BUILDING AND LINKING A MICROSIMULATION MODEL TO A CGE MODEL FOR SOUTH AFRICA

This paper examines the microeconomic effects of macroeconomic policies or shocks in South Africa. In particular, the paper considers the effects of macroeconomic policies on poverty and inequality by building and linking a microsimulation (MS) model to a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. In the South African context, where poverty and inequality are at high levels, this novel approach enables us to identify the winners and losers of any policy change, so that the impact on poverty and inequality can be assessed in detail.     

美国治理内外部经济失衡的经验教训及对中国的启示

对于开放经济,在内外经济失衡的情况下出现政策冲突是难以避免的,关键是根据世界经济环境和国内宏观经济运行状况,在不同情况下选择合适的政策目标及政策措施实现本国经济平稳发展,实现本国经济利益的最大化。中国目前出现内外经济均衡的政策困境,通过总结美国治理内外经济失衡的经验,对中国应对严重内外经济失衡,实现经济稳定发展有重要意义。     

Liberalization for services FDI and export quality: Evidence from China

By employing firm-level export data in China, this paper empirically examines the effect of liberalization of services foreign direct investment (FDI) on exporting firms’ quality upgrading. To evaluate its relative effectiveness, we also examine other kinds of trade policies, including tariffs in export destination countries and input and output tariffs in China. With China's accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, these trade policies changed substantially during our sample period of 2000–06. Empirical results showed that easing the restrictiveness of services FDI resulted in raising export product quality, mainly for foreign-owned enterprises. More than any other trade policy, we found that reduced input tariffs contributed to raising export product quality.     

Are there spillover effects between coastal and noncoastal regions in China?

A major policy debate in China starting in the Mao era and carrying through the Deng area involves the tradeoff between equity and efficiency in regional growth policies. In this paper, we explore whether there are regional growth spillover effects promised by Deng's policy of favoring initial industrial development in coastal provinces. A stated objective of these policies was the spread of coastal provinces' growth inland. We review the theoretical underpinnings of such effects and test for them with panel data for the period 1981–1998. We also test whether any spread effects are equally distributed over inland provinces. We find that spillover effects have not been sufficient to reduce disparities across Chinese provinces in the short run.     

Comments on “Black Americans in the 21st Century: Should We Be Optimistic or Concerned?”

In “Black Americans in the 21st Century: Should we be Optimistic or Concerned?”, Dr. Angel Harris discusses a number of facts about the myriad gaps in performance between black Americans and white Americans. In what follows, I present evidence that suggests that a combination of race-conscious policies and early-childhood investments should be included in any policy that seeks to reduce the gaps in performance between black Americans and white Americans.     

The Washington Consensus: A post-mortem

After guiding development policies for nearly 20 years, the “Washington Consensus” lies in shambles. Although selected components remain relevant for development policies around the world, some specifics of the broader policy “package” and, more generally, the concept of a standardized package of policies applicable to all developing countries has clearly been discredited.Criticism has been directed at the assumed link from economic liberalization of international trade and financial flows to more rapid economic growth. Apart from a handful of developing countries, admittedly including some large and important ones, most of the world saw little of the promised economic benefit from widespread and on-going trade and financial liberalization, initially. Many countries actually regressed, when evaluated against broader socio-economic development goals, including income inequality. We conclude that differences in initial conditions (history, culture, geography and levels of industrial and institutional development) preclude any single development policy package from being universally effective.     

Regional policy in a multiregional setting: when the poorest are hurt by subsidies

Regional policies that seek to reduce economic inequalities between regions are common. These policies normally involve subsidies or transfers to the poorest regions. Over any given short-term horizon such subsidies serve to reduce inter-regional inequalities, but as they also affect migration patterns the long-term effects are less clear. This paper demonstrates using a three-region general equilibrium model that subsidising the poorest region may be to the detriment of the periphery as a whole and even to the very region that receives the subsidy, if the subsidy draws firms away from a nearby region that would function better as a production centre. If the subsidy does not attract a sufficient number of firms to the subsidised region, then the long-term effect on the residents of that region would be negative. Though further research is needed to isolate the conditions under which such an effect would arise, this result has potentially important implications for the design of regional policy.     

Autarky in Franco's Spain: The costs of a closed economy

Between the 1940s and 1970s, Spain used a variety of economic policies that hindered international trade. Because the mix of tariffs, quotas, administrative barriers, and exchange rate regimes varied greatly over time, the quantification of the effect of the various trade policies on international trade in this period is particularly elusive. In this paper, we use historical bilateral trade flows and a structural gravity model to quantify the evolution of Spain's border thickness, a summary measure of its barriers to international trade. We find that Spain's borders in the period 1948–75 were thicker than those of any other country in Western Europe, even after the liberalization of trade that started in 1959. These comparatively higher impediments to international trade implied substantial negative effects on consumer welfare. We estimate that accumulated welfare costs over the period 1948–75 exceed 20 per cent of a year's total consumption.     

Lessons for Asia?: European experiences—in American perspective—in legitimizing market integration

The European Union has reached a deeper level of market integration than any other region. In many ways its success parallels the integration of national-level markets, particularly in the broadly similar continental project of the United States. This paper asks whether the EU and US cases hold any lessons for the pursuit of market integration in East Asia, and reaches two positive conclusions. First, the two Atlantic continental markets display a common content of institutions and policies that helped generate broad legitimacy for market integration. Secondly, while there is wide debate over the historical mechanisms that produced successful “embedded” market integration in the EU and the US, several of these mechanisms may be reproducible in East Asia.     

The role of international companies in the economy of South Africa

Summary It is impossible for corporations that locate in South Africa to follow unilateral policies of their own because they must enter into partnership with any of the parastals that we have already identified. Any foreign investor is required to sell some of his shares to one of the government corporations or its subsidiaries before he can start his business operations. These shares are not sold in the market, but under definite partnership agreements. This article is a condensed version of chapter 10 of the recently revised book, The Political Economy of South Africa: The Making of Poverty, published by University Press of America in Washington, D.C.     

Retirement of Older Workers and Employment of the Young

Policy makers have often argued that an additional benefit of facilitating early retirement is that it creates employment for the young. This may happen if older and younger workers are substitutes. Nowadays policies are aimed at increasing employment of older people to counter the economic consequences of an aging population. Opponents of such policies argue that these will adversely affect youth employment. This paper revisits the nexus between employment of older and younger workers, if only to put any concerns for adverse effects of later retirement on youth employment to rest. To empirically investigate this issue we estimate a dynamic model of employment of the young, prime age and old people using panel data of 22 OECD countries over the time period 1960–2008. Our empirical analysis does not support the hypothesis that employment of the young and old are substitutes and finds some minor complementarities. This suggests that encouraging later retirement will have no adverse effect on youth employment.     

The savings trap and economic take-off

We develop a model of economic development in which cultureand technology interact to devermine savings, investment, andgrowth. Investment is assumed to involve intermediation or othercosts that may, in any period, result in either of two equilibriafor the savings rate. At the good equilibrium, aggregate savings,the savings rate, and growth are all higher than at the badequilibrium. Whether the country falls into this savings trapdepends on each individual's belief about the savings behaviorof others in the economy. Goverment policies that coordinatesavings and facilitate investment can influence whether thecountry escapes the trap.     

MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE AND INEQUALITY: BRAZIL, 1983–94

We examine how poor macroeconomic performance, mainly in terms of high rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The results, based initially on aggregate time series, and then on sub‐national panel time‐series data and analysis, show that the extreme inflation, combined with an imperfect process of financial adaptation and incomplete indexation coverage, had a regressive and significant impact on inequality. The implication of the results is that sound macroeconomic policies, which keep inflation low and stable in the long run, should be a necessary first step of any policy package implemented to alleviate inequality in Brazil.     

Links between urbanization and sectoral shifts in employment in Java

The relationship between urbanization and changes in the employment structure in Indonesia is analyzed. In particular, the author examines whether changes in the occupational structure in rural areas can have any effect in slowing the general shift in economic emphasis to urban areas, whether nonagricultural economic activities can be developed in rural areas, and what policies are needed to assist the transformation of the rural employment sector. Data are primarily from Indonesian censuses, including the 1980 census.     

Partial credibility and policy announcements: The problem of time inconsistency in macroeconomics revisited

This paper studies the credibility of policy announcements in macroeconomics. This issue is exemplified by the problem of monetary policy design in light of an expectations-augmented Phillips curve. In contrast to reputational models of the repeated games literature, the credibility problem between the central bank and the private sector, which results from the policymaker's temptation to create surprise inflation to raise employment, cannot be eliminated. The paper shows that credibility in any sequential equilibrium is generally only partial, in that market participants do not fully believe policy announcements of low inflation rates, even if forthright policies have been implemented in all periods. Indicating reputation-building, credibility improves over time. The example is then used to show the policy implications of partial credibility.     

南京市科技人才政策研究——基于创新型城市政策文本比较分析

为探究南京科技人才政策存在的问题，运用政策文本分析法，将南京与深圳、杭州、苏州3个城市2007—2022年科技人才政策文本进行比较分析。研究发现：在时间趋势上，南京科技人才政策数量呈现逐年增长态势；在政策工具使用上，南京政策工具使用分布不均衡，供给型政策占主导地位，部分政策因支持力度稍弱或政策欠缺成效不明显。最后，从突出政策差异性、提升政策精准性、优化政策分布均衡性和提升政策成效性4个方面提出优化南京科技人才政策建议。     

论金融危机时期中美救市政策之比较——以IS-LM-BP模型为探究视角

面对全球性金融危机,各国政府采取了各种各样的救市政策。财政政策、货币政策和外汇政策的搭配使用使得以IS—LM—BP模型为核心的凯恩斯主义大显神威。尽管中美两国的救市政策无一例外地反映了凯恩斯主义的经济路径和政府干预的反自由主义理念,但依然存在不同之处。IS—LM—BP模型并没有过时,运用该模型分析两国救市政策的异同对于我国早日走出经济危机具有一定的理论意义。     

Further evidence on property–casualty insurance premiums: Do multiple breaks and country characteristics matter?

This paper employs a panel data stationarity test that incorporates multiple structural breaks to investigate whether property–casualty insurance (PCI) premiums per capita among 40 countries are mean-reverting or not. The results suggest that our panel dataset is stationary after we introduce the structural breaks into the model and consider cross-sectional dependence. However, the results for the panel stationarity test vary with regard to different country characteristics. Countries in which the PCI premiums present a panel unit-root property infer that any external shocks can have a permanent effect on the insurance premiums. Accordingly, the associated insurance authorities should take possible structural breaks and cross-sectional dependence into account when implementing related policies.     

Monetary Policies versus Regulatory Policies: Management of Peer to Peer Market Interest Rates

This paper studies how monetary and regulatory policies manage peer to peer (P2P) interest rates. Based on selected representative monetary and regulatory policies, this paper finds that easy monetary policies reduce the demand for online loans, thus reducing the market's interest rates. Monetary policies may increase the supply of online loans through rational expectation channels or reduce the demand for online loans through bank risk‐taking channels. Normative market‐based regulatory policy enables the P2P market to return to rationality, eliminates high‐risk investors and borrowers, and subsequently reduces market interest rates. Risk disposal‐based regulatory policy reduces market supply to some extent, resulting in a small increase in interest rates. Both easy monetary policies and regulatory policies have a great impact on the normal platforms. The interest rate of high‐risk platforms is less affected by the relevant policies, which is evidence that such platforms do not behave in accordance with the financial rules in general. Monetary policies mainly affect platforms with interest rates in a relatively normal range, while regulatory policies mainly focus on platforms with abnormal interest rates.     

A conceptual framework for the growth and redistribution debate in South Africa

It is possible to identify two generic schools of thought on the emotive question of the racially skewed income and wealth distribution in South Africa. Some economists argue in favour of ‘growth through redistribution’, and postulate that redistributive policies can enhance economic growth, especially by increasing labour productivity and generating greater political stability. Others support ‘redistribution through growth’, and emphasise the efficiency losses attendant upon any meaningful redistribution of existing income and wealth. The debate between these two schools of thought can be examined and evaluated within a common analytical framework. In so doing, it appears that, although proponents of both points of view have some compelling theoretical arguments, the matter can only be settled empirically.