陇海—兰新—北疆铁路沿线城市紧凑度及其影响因素研究

根据紧凑城市的核心内涵,从空间紧凑、结构良好、效率较高三个维度构建了城市紧凑度测度指标体系,运用主成分分析计算了2009年陇海—兰新—北疆铁路沿线40个城市紧凑度的综合得分,并将其划分为紧凑、较紧凑、一般紧凑和不紧凑四种类型。除个别城市外,从总体上来看,沿线城市紧凑度水平按照特大城市、大城市、中等城市、小城市的顺序呈现依次降低的变化规律。通过多元线性逐步回归分析了城市紧凑度的主要影响因素,结果表明目前影响沿线城市紧凑度的主要因素首先是经济增长弹性,其次是人口密度、基础设施建设和城市形态紧凑度等;对于不同规模的城市,城市紧凑度的主要影响因素亦有差异。     

加速一体化进程 打造区域经济走廊

2009年8月28日，陇海兰新经济促进会、银川市人民政府主办的陇海兰新经济促进会第十二次年会在银川隆重开幕，来自陇海兰新经济促进会理事单位城市的近200名代表齐聚银川，共谋陇海兰新地带经济加速发展大计。会议期间，本刊记者就陇海兰新经济促进会如何促进陇海兰新沿线城市的经济发展采访了陇海兰新经济促进会理事长、西安市市长陈宝根，徐州市委常委、副市长李荣启，连云港市委常委、常务副市长张同生。     

发挥轴线辐射作用 带动区域经济发展 陇海兰新经济促进会2011年秘书处主任办公会议在汉中市召开

2011年5月12日，陇海兰新经济促进会2011年秘书处主任办公会议在陕西省汉中市隆重召开。陇海兰新经济促进会副秘书长兼秘书处主任卢洪军、中共汉中市委常委、市政协主席李怀生及陇海兰新沿线城市代表出席了会议。     

新疆重点城市建设用地扩张与人地配置协调性分析

以新疆20个重点城市为研究对象,运用GIS技术和数理统计方法对新疆1990—2016年城市建设用地扩张的时序特征、区域差异进行分析,并通过计算1990—2013年人均用地约束构建协调性系数和经济弹性系数,探讨新疆城市发展的人地配置协调性。结果表明:(1)新疆城市建设用地面积持续增大,扩张速度呈现出明显的波动性和阶段性特征。(2)新疆城市建设用地的扩张过程存在显著的区域差异,天山北坡城市扩张幅度最大,南疆城市扩张速度最快,东疆和北疆城市的扩张过程相对平稳。(3)通过评价新疆城市人地配置协调性,发现土地—人口之间的协调关系以土地扩张型为主,土地—经济之间则主要处于协调发展状态;整体上,人地配置协调程度不高,且呈减弱趋势,有必要实施有力措施,实现城市建设用地高效利用。     

陇海兰新经济促进会秘书处主任会议强调——做好三个专题调研 抓好首届新陆桥国际旅游文化节等活动

陇海兰新经济促进会秘书处主任办公会议于2005年8月10日至12日在西宁市如开。来自陇海兰新沿线30多个城市、铁路部门的秘书处主任与代表50余人参加了会议，卢洪军副秘书长与陇海兰新经济促进会副秘书长和平、西宁市政府副秘书长马志祥共同主持了会议．西宁市政府秘书长冯义到会致词并介绍了西宁市的社会、经济、城市建设等方面的情况。     

发挥轴线辐射作用 带动区域经济发展 陇海兰新经济促进会2011年秘书处主任办公会议在汉中市召开

2011年5月12日,陇海兰新经济促进会2011年秘书处主任办公会议在陕西省汉中市隆重召开。陇海兰新经济促进会副秘书长兼秘书处主任卢洪军、中共汉中市委常委、市政协主席李怀生及陇海兰新沿线城市代表出席了会议。会议主要总结了第十二次年会以来的各项工作,商     

拉开区域经济联动发展帷幕 打造陇海兰新品牌经济带——访陇海兰新经济促进会理事长、西安市市长 陈宝根

《大陆桥视野》:陈市长,请您简要介绍一下陇海兰新经济促进会的基本情况。近年来,陇海兰新经济促进会做了哪些主要工作,对促进大陆桥沿线城市的经济社会发展发挥了什么作用?陈宝根:陇海兰新经济促进会是由西安、连云港等城市发起,在国家民政部登记注册,并接受国家民委社团管理的     

陇海兰新经济促进会

陇海兰新经济促进会（EPALLR）于1986年12月在西安成立，是以陇海兰新铁路为纽带，以沿线中心城市为骨干，以东西海陆口岸为对外开放“窗口”，依托新亚欧大陆桥，由陇海兰新地带各市地州、铁路部门、口岸自愿组成的跨省区、政府间、非营利性社会团体。     

合作与共赢：打造丝路旅游新局面——陇海兰新青藏铁路沿线城市旅游局长联席会侧记

2008年4月7—10日,陇海兰新青藏铁路沿线旅游局长联席会暨丝绸之路旅游区总体规划研讨会,在千年帝都、牡丹花城、丝绸之路起点洛阳召开。联合国开发计划署、洛阳市领导及丝绸之路沿线城市的西安市、乌鲁木齐市、西宁市、太原市、酒泉市、敦煌市、徐州市、连云港市、张掖市、武威市、三门峡市、天水市、渭南市、登封市等30余个城市的旅游局长和120多代表及专家出席了会议。     

第十次陆桥沿线部分城市领导联谊会备忘录

新亚欧大陆桥沿线部分城市领导联谊活动,由陆桥沿线部分城市领导、全国人大代表于2003年十届全国人大一次会议期间在北京发起,已成功举办了九次,影响力不断扩大,成为沿线城市加强交流合作的重要平台。根据第九次陆桥沿线城市领导联谊会备忘录,第十次联谊会由甘肃省嘉峪关市人民政府承办。2012年3月2日,第十次陆桥沿线部分城市领导联谊会在北京飞天大厦举行。陇海兰新经济促进会理事长、西安     

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.”     

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.     

Bayesian estimation of duration models: An application of the multiperiod probit model

The multiperiod probit model is presented and Bayesian estimation using the Gibbs sampler with data augmentation is described. As an empirical illustration, the multiperiod probit model is then used to estimate a duration model using employment duration data for the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Bayesian estimation with unobserved heterogeneity is shown to be a simple extension of estimation of a duration model with no unobserved heterogeneity. More importantly, perhaps, some numerical problems encountered by other authors using Maximum Likelihood are avoided.I would like to thank M. Baker, G. Koop, A. Melino and D. Poirier for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank M. Baker for providing his data.     

Scenarios and creativity: Thinking in new boxes

To be creative and make change happen, leaders must do more than simply ‘think outside the box’, as the traditional business manuals suggest, using the popular American expression. After all, the space outside the box is infinitely expansive. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that a solution to the problem will be found. The answer: ‘Think in new boxes.’ This requires developing the right new box; in other words, useful new models, a helpful new approach to a problem. That is the real art of practical creativity. This short article outlines the approach (Thinking in New Boxes) and its application to classic scenario planning with a few examples. The authors also present the ‘Expressway to Scenarios’, an approach that wins in impact and practicality what it loses in deep analysis, by having top executives involved in key steps.     

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.     

How chaebol restructuring after the 1997 crisis has affected corporate decision and performance in Korea: debt financing,ownership structure,and investment

ABSTRACT

Korean chaebol firms, characterized by excessive debt financing and overinvestment, experienced restructuring after the 1997 crisis. By reducing debt financing and thus overinvestment, they tried to reorganize financing structure and ownership structure. Chaebols’ debt reduction turns out to have improved performance. However, polarization between chaebol and non-chaebol firms has become more significant. Even after the crisis, firms that give higher cash flows to a controlling shareholder take more capital investment, indicating that agency problems still exist within chaebols. Chaebol-affiliated firms continue to be more active in R&D than non-chaebol firms. However, the pattern is limited to the group of top 10 chaebols after the crisis.

Abbreviations: KFTC: Korea Fair Trade Commission     

On the Role of Paradigms in Understanding Economic Globalization

Any adequate analysis of economic globalization necessarily requires fundamental understanding of the worldviews underlying the views expressed with respect to the nature and role of economic globalization. This paper is based on the premise that any worldview can be associated with one of the four basic paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. It argues that any view expressed with respect to economic globalization is based on one of the four paradigms or worldviews. It, therefore, discusses four views with respect to the nature and role of economic globalization which correspond to the four broad worldviews. The paper emphasizes that the four views expressed are equally scientific and informative; they look at the nature and role of economic globalization from a certain paradigmatic viewpoint. Emphasizing this example in the area of economic globalization, the paper concludes that there are opportunities for each paradigm to benefit from contributions coming from the other three paradigms.     

A Humean theory of choice of which rationality may be one consequence

For the reader who considers economic theory of choice as a special case of a more general theory of action, Hume's discussion of the determinants of action in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739?–?40), in the Enquiry on Human Understanding (1748) and in the Dissertation on Passions (1757) deserves attention. However, according to some modern commentators, Hume does not seem to have given any evidence that would favour what nowadays we would consider as the kind of rationality involved in modern theories of rational choice. On the contrary, this paper arrives at the conclusion that consistency between preferences and choice, like the usual properties of completeness and transitivity, may be considered as outcomes of a mental process, described by means of a decision algorithm that aims to represent Hume's theory of choice.     

The concept of freedom and its relation to economic development--a critical appreciation of the work of Amartya Sen

Following a brief review of the conception of freedom as employedin economic discourse, this paper focuses on the evolution ofthe concept of freedom in the work of Amartya Sen. It tracesthe development of Sen's thought from the capability analysisof the late 1970s to his more recent separation of freedom intoits opportunity and process aspects. While broadly appreciativeof Sen's development of the concept of positive freedom, thepaper identifies some difficulties arising from his definitionof capability as a set of options as well as from his separationof the opportunity and process aspects of freedom. Aspects ofthe relationship between Sen's conception of freedom and thatof Marx are discussed briefly in the context of Sen's recentdiscussion of the market as a source of freedom.