中国城市化水平与产业生产率增长的实证研究

对1978-2008年中国城市化水平对第二产业和第三产业生产率增长的影响进行实证分析,结果显示：城市化对产业增长的影响有着类似于全要素生产率（TFP）的作用;城市化对产业生产率增长的技术效应和要素重置效应都有贡献。这表明,城市发展对产业增长形成了要素的集聚效应和重置效应,促进了产业生产率的提高;但工资成本的上升不利于产业生产率的增长。     

中国经济增长中的产业结构变迁和技术进步

本文将技术进步和产业结构变迁从要素生产率中分解出来,实证度量了产业结构变迁对中国经济增长的贡献,并将其与技术进步的贡献相比较。实证研究表明,在改革开放以来的三十年中,虽然产业结构变迁对中国经济增长的贡献一度十分显著,但是随着市场化程度的提高,产业结构变迁对经济增长的贡献呈现不断降低的趋势,逐渐让位于技术进步,即产业结构变迁所体现的市场化的力量将逐步让位于技术进步的力量。此外,研究也发现,结构变迁效应的减弱并不表明市场化改革的收益将会消失,某些发展和体制的因素仍然阻碍着资源配置效率进一步提高。从这个层面来看,我国完善市场机制的工作仍然任重而道远。     

中国经济增长与产业结构高级化演变的互动关系研究——基于1978-2010年的数据检验

为了厘清产业结构高级化进程中,第二产业和第三产业发展对经济增长的具体贡献和因果关系,本文对经济增长和产业结构高级化的衡量指标进行了重新选取,并依据中国1978-2010年数据,通过构建向量自回归和误差修正模型对我国经济增长与产业结构高级化演进之间的互动关系进行了实证检验。实证研究结果表明:第二产业和第三产业发展与经济增长之间存在长期显著的均衡关系,第三产业发展对经济增长的具体贡献更大,我国改革开放以来的经济增长主要是第二产业的发展带动的,第二产业和经济增长之间已形成良性互动的因果关系,这种良性互动关系在第三产业发展过程中还没有实现。     

中国产业增长的要素重置效应研究

产业间要素生产效率的差异导致要素在产业间流动和重新配置,这种重新配置提高了产业的整体劳动生产率,从而促进了产业增长。本文首先建立一个理论模型论述要素配置的原因,在此基础上根据1978—2008年中国三次产业数据进行实证分析。结果显示,要素重置促进了产业增长,特别是促进了第三产业的快速增长。     

改革以来中国经济增长因素的分析及测算

笔者运用标准的计量方法进行实证检验,结合改革开放以来中国的特征事实,测算了中国经济增长的要素投入贡献和全要素生产率贡献.结果显示,中国的经济增长是要素投入和包括人力资本、制度变迁、技术进步等全要素生产率综合作用的结果,其中全要素生产率的提高对经济增长做出了大约三分之一的贡献.因此,改革开放以来中国的经济增长并不完全是投入驱动型的,而是真实可靠的增长.     

产业结构与经济增长动态关系的探讨——基于VAR模型的山东省实证分析

目前,国内外许多学者都认为产业结构变迁与经济增长之间有着密切的关系,国内学者还用实证分析探讨了改革开放以来我国产业结构调整对经济增长的推动作用.在此,本文主要通过运用VAR模型、协整分析、向量误差修正模型、脉冲响应函数及方差分解的动态经济计量分析方法,对山东省1978-2010年产业结构变迁与经济增长之间的动态关系进行了实证研究.研究结果表明,山东省产业结构变迁与实际经济增长之间存在着长期稳定的均衡协同关系,并且这种均衡协同关系具有反向修正机制.根据脉冲响应函数分析,山东省产值结构的冲击对经济增长具有持续明显的反向冲击效应;就业结构的冲击对经济增长有持续显著的正向冲击效应,并且这种影响需要一定时间才能表现出来.可见,通过产业结构调整是可以推动山东经济持续增长的.     

资源开发、产业结构演进与地区经济增长——基于中介传导模型的实证分析

学术界对于“资源诅咒”产生的原因有着不同的观点,本文将产业结构演进这一影响经济增长的重要因素纳入到“资源诅咒”现象的解释框架中,构建以工业化程度和第三产业发展水平为中介变量的中介传导模型,并利用中国1998～2009年的省际面板数据对相关假说进行实证检验.研究发现:资源开发强度的提高会抑制第三产业的发展,但是对制造业的“挤出效应”并不明显.第三产业发展在“资源诅咒”的发生机制中起不完全中介作用,资源开发会通过抑制第三产业发展来影响资源型地区经济的增长.     

北京市产业结构变迁对经济增长贡献的实证研究

对比北京和全国的情形,本文分析了导致北京市产业结构变迁对经济增长的贡献不显著的若干因素。结合对现有文献中有关结构效应的争论的分析,本文在产业结构变迁对经济增长的贡献方面得出了一般性结论:产业结构变迁对经济增长的贡献不仅和不同产业之间的资源配置效率的差距有关,也和资源在产业之间的转移方向有关。当不同产业之间的资源配置效率的差距较大时,产业结构变迁对经济增长的贡献较大,这导致了一个经济体的不同发展阶段的结构效应是不同的,经济发展水平越高,经济增长越依赖于技术进步。同时,由于工业化进程中资源转移往往发生于三大产业之间,较少发生于三大产业内部的各行业之间,三大产业内部的产业结构变迁对三大产业各自的产出增长的贡献并不显著。     

产业结构调整对经济增长的影响——基与江西省的实证分析1978—2008年

产业结构调整对经济增长的影响在学术界一直是研究的热点.运用计量统计方法,对江西省1978-2008年的数据进行的了计量统计分析,得出江西省产业结构调整对其经济增长的影响逐步减小.实证得出,第一、二产业调整对经济增长的影响更大,但是,一味依赖第一、二产业的调整,将会出现经济增长的瓶颈,只有加快第三产业的发展.才能实现经济持续、高效的发展.最后,在实证的基础上,对江西产业结构调整提出了一些建议.     

中国产业结构变迁与经济增长的实证分析

本文对我国1978～2002年产业结构变化状况和产业结构变化趋势进行定量分析,考察产业结构变动引起各产业部门对经济增长的贡献和作用的相应变化.实证检验表明,这一时期我国产业结构变动基本符合工业化发展的演变规律,但从我国经济发展的要求看,产业结构转换仍滞后于总量增长的要求;进一步优化产业结构,需要着力解决"三农"问题、提升企业的国际竞争力、加快发展第三产业.     

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.