Donors and domestic politics: Political influences on foreign aid effort

The vast majority of scholarship on foreign aid looks at either the effectiveness of foreign aid or why particular countries receive aid from particular donors. This paper takes a different approach: what are the domestic sources of support for foreign aid? Specifically, how does the donor's domestic political and economic environment influence ‘aid effort’? This paper uses a time-series cross-sectional data set to analyze the influence of changes in political and economic variables. As governments become more conservative, their aid effort is likely to fall. Domestic political variables appear to influence aid effort, but only for aid to low income countries and multilaterals while aid effort to middle income countries in unaffected. This suggests that models solely emphasizing donor economic and international strategic interests as determinants of donor aid policy may be mis-specified. These results also suggest sources of aid volatility that might influence recipient growth prospects.     

Changes in UK tax‐effective giving: implications for donor fundraising strategies

Strategies for fundraising from committed donors in the UK have long placed considerable emphasis on tax‐efficient giving, in particular the use of deeds of covenant and gift aid which enables charities to recover tax paid by the donor and thus increase the value of a donor's gift. However, recent developments and proposed developments in UK legislation and Inland Revenue procedures are about to make radical changes to this regime. Although in general the changes are beneficial to charities, the precise implications will, in many cases, require a significant change in fundraising strategies to make effective use of the new giving environment. This paper seeks to analyse the nature of those changes and the consequence for fundraising strategies. In relation to three main strategies some approaches to further research are proposed, which a charity may wish to apply in order to assess whether and to what extent new approaches to committed donor fundraising are required. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers Convention (Academic Stream) in July 1999, but it has been substantially changed to take account of further government announcements made in November, 1999. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Cultural values and public policy: The case of international development aid

This paper investigates whether the quantity and character of aggregate expenditures on foreign aid by donor governments are related to the cultural values held by the people of the donor countries. In particular, we study whether any association exists between three measures of donors’ foreign aid expenditures and two dimensions of culture. We find that the shares of national income governments spend on aid, the proportion of total aid provided in the form of grants, and the proportion of aid directed to humanitarian relief are all related in statistically significant and quantitatively important ways to the location of the cultural values of people in the donor countries on two continua, one from “traditional” to “rational” beliefs about social organization and authority, and the other from “survival” to “self-expression” as the focus of individual aspirations. These results contribute to our understanding of the political economy of aid, and to a growing literature on how culture shapes economic policies, institutions, and performance.     

管理者过度自信与企业投资现金敏感度——基于英国上市公司的实证研究

本文以英国上市公司为样本,发现融资约束公司普遍表现出管理者过度自信与投资现金流敏感性之间显著的正相关关系。与此相反,这种积极的关系不能在融资无约束公司中找到。这个结果和预期相一致,即在融资约束公司中过度自信的管理者的投资决策应该比非过度自信的管理者投资决策对现金流更加敏感。因为,现金流的增加能够促使过度自信的管理者加大投资并达到他们想要的水平。     

Government Time Discounting and Required Rates of Return: UK History and Current Issues

The UK government first set financial objectives for the nationalised industries in 1961 and subsequently promoted the use of ‘discounted cash flow’ for investment appraisal. The nationalised industry regime evolved until, in the 1990s, it was succeeded by economic regulation regimes for the privatised utilities. Meanwhile discounting conventions emerged and have continued to evolve for wider government policy analysis, including aspects of climate change. Issues about the size and functions of public expenditure notwithstanding, UK government conventions are currently fairly uncontroversial: however, in the world at large, government discounting remains subject to many academic and international controversies and misunderstandings.     

Evolution in a General Equilibrium framework

In this paper, we consider a general equilibrium model in which the economies are characterized by the distribution of firms on a set of branches of production; we will show that based on the decisions of the managers of the firms, it is possible to build a dynamic system whose solutions reproduce the possible trajectories of the economy. Once the initial state of an economy is known, that is, the initial distribution of firms, we will have a unique solution for this dynamic system, which will coincide with the evolution of the economy, that is, the evolution of prices and equilibrium allocations.The investment decisions of the administrators of the companies will change the distribution over the set of existing productive branches, which in turn will produce changes in the wealth of consumers who are also shareholders of the companies and then as a consequence, their demand will change, and therefore the equilibrium allocations and prices will too.In most cases, these decisions lead to an improvement in the efficiency of the productive side of the economy and an increase in the welfare of the economy as a whole, but, as we will show, under some particular circumstances, even when it comes to rational decisions from the point of view of administrators, this can lead to undesirable repercussions on the welfare of consumers. Besides, in a neighborhood of a critical economy, even when these decisions may involve small changes in the distribution of companies, they can cause abrupt and unexpected changes in the behavior of the economy, or in other words, they can cause an economic crisis. These are characterized by large changes in the prices, in the demand, and in the supply of goods. In contrast, in a sufficiently small neighborhood of a regular economy, small changes in the distribution of firms produced by the investment decisions of managers do not lead to large changes in the subsequent behavior of the economy. We will exemplify these statements with several numerical examples.     

EDUCATING AMARETCH: PRIVATE SCHOOLS FOR THE POOR AND THE NEW FRONTIER FOR INVESTORS

The accepted wisdom says that the poor need billions of dollars more in donor aid for state education. But this ignores the reality that poor parents are abandoning government schools to send their children to 'budget' private schools that charge very low fees, affordable to parents on minimum wages. Recent research shows that private schools for the poor are superior to government schools – teachers are more committed, the provision of inputs better and educational outcomes better – even after controlling for background variables. All this is accomplished for a fraction of the per-pupil teacher cost of government schools. The development community could therefore assist the poor by extending access to private schools through targeted vouchers. There are also opportunities for investors to contribute through microfinance-type loans, dedicated education investment funds and joint ventures with educational entrepreneurs, including the development of brands of budget private schools to help solve the information problem facing poor parents.     

Efficient allocations and equilibria with short-selling and incomplete preferences

This paper reconsiders the theory of existence of efficient allocations and equilibria when consumption sets are unbounded below under the assumption that agents have incomplete preferences. Our model is motivated by an example in the theory of assets with short-selling where there is risk and ambiguity. Agents have Bewley’s incomplete preferences. As an inertia principle is assumed in markets, equilibria are individually rational. It is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an individually rational efficient allocation or of an equilibrium is that the relative interiors of the risk adjusted sets of probabilities intersect. The more risk averse, the more ambiguity averse the agents, the more likely is an equilibrium to exist. The paper then turns to incomplete preferences represented by a family of concave utility functions. Several definitions of efficiency and of equilibrium with inertia are considered. Sufficient conditions and necessary and sufficient conditions are given for the existence of efficient allocations and equilibria with inertia.     

有风险的企业投资与家庭理财问题定量分析

运用定量分析方法解决经济领域内的问题已成为经济学理论体系中一个重要的组成部分。随着经济的发展和商业规模的扩大及人们投资、理财行为日益理性,我们越来越倾向于使用数学方法进行分析,以帮助决策者作出正确决策。在合理的经济学假定前提下,利用边际函数的分析方法解决企业利润最大化和消费者效用最大化问题及存在风险时投资决策的最优处理方法。     

Sustainable procurement practice

Procurement has a key role in sustainability as policies and practices need to extend beyond organisations' boundaries incorporating their whole supply chains. Guidelines on sustainability encourage procurement to make decisions that encompass the environmental, economic and social elements of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). Taking a supply chain perspective, procurement also need to analyse how decisions impact on the TBL in respect of suppliers. The results of a survey of sustainable procurement practices in 44 English‐based UK Housing Associations (HAs), who are responsible for the provision of social housing, confirms prior research of other sectors that suggests 1) a failure to overcome inertia in relation to sustainable procurement; and 2) in the few examples where practices have been established, only the environmental element of the TBL is considered. The organisations surveyed have sustainability‐related issues in their missions and external and internal pressures to embed sustainability, yet this has not translated into widespread establishment of sustainable procurement. Recommendations to neutralise inertia are: firstly, take the experiences from other areas, e.g. innovation management, which stress the importance of inter‐organisational relationships; secondly, develop a small number of sustainable development indicators for procurement and, to take advantage of the relatively more‐advanced environmental practices to show how these elements have socio‐economic impacts; and finally, rather than focus on just the pressures and drivers of sustainability (as suggested in strategic models of sustainability), emphasise the triggers that overcome inertia and lead to changes in behaviour amongst procurement staff i.e. the establishment of ethical pricing models. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The UK corporate tax reform and business investment decisions

The 1984 Finance Act made fundamental changes to the UK corporate tax system. Evidence from a detailed study of sixty past investment decisions is used to assess the likely effects of the shift from a high-tax, high-allowance system to a system of low taxes and allowances. This suggests that 100% allowances have had little impact on the scale of investment since 1979, reflecting limited taxable capacity and the importance of market considerations in investment decisions. Timing effects were more common, especially among small firms sampled. The post-tax cost of capital will fall for some firms but few appeared to use strict cost of capital criteria in assessing investments.     

政府债务对经济增长的影响及作用渠道

基于1960～2010年113个国家的面板数据集,运用系统广义矩动态面板方法和稳健性分析,比较发达国家和发展中国家政府债务经济增长效应的差异,并尝试分析政府债务影响经济增长的渠道。研究结果显示,政府债务对经济增长有非线性影响;发达国家政府债务对经济增长、投资以及全要素生产率均无显著影响;发展中国家对政府债务的直接承受力更弱,但在一个宽松的临界点内,政府债务的增加可以提高投资率。     

政府补助与公司投资行为——基于中国上市公司的数据

基于公司投资视角,以2007—2012年我国资本市场上A股上市公司为样本,研究政府补助对公司投资行为的影响,结果显示：政府补助越多,公司投资支出水平越高;政府补助对非国有公司的投资激励作用比国有公司更有效;公司产权性质差异会影响政府补助的投资激励效应;市场化程度越低、经济增长越缓慢的地区,政府补助对公司投资支出的影响越敏感;上市公司的非效率投资问题比较突出,政府补助加剧了上市公司的过度投资行为。因此,政府应根据微观企业主体的差异性来制定和实施相应的补助政策,以实现预期效果。     

你的企业有惰性吗?

新的一年,企业各个业务单元都会为如何分配资金、人才和研发投入展开"内部竞争"。相当多的企业采用了"萧规曹随"、"按既定方针办"的做法,对决策者而言,可以搬出现代企业管理理论作为依据—保持企业经营战略的稳定性。但上述理由遮掩不了一个事实:这时,你的企业已经浑身散发着惰性,不能按照市场变化和企业长远目标及时调整业务布局,对内部资源进行最佳分配,而只是机械地按照上一年的老皇历办事。全球著名战略咨询公司麦肯锡公司近日发布报告,在对全球1600家样本公司进行统计分析后,揭示了令人吃惊的事实:1/3的样本企业由于自身的惰性,几乎从不调整内部资源的分配状况,而那些能够适时调整资源分配机制的企业,在一个15年的周期里,表现要明显胜出。人性中天然的惰性和微妙的公司政治是企业惰性的两大源头。所幸,我们研究发现,有一些药方可以有效地治疗企业的懒惰病,让资源在企业内部得到更加合理和高效的分配,从而不断提高企业的绩效。     

The MNE investment location decision: Some empirical evidence

Factors governing MNE investment are typically divided into three groups-infrastructural variables, location-specific risk factors and government policy variables. The first objective of this paper is to assess the influence of these factors on MNE location decisions. The second objective is to test whether government participation in location tournaments (whereby local governments offer incentives to MNEs to influence their location decisions) is worthwhile. Arthur (1986,1990) points out that such participation is worthwhile if government policy has irreversible effects that persist after policy is withdrawn. In the estimation of the model, neither risk nor infrastructural factors are found to have a significant effect on the MNE investment location decision. However, there seems to be some evidence indicating that past investment decisions tend to have irreversible effects. Thus, government participation in location tournaments may be worthwhile.     

Prosocial customer in the public sector: A PLS-SEM analysis applied to blood donation (active donors)

The act of donating blood creates social and public value (as a transformative service), but donors do not always repeat, so this study analyses the antecedents of attitudinal loyalty in donors. In addition, this research identifies active donor profiles to design personalised strategies to increase customers’ attitudinal loyalty. An online survey was conducted with 30,619 active donors who have donated blood at least once over the past two years. The study applies a quantitative modelling model called Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Analyses confirmed that motivations, obstacles and service quality influence satisfaction and donor attitudinal loyalty. Also, three active donor clusters were identified, as donation centres must adjust to each cluster to create value for society. This research contributes to understanding the factors that increase donor loyalty and closing a gap in the literature on prosocial consumer behaviour, and thereby other public services that depend upon the willingness of the individual. Furthermore, this approach enables the design of a more effective policy agenda and helps to focus public investment on developing strategies to engage willing and experienced donors.     

Can Development Aid Help Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Evidence from Central Asia

There is a continuing debate on the effectiveness of development aid. One less obvious angle on this issue is the question of the likely impact of aid on foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper tests whether aid had any impact on incoming FDI in Central Asian economies during the period 1993–2008. A simple panel model suggests that (a) aid had a moderate complementary effect on inward FDI, (b) there was a crowding‐out effect such that domestic investment reduced FDI stocks, (c) natural resources were a key attraction for private capital, and (d) increases in development aid offset the crowding‐out effect of domestic capital on FDI. It is argued that donors should target aid to enhance the climate for inward investment.     

对我国政府投资项目管理方式的探讨

政府投资项目是行使其职能的一种重要手段。随着市场经济体制逐渐形成 ,政府投资领域也随之发生了巨大变化。在新的投资体制下 ,我国旧有的政府投资项目管理方式存在很大弊端。为了有效解决这些问题 ,对传统的政府投资项目管理方式的改革势在必行。     

Five ways the pandemic could alter the economy

• ▀ Economic crises are often turning points, and the upheaval triggered by coronavirus may prove one of them. A permanently bigger state and public borrowing, persistently cowed consumers, a more ‘national’ UK economy and the impetus for beneficial reforms are all possibilities.
• ▀ We think the scale of state intervention in the economy to protect public health will increase pressure to do more in aid of other social goals. The austere ‘Treasury view’ of deficits is also likely to wane.
• ▀ Meanwhile, evidence suggests that major economic shocks can exert a decades-long drag on consumers’ desire to spend, giving another reason why higher government borrowing may persist long after the pandemic has faded.
• ▀ Supply-chain vulnerabilities exposed by the virus may crystallise the more ‘UK-first’ approach to economic policy that Brexit ushered in. Although greater protectionism could threaten economic dynamism, the crisis could be the stimulus to structural reform, offering a potential growth upside

     

市政投资是保增长的重要力量

抵御金融危机,确保经济增长,扩大投资拉动是必要的也是可行的.但是谁来投资拉动?靠政府扩大基础设施投资是必要的.但是更主要的,是靠在政府四万亿投资抖动引导下,进一步实施特许经营制度,吸引和鼓励更多的企业投资、社会投资和国内外投资.增强非公有制经济投资城市市政设施的信心,保护好其投资的资产安全和投资收益.