环境敏感地区水环境保护与治理规划研究——以贵安新区为例

环境敏感地区面临经济社会发展与环境保护的双重压力,构建合理的水环境保护与治理规划体系,促进经济社会健康发展与水环境质量改善具有重要战略意义。贵安新区是我国第八个国家级新区,承担重要的经济发展使命,同时生态环境高度敏感,区内93%的面积位于水源地上游汇水区,经济社会发展与环境保护矛盾突出。以贵安新区为例,分析了环境敏感地区生态环境现状特征和压力,构建了流域水环境保护与治理的"源头预防—过程控制—末端治理"体系,通过实施流域分区管制、水系生态格局构建和重要水体湿地保护,强化区域发展的资源环境引导、产业布局优化和海绵城市建设,推动流域分区治理措施、完善环境基础设施和河道生态建设,促进该地区经济社会发展与水环境保护的协调可持续,可为我国中、西部环境敏感地区经济社会发展与环境保护工作提供案例借鉴。     

西部经济开发与环境的关系及和谐模式

在经济高速增长的同时,环境保护与经济发展二者之间相互促进、相互制约,相互矛盾而又相互统一。在资源有限的前提下,如何达到经济发展与环境保护和谐的模式,本文通过分析西部开发对自然环境及经济环境的影响以及环境的改变对经济环境所产生的影响,得出经济发展与环境呈正相关的因果关系,通过对目前经济开发与环保之间现有模式的分析,构建了经济与环境并重和谐发展的模型。     

煤炭工业城市的循环经济与工业垃圾治理

煤炭工业城市以重工业生产为主,城市污染严重,对自然生态环境的破坏更是触目惊心,由于受到传统产业结构和城市基础设施建设滞后的影响,随着生产力的不断提高,煤炭开采及工业生产过程中的工业垃圾逐渐增加.这些工业垃圾的治理不仅是环境治理问题,更是一个与经济、社会各方面都有密切联系的系统工程,它直接影响到煤炭城市的建设和经济发展.通过循环经济发展模式,对工业垃圾实现减量-利用-再利用的运作过程,最大程度提高工业垃圾利用价值和减少污染,达到生产效益和经济效益的增长.     

治理污染的经济学思考

环境保护目前已成为我国社会经济发展中必须要完成的关键性任务。环境保护的内容是多方面的,其中一个极为重要的内容是生产与生活中所形成的污染。如何治理污染?我认为至少有三个方面的问题需要讨论。 理顺治理体制     

实现经济发展与环境保护共赢的途径探索

如何处理好经济发展与环境保护的关系是现代社会面临的一大难题。本文通过深入分析经济发展与环境保护的现状以及二者的关系,在坚持经济发展与环境保护道路理论依据的前提下,总结出实现经济发展与环境保护共赢的途径。     

面向生态城市的经济发展模式

良好的经济发展模式是实现生态城市建设的前提,因此面向可持续发展转变经济发展模式是生态城市建设中必要的一环.它既强调城市开发建设中生态环境保护的重要性、又体现了生态环境保护与经济发展之间的协调性.本文提出了面向生态城市经济发展模式的四化原则,即工业园区化、园区循环化、产业知识化、企业清洁化,并以广州市南拓区为例,根据四化原则设计了适合该地区的经济发展模式.     

污染治理对策研究——以大气治理为例

改革开放以来,我国经济成就举世瞩目,但我国仍是走发达国家"先污染后治理"的老路,经济发展带来日益严重的环境污染.如何处理好经济发展和环境保护这一矛盾,成为现阶段经济发展的一大难点.文章以大气污染治理为例,浅析在治理过程中,政府通过征收"庇古税",开展排污权交易将稀缺资源一环境容量在经济个体问进行分配等手段使得污染治理内部化.     

新农村建设环境经济协调发展的思考

文章在分析中国农村生态环境现状和农村经济问题的基础上,通过对生态环境保护与经济发展关系的剖析,提出了新农村建设环境经济协调发展的思路.新农村建设必须重视经济与环境的协调发展,将环境保护纳入农村经济系统.树立水土资源综合治理和农村污染治理的循环经济理念,推动生态农业和精确(细)农业建设,强化农村小城镇规划和乡镇企业的宏观调控,统筹协调工农业关系和农村经济结构,保证新农村建设的顺利进行.     

城市环境保护中的污水治理问题与对策

随着经济的发展,城市建设速度越来越快,同时也产生了一系列的环境保护问题,对城市化的发展造成了很大影响.污水治理是城市环境保护中的主要问题之一,受体制建设、资金及运营管理等因素影响,导致城市污水治理中存在很多问题,已经成为人们研究的主要话题.本文主要对城市环境保护中的污水治理问题进行分析,并提出了改善措施,希望可以给相关人员提供参考.     

国外环境治理经验及对中国的启示

我国目前在经济发展与环境保护之间出现了环境污染与经济发展形成恶性循环的严重矛盾,本文梳理了一些西方发达国家利用外部环境经济手段,以及内部经济结构根本调整等优秀治理经验的他山之石作为参考,来对我国的"先污染,后治理"的粗放型经济发展模式提出由内而外的完善的建议。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.