风险是权力与金融

上海自贸区的设立,显示有关方面意识到,重商主义与权力的叠加,已经让中国市场经济举步维艰。 上海自贸区是中国以开放促改革的又一次全新尝试,通过上海自贸区进行要素自由流动、经济管理模式的深层次改革。     

关于河南自贸区发展探索研究——基于上海自贸区的经验总结

历经多年的发展,我国自贸区建设经历了一个从无到有、由少变多的重要过渡时期.而在当今的新形势下,自贸区的发展在我国对外开放、国际市场中也发挥着重要、不可或缺的作用.本文通过对上海自贸区丰富的改革经验分析,选择性复制上海经验,并结合河南自贸区的特色提出相应的政策建议,实现河南自贸区健康发展.     

上海自贸区对长三角地区经济的影响及对策

本文从上海自贸区的建设现状出发,分析了上海自贸区对我国其他地区尤其长三角地区的经济存在的政策示范、辐射带动、促进改革等方面的影响,认为长三角地区应抓住上海自贸区建设的契机,更新政府管理理念,坚持错位发展策略,参与上海自贸区建设,探索本地自贸区建设,以保证本地经济与上海自贸区协同发展.     

中国共产党的社会主义市场经济理论创新——庆祝中国共产党成立100周年

社会主义市场经济理论的来源和理论基础,主要是马克思主义政治经济学的商品经济理论,同时也参考借鉴了西方经济学的市场经济理论;社会主义市场经济理论是创新和发展而不是否定马克思主义政治经济学;社会主义市场经济理论创新的主要内容包括市场和市场经济的社会属性、市场经济不可逾越的历史地位、社会主义初级阶段发展市场经济的可能性和必要性、社会主义市场经济体制及其完善等理论;社会主义市场经济理论的进一步创新和发展,需要深入研究和解决十大问题,采取三个方面行之有效的方法.     

上海的机遇与责任

当年的深圳是一块试验田,如今的上海自贸区也是一块试验田,两者之于中国改革的意义都是巨大的。深圳开改革之先,打开了市场经济的门栏;如今的上海自贸区则承载着市场经济进一步开放的广度和深度的重任,力图能"在离岸金融创新的维度上,将中国经济带入到一个更深层次的改革阶段"。     

论科学发展观对中国特色社会主义经济建设的重要价值

科学发展观作为一套科学、完整的关于发展的系统化理论体系,为社会主义市场经济建设提供了根本指导思想,适应了社会主义市场经济建设的战略需要,保证了我国市场经济的社会主义性质,促进了市场经济和社会主义制度更好的结合,发展了我国社会主义市场经济的相关理论,对中国特色社会主义经济建设具有十分重大的价值。     

全球自贸区发展与中国自贸区建设北大核心CSSCISSCI

一、2015年全球自贸区的新发展 2015年无疑是全球自贸区发展历史上极为关键的一年．区域和双边自贸区加速发展。欧美发达国家,以及新兴经济体和发展中国家都在积极推动自贸协定的谈判,并且积极论证与潜在伙伴建设自贸区的可行性。     

非洲大陆自贸区成立背景下推进中非自贸区建设的建议

非洲大陆自贸区的正式启动,为推进中非自贸区建设提供了新机遇,中非经贸往来加速增长、发展诉求高度契合、规则基础建立将为推进中非自贸区建设提供动力.但受非洲国家间贸易自由化意愿不一致、非洲大陆自贸区谈判进展缓慢及贸易壁垒等因素的影响,中非自贸区建设面临多重挑战.中国应在总体策略、对非合作、双边自贸区建设及谈判推进方式等方面,充分借鉴中国—东盟自贸区建设的成功经验,合理平衡取予关系,积极参与非洲大陆自贸区建设,并行推进与非洲国家多边、双边自贸区建设,以先易后难的方式推进中非自贸区谈判.     

民间组织的培育与社会主义市场经济的发展

民间组织的发展与社会主义市场经济建设有着内在的联系.一方面,民间组织是社会主义市场经济发展的必然产物;另一方面,民间组织的发展也促进了社会主义市场经济体制的不断完善.当前,我国民间组织发展中存在的问题已制约着社会主义市场经济的健康发展.积极培育民间组织是提升我国社会主义市场经济发展质量的逻辑选择.     

关于上海自贸区建设的几点思考

在经济体制改革和市场经济推进的双重作用下,我国经济已经进入由量变到质变的发展转型期。面对我国现有经济增长模式、外贸环境变迁和国内各项改革的挑战,市场对金融、投资、航运、贸易等服务领域客观上提出了更高的要求,因此关键领域的决定性改革势在必行。上海自贸区切合国家需要,为我国关键领域的决定性改革打开了战略突破口。文章将在此背景下研究上海自贸区建设关键领域如何发挥自身的优势,探索发展模式,提出了几点思考建议。     

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.     

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.