建立城镇贫困人口医疗救助制度的思考

一、建立并实施城镇医疗救助制度的意义 1.实施城镇医疗救助制度是实现健康服务公平性的重要途径.我国的健康服务现阶段最为突出的问题是公平性较差,贫困人口对医疗资源不能与非贫困人口一样享有.世界卫生组织在《2000年世界卫生报告》中,对所有成员国卫生系统的运行及绩效进行了评比与排序,中国在"健康服务筹资的公平性"这项指标上得分列倒数第四,这不能不说是对我们强烈的冲击和警示.     

政府绩效评估与绩效预算

政府绩效评估既包括对政府职能的综合绩效评估,也包括对政府各部门履行职能的经济性、效率性、效益性和公平性进行的评估。而与绩效预算高度相关联的是对政府各职能部门的绩效评估。二者互为前提,互相促进。本文在对我国实施绩效预算改革的难点和条件进行细致分析的基础上,提出我国的政府绩效评估和绩效预算改革应该本着“积极试点,分步实施,逐步推进”的原则,先选择部分部门和支出项目试点,尝试将绩效评估的结果与部门预算编制相结合,逐步建立与我国市场经济体制改革相适应的政府绩效评估和绩效预算制度。     

我国农村社会救助体系建设成就与问题

随着我国经济与社会的发展,农村社会救助对社会稳定的维护作用越来越明显.因此,应该充分发挥农村社会救助作为农村社会保障第一道安全网的保障作用,从而减少农村贫困群体的比重,使我国社会救助事业得以发展.本文首先阐述农村社会救助体系建设已取得的成就,然后提出目前我国农村社会救助体系建设存在的问题,最后针对当前的国情,提出进一步健全社会救助法律法规、完善农村社会救助的基层管理、加强对资源的整合、农村社会救助资金筹集渠道多元化、统筹城乡发展等政策建议,从而建立有效的监督机制.     

世界银行项目绩效评估及其启示

世界银行在其发展过程中形成了较为成熟的项目绩效评估体系。文章将从项目绩效评估机构、项目绩效评估方式、项目绩效评估标准三个方面分析世界银行的项目绩效评估体系,以期为完善我国的公共项目绩效评估提供一定的借鉴。     

国外医疗救助的实践与成功经验

国际社会非常重视对弱势群体的医疗救助。本文从法规建设、资格认定、项目开发、资金筹措、社会参与五个方面，介绍了国外医疗救助的成功实践。国外医疗救助的经验对我国医疗救助城乡一体化具有借鉴的意义和启示的作用。     

国外社会救助的经验和中国社会救助的未来发展

建立和完善社会救助制度,是解决贫困人口生活问题的重要举措,是实现社会团结和公平正义的重要切入点.世界各国在各自的历史发展中形成了各具特色的运行模式和制度安排.本文在研究欧洲部分国家社会救助理论和实践的基础上,结合探究中国社会救助制度建设的历史经验,对中国社会救助的原则、理念和发展模式进行了思考,提出中国社会救助制度模式应当具有公平性、效率性、流动性和发展性等功能特质.     

论我国的社会救助标准

社会救助标准在我国社会救助体系中处于核心地位,社会救助标准制定的科学性和执行力直接关系到社会救助制度在实践中的有效性和生命力.针对我国社会救助标准所存在的问题,需要深化给付标准的认识,从标准的公平性、标准的充足性、救助标准的针对性等方面完善社会救助标准,充分发挥社会救助制度实际效用,保障弱势群体的基本权益.     

海外横向并购能否提升公司绩效?

本文以发生海外横向并购的20家A股制造业上市公司作为研究样本,采用因子分析、配对样本t检验和非参数检验等分析方法考察了海外横向并购对样本公司绩效的影响.经验分析结果表明:在发生海外横向并购后,我国制造业上市公司的绩效水平并未显著提升,而且很多公司的绩效水平出现了较大的下滑.     

我国低保资金绩效评估之思考

建立符合我国国情的城乡低保绩效管理体制和一套完善的低保资金绩效考核指标体系,是切实增强低保政策实施的公平性、公正性和有效性的必然要求,也是进一步提升低保资金科学化精细化管理水平的有效途径。我国一些地区已经开展了城乡低保绩效评估工作,取得了很多经验,但也存在一些问题。今后应该在指标体系精细化、多元化以及评价方法科学化、评价结果运用合理化上下工夫,建立城乡低保资金绩效评估长效机制,更好地保障和改善民生,解决广大城乡困难群众的基本生活问题。     

论新公共管理下的政府绩效评估

政府绩效评估是一种以结果为本的控制,是一种服务和顾客至上的管理机制。西方新公共管理下的政府绩效评估经验很值得借鉴。     

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.