澳门高端服务业:产业走向与发展效应

高端服务业是伴随全球产业结构调整及经济结构高级化而发展起来的现代服务产业。在澳门经济转型升级和城市竞争力提升中,高端服务业发展具有重要的战略地位。文章在探讨澳门高端服务业发展现状、特征及依据的基础上,采用数据包络分析方法 (DEA),对澳门高端服务业的发展效率进行了实证分析,提出了澳门高端服务业发展的政策路径。     

双创环境下发展科技服务业助推经济转型升级问题研究

科技服务业是现代服务业中的新兴产业,在促进经济转型升级中发挥着重要作用。双创环境下,科技服务业主要通过动力机制、利益机制和组织协调机制助推经济转型升级。以江苏省科技服务业为例,分析了当前科技服务业发展现状和存在的问题,探究了双创环境下江苏省发展科技服务业助推经济转型升级的路径,以期为科技服务业发展和经济转型升级提供参考。     

双创环境下发展科技服务业助推经济转型升级问题研究——以江苏科技服务业为例

科技服务业是现代服务业中的新兴产业,在促进经济转型升级中发挥着重要作用。双创环境下,科技服务业主要通过动力机制、利益机制和组织协调机制助推经济转型升级。以江苏省科技服务业为例,分析了当前科技服务业发展现状和存在的问题,探究了双创环境下江苏省发展科技服务业助推经济转型升级的路径,以期为科技服务业发展和经济转型升级提供参考。     

发展高端服务业的必要性及举措

高端服务业是处于服务业高端领域的特殊行业。发展高端服务业是经济稳定发展的重要支撑,是经济持续发展的必然选择,是经济转型升级的内在要求。为了更有效地促进高端服务业快速健康发展,应当探索发展高端服务业的有效路径,找准发展高端服务业的优势领域,创造发展高端服务业的有利条件。     

北京市高端服务业的内涵和外延

基于对高端服务业在中国经济结构及其升级转型中重要性的认识,通过系统分析国内外的相关研究,并结合首都的发展定位,对北京市高端服务业进行了概念界定。基于经济一体化和服务全球化的发展,借鉴欧洲工业标准的分类体系并参考北京现行的行业分类标准,建立了北京市高端服务业分类体系并明确了其产业范围。综合运用内容分析法和统计分析方法,确立了北京市高端服务业的7大重点行业,全面探析了北京市高端服务业的内涵和外延。     

生产性服务业外资对我国制造业升级发展的影响

生产性服务业外资通过直接为东道国制造业提供服务,促进东道国服务业和服务外包发展,吸引制造业外资进入等多种途径促进东道国制造业转型升级。我国生产性服务业外资数量相对较少,并且主要分布在中心城市,促进了中心城市服务业发展,提高了我国服务外包的竞争力,但对制造业转型升级无明显促进作用,甚至可能造成制造业发展的两极分化。我国应进一步扩大生产性服务业开放力度,增强生产性服务业外资与制造业的空间和产业关联度,大力利用服务外包,促进制造业转型发展。     

发达国家和地区发展现代高端服务业的经验启示

在知识经济背景下,全球产业结构呈现出向“服务型经济”的重大转变,服务业尤其是现代服务业的主导地位日益凸显.具有高知识属性、高附加值等显著特征的现代高端服务业,如近年来快速发展的信息服务、研发设计及专业和商务服务等,更是产业转型升级的重要突破方向.发达国家和地区在这些业态领域积累了丰富的发展经验、保持着领先的发展水平,为广东在经济新常态下,加快发展现代高端服务业、推动产业结构转型升级,提供了有益的经验借鉴.     

“十三五”背景下海南现代服务业发展策略探析

现代服务业是推动海南经济增长的重要引擎,但目前海南省现代服务业发展水平还比较低下,各县市发展很不均衡.为使海南省现代服务业又好又快发展,本文建议:继续推动传统服务业向现代服务业转型升级;积极培育新兴产业,例如大健康产业和会展服务业,并促使其与旅游业相融合;以高端制造业推动生产性服务业的发展;加快海南省城镇化进程;注重人才培养机制,完善人才引进机制.     

生产性服务业主导的产业融合——基于北京市投入产出表的实证分析

北京在进入服务经济、形成以生产性服务业为主导产业的产业结构之后,产业升级的主要动力在于以生产性服务业为主导,与其他产业形成全面的产业融合。文章运用投入产出数据,对生产性服务业主导的北京产业融合和产业关联进行了实证分析。北京服务业发展具有较强的自我增强效应。服务业发展对服务业尤其生产性服务业的消耗使用较为均衡,服务业自身初步形成了产业互动关联网络体系。制造业通过投入产出关联与服务业具有一定的融合互动程度,但层次水平有待提高。在实证分析基础上,提出了以生产性服务业主导的产业融合进一步促进北京产业升级的对策建议。第一,以高端制造业和高端服务业融合互动,提升产业核心竞争力;第二,以服务业自增强,促进服务业体系升级。     

服务业发展对天津经济的影响

随着经济的快速发展,三次产业所占比例、对经济的拉动等都发生了很大变化,经济发展方式已经开始转型,经济中心也开始向第三产业特别是现代服务业倾斜。本文基于天津市统计数据,通过对三次产业对经济增长的弹性、三次产业对劳动力就业弹性进行分析,研究经济发展方式转型下的天津市服务业。结果表明：天津市服务业对经济的拉动、对劳动就业的拉动能力强,并且还有很大的发展空间,经济的进一步发展,需要促进第三产业特别是现代服务业的发展。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.