“一带一路”沿线国家贸易网络结构特征及其对技术进步的影响——基于社会网络分析法的研究*

本文采用社会网络分析法探讨了2008—2018年“一带一路”沿线国家贸易网络结构特征,测算沿线国家贸易网络中心位置对技术进步的影响,并对不同收入国家进行异质性分析。研究发现：“一带一路”沿线国家整体贸易结构比较松散,意大利、土耳其、韩国、俄罗斯、中国和新加坡等国家（地区）位于网络核心,共有23个国家（地区）发挥“中介”或“桥梁”作用,影响着其余沿线国家之间的贸易联系;超过四成的沿线国家（地区）与非贸易伙伴国具有较强的间接贸易关系。贸易网络中心位置的提升能显著促进母国技术进步,间接贸易影响母国技术进步的边际效应大于直接贸易;中高等收入水平国家直接和间接贸易地位和贸易强度的提升均显著促进了技术进步,低等收入国家贸易强度的提升也能促进母国的技术进步。     

An integer-based blackman innovation index: Hypothesis,evidence, and implications

Blackman, Seligman, and Sogliero [4] factor analyzed U.S. industrial data on innovation-related variables and defined an “innovation index.” This index was strongly correlated with a parameter which measures the propensity of an industrial sector toward adoption of new technology within the classic Mansfield market substitution model [7].Extension of their analysis to cover a 22-year period, along with consideration of certain methodological issues, suggests that the index values for industries in their data base are not free to vary continuously. Instead, the innovation index for each of the industries can be linked with some fundamental value which lies at an integral number of units (i.e., 0, 1, 2, or 3) above an absolute zero. Such an integer structure may signal the existence of fundamental, quantitative relationships between the behaviors of diverse sectors toward innovation— including both research and development effort and adoption of new technology. Understanding such relationships should prove relevant both to efforts to enhance innovation in the private sector and to evaluating proposals for selective emphasis on particular sectors as part of any national “industrial policy.”     

The Meritocratic Elite vs. the Common Man: Income Inequality in the Affluent OECD Countries

Our goal is to highlight the relationship between vested interests of the meritocratic elite and the deteriorating situation of the common man. We provide an example of rising income inequality in selected OECD countries over the past thirty years. Income inequality is growing, despite the increase in labor productivity based on technological progress, which we prove by using robust panel regression models. Our findings could be explained by the effect of “extreme meritocracy” that describes a situation in which wages for “the working rich” are growing faster than their productivity, and creating wage stagnation for the middle-class workers.     

Energy intensity: Deindustrialization,composition, prices,and policies in U.S. states

This paper uses the historical experience of U.S. states to examine the reasons why energy intensity has declined in some places more than in others. In aggregate, U.S. energy per dollar of GDP declined 34 percent between 1997 and 2018, but across states the decline varied from 9 percent in Iowa to 52 percent in Washington State. I show that none of this variation is explained by either deindustrialization or the changing composition of states’ industrial sectors. Although some U.S. state policies are significantly correlated with these changes, they are not correlated in a way that explains the changing overall state energy intensities. Energy intensity declines do not appear to be a result of leakage to other states or countries and have not been associated with slower economic growth.     

技术进步偏向对要素收入份额的影响——基于中国工业行业数据的研究

本文利用CES生产函数考察了技术进步偏向与资本一劳动收入份额比值之间的关系,并利用中国工业1979—2011年的数据进行了实证分析。估计结果表明：中国工业的要素替代弹性大于0小于1;资本增强型技术进步变化率小于劳动增强型技术进步变化率,1987年后工业技术进步为劳动节约型的,资本一劳动收入份额比值提高;资本深化、技术进步偏向、外商直接投资以及国际贸易是我国工业资本收入份额持续上升、劳动收入份额持续下降的主要原因,其中劳动节约型技术进步对要素收入份额失衡的影响最大。工业要素分配份额的演变直接体现了国民收入分配格局的失衡,也间接拉大了我国居民之间的收入差距。     

The benefits and costs of the deferral of U.S. Taxes on retained earnings of controlled foreign corporations

This paper develops and applies a model to measure the effects of deferral on world and U.S. incomes. It is assumed that elimination of deferral would be accompanied by a compensating reduction in the U.S. corporate income tax rate which would leave the overall tax burden of corporations unchanged. The results of the model support several conclusions: Deferral has a positive net effect on world income, but has a negative effect on U.S. income; over two-thirds of the income gains of foreign countries due to deferral goes to developed or oil-exporting countries; and the Tax Reform Act of 1976 has roughly doubled the importance of deferral.     

Growing like mushrooms? Sectoral evidence from four large European economies

This paper follows a stream of literature on the empirics of sectoral growth rates, originated by Castaldi and Dosi (Income levels and income growth. Some new cross-country evidence and some interpretative puzzles. LEM Working Paper 2004-18, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy, 2004) on two-digit international manufacturing and service sectors, and by Sapio and Thoma’s (The growth of industrial sectors: theoretical insights and empirical evidence from U.S. manufacturing. LEM Working Paper 2006-09, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy, 2006) study on four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries. Our aim is to discuss the statistical properties of growth rates in light of a ’mushroom vision’ of growth. In our analysis, we focus on the growth of value added in NACE five-digit sectors in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom between 1995 and 2003. We find that the volatility of sectoral growth rates is negatively correlated with sectoral size, according to a power law, but with steeper slopes than for firms and U.S. sectors. Rescaled sectoral growth rates are well-described by a Laplace distribution in most years. The outcomes of this statistical analysis provide a further empirical foundation to a view of sectoral growth, wherein inter-firm correlations, market concentration, and inter-sectoral feedbacks play a major role.     

United States income inequality: The concept of countervailing power revisited

This article uses some of the conceptual infrastructure associated with J.K. Galbraith’s “countervailing power” argument to explore the deep history of U.S. income inequality. Two explanatory variables—institutional power and distributive conflict—have played an integral role in the shifting patterns of U.S. income inequality since the late nineteenth century. The “commodified” power of large firms, manifested in aggregate concentration and the markup, exacerbates inequality while the “countervailing” power of organized labor, manifested in union density and strike activity, mitigates inequality. One implication of this research is that U.S. income inequality is unlikely to diminish unless the labor movement (or a comparable social movement) is strengthened.     

Global Technology Policies for Economic Growth

With the end of the Cold War, nations throughout the world are placing ever greater emphasis on economic growth. Over the last 50 years, advances in technology have been the single most important factor in creating growth in many economies, and thus policies to promote technological innovation rank high on the list of priorities for both developed and developing countries. In general, as countries progress up the economic ladder, national R&D intensity, (i.e., R&D/GDP), tends to increase along with per capita income. In addition, nations move through a discernible sequence of technology policies from an initial focus on infrastructure, through a set of actions designed to encourage technology acquisition from more advanced economies, to comprehensive education and research agendas targeted to the creation and development of new technology. In the United States, national technology policy for economic growth focuses on education, building a 21st century infrastructure, and creating a business climate that encourages growth, technological innovation, and risk taking.Throughout the last 50 years there have been significant changes in the competitive position of nations. In recent years, U.S. corporations have regained some of the competitive leadership they lost in the 1980s. This has been accompanied by significantly increased R&D spending by U.S. industry, particularly in the information and health care related sectors. U.S. industry funding of R&D overtook that from the government in the early 1980s and accounts for almost two-thirds of the national total.     

REAL GDP IN PRE-WAR EAST ASIA: A 1934–36 BENCHMARK PURCHASING POWER PARITY COMPARISON WITH THE U.S.

This article provides estimates of purchasing power parity (PPP) converters for expenditure side GDP of Japan/China, Japan/U.S. and China/U.S. in 1934–36 through a detailed matching of prices for more than 50 types of goods and services in private consumption and about 20 items or sectors for investment and government expenditure. Linking with the earlier studies on the price levels of Taiwan and Korea relative to Japan, we derive the mid-1930s benchmark PPP adjusted per capita income of Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea at 32, 11, 23, and 12 percent of the U.S. level respectively. These estimates correct the consistent downward bias in East Asian income levels based on market exchange rate conversions. Compared with Angus Maddison's estimates based on the 1990 benchmark back-projection, our current-price based result are 18 and 44 percent lower for Japan and Korea, and 4 and 10 percent higher for Taiwan and China respectively in the mid-1930s. We develop a preliminary theoretical and empirical framework to examine the possible source of the biases in the back-projection method. The article ends with a discussion on historical implications of our findings on the initial conditions and long-term growth dynamics in East Asia.     

Computerization and immigration: Theory and evidence from the United States

Recent technological changes have been characterized as “routine-substituting” because they reduce demand for routine tasks and increase demand for analytical and service tasks. Little is known about how these changes have impacted immigration, or task specialization between immigrants and native-born individuals. In this paper, we show that such technological progress has attracted immigrants who increasingly specialize in manual-service occupations. We also suggest that openness to immigration attenuated the job and wage polarization faced by native-born from technological changes. We explain these facts with a model of technological progress and endogenous immigration. Simulations show that unskilled immigration attenuates the drop in routine employment proceeding from technological change, enhances skill upgrading for native-born and raises economy-wide productivity and welfare.     

Corporate profit tax,firm entry with unemployment,and income inequality

In this paper, we provide a general equilibrium analysis of corporate profit tax on income distribution, unemployment, and wage inequality. With firm dynamics in industrial sector, we identify a new channel through which profit tax affects income and wage inequality: profit tax cut will widen not only the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor, but also exacerbate the wage inequality of unskilled labor among different sectors. The welfare effect of profit tax cut depends on unemployment deepening (labor-distortion effect) and more manufacturing firms enter the market (business-creation effect), eroding the market share of incumbent firms (business-stealing effect).     

The Sri Lankan Unemployment Problem Revisited

High unemployment in Sri Lanka has been attributed to unrealistic expectations, to queuing for public sector jobs, and to stringent job security regulations. However, the empirical evidence supporting these explanations is weak. This paper analyzes individual records from the 1995 Labor Force Survey, and time series for wages in the formal and informal sectors of the economy. The paper rejects the unrealistic‐expectations hypothesis by comparing the impact of education on the actual wages of those who have a job and on the lowest acceptable wages of the unemployed. But it finds substantial rents associated with jobs in the public sector, and in activities protected by high tariffs or covered by job security regulations. A time‐series analysis of the impact of unemployment on wage increases across sectors suggests that many among the unemployed are waiting for “good” job openings, but are not interested in readily available “bad” jobs.     

NEW DEVELOPMENTS TOWARDS RESOLVING THE COMPANY-ESTABLISHMENT PROBLEM*

The paper begins by stating various aspects of the national economic accountant's “company-establishment problem.” Six possible approaches to the problem are briefly outlined. The paper concentrates on one approach based on new developments in business accounting theory and practice, namely divisional-reporting procedures. The division represents the smallest operating entity capable of reporting both a complete set of production (income) statistics and a set of related financial (balance-sheet) statistics. When companies are owned and controlled by the same interests, namely the enterprise, each division reports on an enterprise-wide basis. In this important case, the traditional company-establishment problem has an enterprise-division-establishment resolution. There is considerable emphasis on clarifying the issues needed for systematic development of divisional-reporting to meet the requirements of a national statistical agency. Key aspects are the provision of appropriate conceptual distinctions relating to statistical structure of corporate organizations and patterns of intercorporate ownership consolidation. Practical experience gained by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's line of business reporting program is also highlighted. Two tables show details with respect to a proposed divisional income statement and balance-sheet statement that a systematically developed division-reporting unit can provide. The tables are related to existing statistics yielded by traditional company- and establishment-reporting units. In effect the paper is part of a movement giving national economic accounting more microdata dimensions. Future research must integrate the proposed new statistical reporting unit within systems of national accounts presently constructed on the basis of a dual sectoring classification.     

How does technological innovation and diffusion affect inter-industry workers’ mobility?

Does technological change amount to accumulation of general, and so transferable, human capital? To approach this question I rely on a theoretical framework in which the “technology distance” between industries reduces inter-industry transferability of workers’ skill. Empirically, I use US panel data on individual intra-industry and inter-industry mobility decisions between 1982 and 1990, a period of rapid technological change in all manufacturing sectors, to estimate a mixed logit econometric specification that does not rely on the IIA assumption. I find support to the main idea that technological innovation and diffusion have different effects on workers’ industrial mobility patterns. “Knowledge spillovers”, differently from “rent spillovers”, indeed boost the chances of workers’ inter-industry mobility. Surprisingly, this is more consistently so in low-tech industries than in high-tech industries. Consistently with the expectations developed in the theoretical framework, in low-tech industries skilled workers respond more sharply to technology diffusion than unskilled workers.     

Technological Progress,Income Distribution,and The Explanation of Some Stylized Facts of Economic Growth

This paper examines the effects of technological progress in the framework of a specific-factor variant of the “dependent economy” model. We analyse, first, the effects of technological progress on income distribution, and secondly, its effects on commodity prices, and the structure of production. Our model predicts that, services must be more expensive in the country with higher per capita GDP, and that labor productivity in manufactures is positives associated with the per capita income, etc. The model can also explain several other stylized facts of economic growth. [O33, F11]     

Job Polarization and Task‐Biased Technological Change: Evidence from Sweden, 1975–2005

In this paper, we show that between 1975 and 2005, Sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest‐ and lowest‐paid jobs compared to middle‐wage jobs. The most popular explanation for such a pattern is the hypothesis of task‐biased technological change, where technological progress reduces the demand for routine middle‐wage jobs but increases the demand for non‐routine jobs located at the tails of the job–wage distribution. However, our estimates do not support this explanation for the 1970s and 1980s. Stronger evidence for task‐biased technological change, albeit not conclusive, is found for the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, there is both a statistically and economically significant growth of non‐routine jobs and a decline of routine jobs. However, results for wages are mixed; while task‐biased technological change cannot explain changes in between‐occupation wage differentials, it does have considerable explanatory power for changes in within‐occupation wage differentials.     

TAXES,REGULATIONS AND THE CORPORATE DEBT MARKET*

Outstanding credit market debt in the U.S. corporate sector increased dramatically over the second half of the 20th century. During this period, tax rates on dividend distributions and corporate income decreased. This article argues that the observed decline in dividend and corporate income tax rates generated an improvement in the collateral value of corporate assets and led to an increase in U.S. corporate debt. To analyze this conjecture, we build a general equilibrium model with enforcement constraints that induce endogenous limits on debt financing. We find that the model can account for the time‐series features of U.S. corporate debt data.     

Micro and macro dynamics: Industry life cycles,inter-sector coordination and aggregate growth

Technological change directly affects economic growth by exploiting and exploring technological opportunities, thus determining productivity growth and income. However, technological change also affects the composition of the economic system, which itself constitutes an important prerequisite for economic growth. The first aim of this paper is to show that the growing variety of the economic system, determined by the emergence of new products and services and leading to new industrial sectors, can allow the long term continuation of economic development, even when the employment creating capacity of individual sectors falls. The second aim is to illustrate the impact of micro variables on the meso-level, that is, on the sectoral composition of an economy, as well as on its macro-economic performance.      

Intersectoral default contagion: A multivariate Poisson autoregression analysis

This paper analyzes credit rating default dependencies in a multisectoral framework. Using Mergent's FISD database, we study the default series in the U.S. over the last two decades, disaggregating defaults by industry-sector group. During this period, two main waves of default occurred: the implosion of the “dot-com” bubble and the global financial crisis. We estimate a Multivariate Autoregressive Conditional Poisson model according to the biweekly number of defaults that occurred in different sectors of the economy from 1996 to 2015. We discuss the contagion effect between sectors in two ways: the degree of transmission of the probability of default from one sector to another, i.e., the “infectivity” of the sector, and the degree of contagion of one sector from another, i.e., the “vulnerability” of the sector. Our results show differences between the sectors' relations during the first and second part of our sample. We add some exogenous variables to the analysis and evaluate their contribution to the goodness of fit.