affects the hazard of discontinuing breastfeeding, both partial and exclusive (and is thus associated with abbreviated breastfeeding duration). No significant association is found between the mother’s participation and the hazards of stopping exclusive or partial breastfeeding. Such differential effects might be a result of the programme’s policy, according to which the infant, but not the mother needs to be enrolled to receive free formula.     

Nature’s Economy and the Human Economy

Human beings and the human economy are entirely integrated into nature’s economy—the biosphere and the ecosystems that comprise it. Society is therefore utterly dependent on the free services provided by ecosystems. But population growth, rising per capita consumption, and the use of environmentally malign technologies are steadily eroding those services. Projecting how long that process can continue without a global calamity depends on numerous uncertainties, many created by the existence of nonlinearities, thresholds, and lag times in ecological systems. A major problem is to determine how to allocate resources in various ways to solve the human predicament. Scientists have much of the information necessary for making those decisions, so the biggest problem is in the purview of social scientists. They must help to determine how best to move society from knowledge to action.     

Fairness and intentionality in children’s decision-making

Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding) in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore the development of the decisional behavior along with the understanding of fairness, intentions and first- and second-order false belief understanding in children who are just acquiring those abilities. Multiple rounds of the ultimatum game with a human and a non-human partner (child/roulette wheel) were played by 177 children in the age range of 5–10 years, who also completed classic false belief tasks. Results confirm the key role of fairness sensibility across age groups and different degrees of the relevance of ToM according to the variability of children’s decisional behavior (stable vs. dynamic).     

The Copeland rule and Condorcet’s principle

Summary. The purpose of this note is to shed some light on the relationship between the Copeland rule and the Condorcet principle in those cases where there does not exist a Condorcet winner. It will be shown that the Copeland rule ranks alternatives according to their distances to being a Condorcet winner.Received: 30 July 2003, Revised: 31 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D70, D71.Christian Klamler: I am very grateful to Daniel Eckert and Nick Baigent for their helpful comments.     

India’s Economic and Strategic Perceptions of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative

The Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) is a part of China’s experiment in scaling up economic corridors across vast swathes of diverse economic geographies. China’s involvement in a large number of ongoing transport corridor projects has encouraged it to embark on the most ambitious of them all till date. The heterogeneity among the economic capacities and integrations of various regions constituting the MSRI, particularly in efficiency of infrastructure and ability to trade, is noticeable. This article underscores these variations as important determinants of competitiveness of the constituent regions and countries. India’s perceptions of the MSRI are significantly shaped by its lack of quality maritime infrastructure capacities that make it relatively uncompetitive vis-à-vis China, Europe and most of Southeast Asia; and the impression of the MSRI’s “China-centrality” emanating from lack of mention of non-China regional forums in the Chinese government’s vision statement; and absence of proactive measures from the Chinese leadership in establishing the MSRI’s multi-country character. The article argues that it is important for India to appreciate the geopolitical character of this unprecedented infrastructure initiative, which, while emphasizing Chinese interests, might not be inimical to India’s economic ambitions, provided India is able to address its domestic infrastructure imperatives.     

China’s economic reforms and growth prospects

Conventional wisdom attributes China’s rapid economic growth to its model of state capitalism, which combines direct state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy and indirect state control of the rest of the economy through industrial policies and the allocation of credit through state-owned banks. This article argues that China’s growth since 1978 is largely due to the result of the expanding role of markets and the rise of private business. If China systematically adopts the economic reform agenda endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party in the fall of 2013, it likely will avoid a sustained period of much slower growth that some have forecast.     

India’s petroleum demand: estimations and projections

Energy security is crucial for sustaining high economic growth in India. This article empirically estimates India’s long- and short-term demand relations for crude oil, diesel and petrol (gasoline) using the ARDL and ECM cointegration procedures and then uses them to project demand for these products up to 2025 under various scenarios of GDP growth and oil prices. Our projections show that over 2012 to 2025, demand is likely to increase by about 74% for crude oil, 117% for diesel and 136% for petrol – the annual growth rates being about 4.3% for crude oil, 6.1% for diesel and 6.8% for petrol (gasoline). This article suggests that India needs to (1) take measures to improve efficiency in the use of petroleum products; (2) try to enhance supplies such as through production sharing agreements by Indian oil companies with other countries and (3) increase the use of nuclear, hydro, solar and other alternative energy sources, as Western European countries have done.     

Ingmar Prucha’s contributions to economics and econometrics

We study the link between two recent approaches to modeling emission-generating technologies: the by-production approach and the axiomatic approach. The by-production approach models these technologies as intersections of two independent sub-technologies reflecting (1) the relations between goods in intended-output production designed by human engineers and (2) the emission-generating mechanism of nature governed by material-balance considerations. The axiomatic approach proposes a set of axioms that a pollution-generating technology should satisfy. We show that the by-production technology satisfies these axioms and that, conversely, any technology satisfying the axioms can be decomposed into two sub-technologies satisfying the by-production properties. In either approach, the technology can be functionally represented by two radial distance functions with well-defined properties. These distance functions can also serve as measures of technological and environmental efficiency. We exploit the link between the by-production and axiomatic approaches to offer preliminary suggestions about suitable functional forms for the empirical estimation of the two distance functions.     

Bankruptcy games and the Ibn Ezra’s proposal

Summary. This paper explores an old solution for bankruptcy problems, described by Ibn Ezra in the XII century. Particularly, we introduce a new way of extending the Ibn Ezras proposal, the Generalized Ibn Ezra solution, by imposing that the general distribution principle from which it is inspired remains fixed. In this context, we follow the interpretation of bankruptcy problems in terms of TU games given in ONeill (1982), and propose the analysis of the Transition Game associated to bankruptcy problems to provide a characterization for the Generalized Ibn Ezra solution.Received: 14 October 2003, Revised: 26 May 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C71, D63, D71. Correspondence to: José Alcalde: alasur@merlin.fae.ua.esWe are grateful to Carmen Herrero, Juan de Dios Moreno, William Thomson and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Authors work is partially supported by the Institut Valenciá dInvestigacions Económiques. Alcalde and Silva acknowledge support by FEDER and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under project BEC 2001-0535. Marco acknowledges support by the Fundación Séneca, and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under projects SEC2000-0838 and BEC 2001-0781.     

The Euroland crisis and Germany’s euro trilemma

This paper investigates the causes behind the Euroland crisis, particularly Germany’s role in it. It is argued that the crisis is not primarily a ‘sovereign debt crisis’, but rather a (twin) banking and balance of payments crisis. Intra-area competitiveness and current account imbalances, and the corresponding debt flows that such imbalances give rise to, are at the heart of the matter, and they ultimately go back to competitive wage restraint on Germany’s part since the late 1990s. Germany broke the golden rule of a monetary union: commitment to a common inflation rate. As a result, the country faces a trilemma of its own making and must make a critical choice, since it cannot have it all – perpetual export surpluses, a no transfer/no bailout monetary union, and a ‘clean,’ independent central bank. Misdiagnosis and the wrongly prescribed medication of austerity have made the situation worse by adding a growth crisis to the potpourri of internal stresses that threaten the euro’s survival. The crisis in Euroland poses a global ‘too big to fail’ threat, and presents a moral hazard of perhaps unprecedented scale to the global community.     

Learning Direction Theory and the Winner’s Curse

We report an experiment on a decision task by Samuelson and Bazerman (1985). Subjects submit a bid for an item with an unknown value. A winners curse phenomenon arises when subjects bid too high and make losses. Learning direction theory can account for this. However, other influences on behaviour can also be identified. We introduce impulse balance theory to make quantitative predictions on the basis of learning direction theory. We also look at monotonic ladder processes. It is shown that for this kind of Markov chains the impulse balance point is connected to the mode of the stationary distribution.     

Vicarelli’s Keynes and the New-Keynesian analytical method

This article provides a critical review of the foundations of the new Keynesian apparatus, to evaluate the actual strength of the Keynesian inheritance. As a reference of the Keynesian vision, Fausto Vicarelli’s recognition of the Keynesian message is adopted. The critical recognition of the new Keynesian methodology focuses on its analytical foundations, the recent extensions and on the criticality of its empirical performances and controls. The new Keynesian construction is shown to lack truly Keynesian roots in at least three key theoretical features: the role of the microfoundations, the stability of equilibrium, and expectations formation. The directions of an ongoing research narrowing the new Keynesian theoretical fracture from Keynesian economics are addressed.     

Individual investor’s limited attention and IPO performance

The paper models and verifies the spread and decay of investor’s attention before listing on the stock market by using the Baidu Index as a proxy for investor attention of the frequency of searches. We find that individual investor’s attention has a significant influence on the first-day IPO return. We empirically study the allocation of investor attention among several stocks and discover that the more stocks going public on the same day, the milder and more similar their performance tends to be. This paper is the first to research IPO performance and individual attention.     

A young EU member’s ageing: budgetary and macroeconomic consequences of Slovenia’s demographic prospects

In this paper, we simulate a macroeconometric model of Slovenia over the period 2012–2060, using the projected demographic development as input, and determine time paths for budgetary and macroeconomic variables under alternative assumptions about Slovenian policy instruments so as to limit budgetary pressures stemming from population ageing. The main macroeconomic indicators (growth, employment, price stability, sustainable public finances) are shown to depend on the assumed long-run policy options followed. It is demonstrated that the ageing of the Slovenian population projected in the demographic forecast leads to severe budgetary problems unless increases of the retirement age, rising social security contributions or reductions of state financed pensions are implemented. A reduction of the pension replacement rate turns out to be the most effective measure to cope with the budgetary implications of population ageing. However, none of the analysed policy measures is sufficient to stabilise the debt ratio.     

Productivity and Employment in the Information Economy: What Kaldor’s and Verdoorn’s Growth Laws Can Teach the US

During the last decade of the 20th century the US economy experienced the longest economic boom since World War II. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are seen as one of the main reasons for this development and it is still an open question how ICT will affect growth and employment in the future. To evaluate this process Kaldors growth laws, especially Verdoorns law are reconsidered. It will be discussed which changes in the Verdoorn-Coefficient (VC) and the employment threshold (ET) can be expected due to ICT. Induced technical progress and increasing returns to scale could make future economic growth to be less labor-intensive. A simple OLS estimation using data for the US non-farm sector indicates that the VC increased in the second half of the 1990s. Thus, more output growth is required to keep employment constant.The author gratefully acknowledges the most valuable comments from two anonymous referees and the participants of the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association (NOeG) at the Vienna University of Economics (WU), May 21–22, 2004. Any remaining errors are my own.