长株潭城市群用地扩展下的用地效益分析

通过分析长株潭城市群近五年来城市用地增长弹性系数以及土地利用效益的变化情况,发现在人口不断增长,用地规模日益扩张的背景下,城市群的用地增长速度不一,并且用地扩展过快,用地效益偏低。城市用地规模过小或过大,均不能实现土地利用效益的最大化,因此,在现有的规模上集约利用土地,充分挖掘土地利用潜力,提高综合土地利用效益是必须解决的问题。     

我国特大城市地域扩展中用地效益的初步研究

基于我国100万人口以上的特大城市建国后的历史统计资料，分析我国城市地域扩展的类型：迅速发展型，较快扩张型，一般发展型，缓慢发展型。并选用单位土地产出，土地利用效益变化幅度以及单位面积增加值区位商等指标分析了我国特大城市土地利用中的用地效益问题。最后针对城市的扩展模式与城市的用地效益评估指标体系等问题，提出：①土地不是经济增长的主导要素；②完全市场化的用地机制可以有效保证城市土地整体的效益水平；③我国的城市用地相对于国外而言仍有增长潜力。所以，可选择的政策路径是：①政府不应是城市化的主导力量；②政府应该尽可能获取完整准确的城市统计资料；③土地产权的界定应该明确；④加强基础项目建设,为土地进一步释放潜能提供支持。     

基于层次分析法的土地利用效益评价——以安庆市迎江区为例

作为衡量土地资源利用可持续性的重要标度,土地利用效益评价是近年来国内外城市土地研究的热点之一.本文主要分析了安庆市迎江区土地利用效益各级评价指标,确立了土地利用效益评价指标由土地利用的社会效益、经济效益以及生态效益3个一级指标和12个二级指标组成,由同层指标的相对重要度组成判断矩阵,并由判断矩阵计算被比较评价指标的相对权重.通过实例分析,发现采用层次分析法所得出的评价权重结果在实施效益评价中有较好的适用性.     

黑龙江省煤炭城市土地利用综合效益时空变异分析

定量分析和评价煤炭城市土地利用综合效益并确定其空间分布,为煤炭城市集约合理利用土地提供科学依据。以黑龙江省煤炭城市为例,以影响城市土地利用综合效益的土地投入效益、土地利用效益、土地产出效益和土地生态效益为要素层,构建黑龙江省煤炭城市土地利用综合效益评价指标体系,运用最优组合赋权法确定指标权重,采取多目标综合评价法,对2002—2007年土地利用综合效益进行定量分析。结果表明,黑龙江省煤炭城市6年间土地利用综合效益呈上升趋势。土地投入效益、土地利用效益、土地产出效益和土地生态效益对土地利用综合效益影响存在一定的差异,土地利用协调度呈现先上升后下降的趋势,土地利用协调度的下降将成为土地利用综合效益进一步增长的障碍。     

基于文献的城市土地集约利用现状研究

随着我国城市化进程加速发展,城市用地扩张迅速,我国经济增长方式面临由粗放经济向集约经济的根本性转变。纵观目前城市土地集约利用研究的现状,从文献总结的角度出发,文章分析了目前城市土地利用中存在的问题,阐述了城市土地集约利用的内涵与指导思想,探讨了城市土地集约利用的影响因子与理论基础,并归纳其研究思路、方法与评价指标选取的原则,指出实现城市土地集约利用的途径,最后对城市土地集约利用的研究进行了展望。     

呼和浩特市土地利用效益区域差异分析

结合呼和浩特市土地利用实际,从经济效益、社会效益和生态效益三方面构建土地利用综合效益评价指标体系,以呼和浩特市各旗县和市辖区的土地利用数据为基础,采用主客观组合赋权法确定指标权重,运用综合指数模型计算效益评价分值,对呼和浩特市土地利用效益进行综合评价,分析其区域差异情况。研究结果表明,呼和浩特市整体土地利用处于较低效状态;各旗县区的土地利用效益区域差异显著,基于对评价结果的分析,提出集约高效利用土地的对策。     

晋城市城市土地集约利用评价研究

土地集约利用是我国土地资源管理长期坚持的战略方针,科学评价城市土地的集约利用水平是一个亟待解决的问题。结合山西省晋城市的实际情况,通过多因素综合评价模型对其城市土地集约利用水平进行评价。综合土地投入及土地利用的经济效益、社会效益和生态效益等四个方面,构建了由11个评价指标组成的城市土地集约利用评价指标体系,其中各指标的权重由熵值法来确定;以晋城市2006—2013年数据为例进行评价,结果表明晋城市土地集约利用处于中低水平,还有较大改进空间,同时基于评价结果提出了相应的对策建议。     

城市用地规模扩张的灰色关联度分析

文章从分析城市用地规模的变化及其影响因素入手,利用灰色理论测算了城市用地规模变化和各因素的关联度,并结合我国城市土地利用的实际提出了相应的政策建议。     

直觉语言多准则决策方法在土地整理项目社会效益评价中的应用

由于土地整理项目的社会效益存在的不确定性,采用区间直觉语言的方法来求解评价指标的权重,通过文献整理和分析,构建了土地整理项目社会效益评价指标体系,并确定体系中的定性指标和定量指标。在此基础上对土地整理项目的社会效益评价进行评估和分析。结果表明:农村社会面貌影响指数评价较高,土地资源合理利用指标评价一般,农村社会保障指标评价较差。     

基于TOPSIS方法的土地利用综合效益评价

在TOPSIS方法下,充分考虑土地投入和土地产出,结合变异系数法确定权重,构造农用地、建设用地和土地利用综合效益评价模型,对我国31个省(市、自治区)2008—2010年的农用地综合效益、建设用地综合效益、土地利用综合效益进行定量评价。研究表明:①我国土地利用效益偏低,2010年全国平均土地利用综合效益值仅约0.28;②我国土地利用"成本投入—效益产出"比过高;③我国地域差异显著,农用地综合效益东北>东部>中部>西部,建设用地综合效益东部>中部>西部>东北。在此基础上,提出了土地高效益利用的对策与建议。     

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.     

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.     

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     

Types of technology

Technology is a concept rife with confusion. Here, I argue that technologies can be distinguished as a combination of type of producer and an idealized artefact life history. Using this definition, a number of technologies are identified. The first technology historically, in the Protostomes, was the production of individual or family dwellings. Next came objects such as spider webs for trapping prey. Stigmergy followed, with the social insects, as a collective endeavour to construct a mega-structure using simple rules of accretion. Some birds and primates began to make tools, or simple technological objects whose function is closely related to their form. Humans are distinguished by their ability to make machines. Traditional technology took place once people voluntarily organised into groups with specialised knowledge to produce more complex objects and structures. Monumental objects like ceremonial pyramids came with the command economies of the early agrarian societies, which also resulted in a new category of artefact, the network. Finally, with modern civilizations came ad hoc accretion, or population-level adding-on, to make truly complex technological systems. Developing a theoretical framework within which artefacts, production processes and ways of interacting with them are identified should help the study of technology to become more scientific.