通货膨胀的政治经济学——政治宏观经济学的视角

一、概述.经济增长和经济波动是宏观经济学的两个基本研究主题，通货膨胀则是经济波动理论研究的主要内容之一，因为价格总水平的波动与就业从而产出的波动之间存在着某种密切的关系。但是，它们之间存在的究竟是什么样的关系?或者说，价格波动与产出波动之间是否存在着明显的替代性?经济学家们对这个问题一直存在着争议。一般来说，保持价格稳定是一国政府重要的宏观经济目标之一。但是问题在于，政府是否有激励保持价格的稳定，是否有能力保持价格的稳定，以及如何才能达到价格稳定的目标?     

世界经济周期性波动与石油危机

石油危机或剧烈的价格波动初期与世界经济周期性波动有紧密的关联,加深了世界经济波动的幅度,拉长了世界经济波动的周期,但在滞后期对世界经济周期性波动的影响则逐步减弱,并由最初的异向变动转为同向变动.     

缓解房地产周期性波动的路径选择

经济的周期性波动,是一种不以人的意志为转移的客观规律,它是超越经济制度和体制的,房地产同样也是如此。因而,对经济周期波动和房地产周期波动的调控并不等于人为能够根本消除它。一定的经济政策只能影响周期波动,即放大或缩小其波动幅度,减缓周期频率,抑制周期波动的"负效应",保证经济稳定增长。但我们如果依照人为因素影响的大小,将经济波动区分为非自然波动和自然波动,则经济波动不可消除的意义在于由非自然波动向自然波动的转移,通过有弹性的宏观经济政策和体制调整而抑制大起大落的经济震荡和非自然的经济波动,以减少它对社会经济活动发生的灾害性影响。     

制度变迁、产业结构调整与我国经济周期波动的经验研究

本文对制度变迁、产业结构调整与经济波动三者的关系进行了经验分析,得出主要结论：中国1978年以来,走的是一种渐进式的制度变迁之路,制度变迁并不是宏观经济波动的格兰杰原因,而第一、二产业波动是引起宏观经济波动的主要原因;由于第一产业占国民经济比重不断下降,第二产业占国民经济比重相对稳定,第三产业占国民经济的比重逐渐上升,这使得第一、二产业对宏观经济波动的整体推动力减弱,很好地解释了我国经济实现高速增长但波动幅度变小的现象。     

近代中外经济波动的相关性研究

本文以详实可靠的中外批发物价指数资料来研究1867-1937年中外经济波动的相关性。当把国外批发物价指数变换成以银计价的指数后,中外经济波动的相关性显著增强。这不是巧合,说明国外经济波动对国内经济波动有较强的传导性,近代中外经济波动之间有内在联系。研究表明,近代中国经济波动深受美、英两国经济的波动影响,但美、英两国经济波动几乎不受中国经济波动的影响。造成近代中外经济波动的相关性深受计价货币影响的原因有两点:一是物价核算基础货币的不同,造成计价货币变换前近代中外经济波动的相关性不强;二是在自由汇率制度下,国际白银购买力的波动造成了国内白银的流入与流出,从而影响到中国经济的繁荣与萧条。     

为什么中国经济不是过冷就是过热?

经济波动是一种伴随着增长的正常现象 ,但如果在长期发展中总是出现波幅很大的振动 ,则需要分析这种波动是否正常。中国经济在改革开放以来的 2 0多年内虽然强劲增长 ,但经济波动幅度很大。导致经济大幅波动的原因何在 ?本文通过一个改进的货币先行模型来探讨货币变动对经济波动的作用 ,基本结论是 ,因为中国市场发育水平低 ,频繁的货币供给量波动会引起经济的大起大落。     

宏观经济景气波动对我国农产品价格的影响

我国农产品价格与宏观经济之间的联动性日益明显,宏观经济景气波动通过农产品产出、农产品需求和政府宏观调控等三种途径影响农产品价格,经济波动与农产品价格存在相互作用关系。在农产品产出传导路径上,经济波动刺激了农产品产出,影响了农产品价格的波动;在农产品需求传导路径上,经济增长促进了城镇居民收入的增加,购买力的加强,刺激了农产品价格的波动;在政府宏观调控传导路径上,经济增长使得国家广义货币供应量增加,货币的超发刺激了经济波动对农产品价格的冲击。     

中国产业结构变迁对经济增长和波动的影响

本文在测度产业结构合理化和产业结构高级化的基础上,构建了关于产业结构变迁与经济增长的计量经济模型,进而探讨了二者对经济波动的影响。研究结果表明:产业结构合理化和高级化进程均对经济增长的影响有明显的阶段性特征。相对而言,产业结构合理化与经济增长之间的关系具有较强的稳定性,而高级化则表现出较大的不确定性。产业结构合理化和高级化对经济波动的影响主要表现在不可预测的周期性波动方面,而它们的影响机制却截然不同。产业结构高级化是经济波动的一个重要来源,产业结构合理化则有助于抑制经济波动。总体上,现阶段我国产业结构合理化对经济发展的贡献要远远大于产业结构高级化。本文认为,政府在制定产业结构政策时,应在强调产业结构合理化的同时,积极突破制约产业结构高级化效应的限制条件,有效推进产业结构的高级化,充分发挥产业转型与升级对经济增长的持续推动作用。     

劳动力年龄结构对中国经济发展的影响

基于中国人口结构新特征,分析了劳动力年龄结构对中国经济发展的影响,在索罗经济增长模型的基础上扩展得到人口变量与经济变量的关系。通过建立面板结构向量自回归模型(PSVAR)发现,中国经济发展的波动与劳动力年龄结构的波动密切相关。其中,30～45岁劳动力占比的波动冲击对经济波动有正向影响,46～64岁劳动力占比的波动冲击对经济波动有负向影响,而15～29岁劳动力占比的波动冲击随着第三产业的发展对经济波动产生正向影响。使用Leslie模型方法对未来人口年龄结构进行预测。结果发现,若生育率逐渐升高,则未来青壮年劳动力的比例波动趋缓会对缓解经济波动起到一定的积极作用。最后,提出了完善生育政策,优化劳动力年龄结构的政策建议。     

增长·波动·机理—对我国社会主义经济运行机制的思考

经济过程中稳定持续的经济增长是难得经常出现的,而经济波动则为经济过程的常态。严重和连续的经济波动打乱了经济运转的正常秩序,给经济增长施加了巨大的压力。经济运行与经济波动本来是经济过程中两个不同断面。经济过程以空间为断面表现为经济运行,而以时间为断面则表现为经济波动。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.