可持续经济发展中的人力资本投资分析

人力资本是影响经济发展的关键因素,实施正确的人力资本投资战略是实现经济可持续发展的重要前提和保障。长期以来,我国人力资本投资面临教育投资低,过多人口导致医疗保健水平低下,职业培训未成体系和人力资本流动受到制约等问题。要想实现经济的可持续发展．必须重视人力资本投资的重要性和方向性,加大教育投资力度,控制人口并增加医疗保健支出,多渠道筹集资金发展职业培训,改革户籍管理制度,并通过物质激励促进人力资本的流动。     

可持续经济发展中的人力资本投资分析

人力资本是影响经济发展的关键因素,实施正确的人力资本投资战略是实现经济可持续发展的重要前提和保障.长期以来,我国人力资本投资面临教育投资低,过多人口导致医疗保健水平低下,职业培训未成体系和人力资本流动受到制约等问题.要想实现经济的可持续发展,必须重视人力资本投资的重要性和方向性,加大教育投资力度,控制人口并增加医疗保健支出,多渠道筹集资金发展职业培训,改革户籍管理制度,并通过物质激励促进人力资本的流动.     

政府教育投入产出效率的区域差异——基于东、中、西部的面板数据

教育投入的直接产出为人力资本,间接产出为对经济增长的作用。运用卢卡斯模型和经过改进的柯布道格拉斯生产函数,对1996—2006年中国东、中、西部教育经费、GDP、人力资本存量、劳动力的面板数据进行不同地区基础教育投入产出差异的实证分析。结果表明：直接产出效率为西部〉东部〉中部;间接产出效率为西部〉中部〉东部。显然,西部教育投入具有更高的产出效率,政府对西部地区应侧重增加教育投资,对东部地区应侧重进行教育体制机制创新。     

农村人力资本投资与新农村建设

农村人力资本投资不足，人力资本存量水平过低，已经成为制约我国新农村建设的瓶颈。当前，增加农村人力资本投资，主要在于加大农村教育经费投入，提高农民收入水平，解决不利于农村人力资本投资的限制因素。     

农村人力资本投资与新农村建设

农村的落后不仅是基础设施和物质条件落后，更重要的是“人的落后”。因此，农村的发展和新农村建设，重要的是加大农村人力资本投资。制约农村人力资本投资不足的主要原因有：思想认识不到位，国家对农村人力资本投资力度太小，农村教育结构不合理，农民人均收入低，投资意识差等等。加大农村人力资本投资的相应对策是：转变观念，搞好服务，加大农村人力资本投资力度；调整农村教育结构，加快发展农村职业教育和成人教育；千方百计增加农民收入，转变投资理念。     

教育促进经济发展的作用机制分析

教育系统是内生于经济系统的，其产出是GDP的一个组成部分，教育系统与一般物质生产系统的区别在于教育系统的主要投入是人力资本，而更重要的是，教育系统的主要产出是人力资本，教育系统是一个专业化生产人力资本的部门。教育及其生产的人力资本具有资源配置功能、制度性功能和生产性功能等功能，是技术进步的载体，对经济发展具有重要的间接贡献。综合教育对经济发展的直接与间接贡献及对教育经济功能的深入分析，本文构建了一个教育促进经济发展的作用机制的理论模型。     

人力资本对河南省经济增长影响的实证分析

本文采用卢卡斯人力资本外部性模型,基于河南省1989-2009年时间序列数据,对河南省经济增长影响要素进行实证分析.研究结果表明:物质资本投入的产出弹性为0.828,人力存量投入的产出弹性为0.172,人力资本水平投入的产出弹性为0.034,物质资本产出弹性远远高于人力资本产出弹性,说明河南省经济增长主要是依靠物质资本的投入来推动的     

健康人力资本与教育人力资本投资耦合关系研究

本文通过研究我国教育人力资本投资和健康人力资本投资的耦合关系,发现我国各地区教育投资和健康投资耦合协调度偏低,教育人力资本和健康人力资本的协同作用效果因此减弱.区域间人力资本发展水平存在较大差距,西部地区健康投入、教育投入和两者耦合度都远低于东部地区.因此,为保证经济的可持续发展,应该合理的分配资源进行人力资本投资,提高资源利用率,促进健康人力资本和教育人力资本的整体协调发展.     

人力资本投资风险理论:模型演变及其进展

从研究风险因素对人力资本投资的影响到不确定条件下的教育选择问题,以投入-产出的角度来研究人力资本投资理论为其发展奠定了坚实基础。采用均值-方差资产组合理论、期权模型等方法拓展了人力资本投资风险理论的研究思路;引入个体风险态度因素,并采用实验经济学的方法促进了其纵深发展。与理论相比,人力资本投资风险相关的政策研究还较为缺乏。     

教育投入比与地区经济增长差异

本文在Lucas(1988)等的基础上,将人力资本的教育投入主体分为非政府教育投入和政府教育投入两类,分析均衡条件下两类教育投入比与长期经济增长的关系,较好地刻画了在一定条件下非政府教育投入对于长期经济增长的重要意义。以此为基础,用1996—2005年中国的面板数据进行了分类比较和实证检验,结果表明,中国的政府和非政府投入对于人力资本积累和经济增长具有短期效应。在教育投入比相对较低的地区,物质资本投入是拉动经济增长主要原因,而非政府投入的增长对人力资本积累的效果更加明显。     

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.