洞庭湖湿地生态系统服务功能价值评估

在实地调查和试验的基础上，依据资源经济学和生态经济学的理论和方法，针对洞庭湖湿地资源的特点，对洞庭湖湿地的生态服务功能价值——直接利用价值和间接利用价值进行了货币化评估，由此得出洞庭湖湿地的生态服务功能价值为80．72亿元；其中调蓄洪水的价值为37．12亿元，占45．99％；研究结果表明，洞庭湖湿地生态服务功能价值主要表现在调蓄洪水、供水和调节气候等方面的价值。因此，只有合理开发洞庭湖湿地资源，保护好洞庭湖区湿地生态环境，才能实现洞庭湖区湿地资源的可持续利用，保证湖区经济的可持续发展。     

如何加强祁连山自然保护区管理？

甘肃祁连山国家级自然保护区分布有丰富的森林、草地和湿地及冰川资源,发挥着重要的水源涵养、调节气候、保持水土、保护生物多样性等重要生态服务功能。保护好祁连山北坡自然资源和自然环境,发挥多种生态服务功能,维护生物多样性,是祁连山自然保护区的主要任务。建区以来,祁连山自然保护区管理工作取得了显著成效,但也存在不少困难和问题,严重影响保护区建设发展。     

南昆山生态旅游区的环境质量评价

通过对南昆山生态旅游区的实地调查、监测和资料的收集,根据景区资源分布和旅游开展的实际情况对南昆山生态旅游区进行功能分区,建立相应指标体系,对景区自然环境质量各单项指标进行分析.分析结果可为南昆山生态旅游环境容量管理提供理论基础和数据支撑,进而为南昆山生态旅游区的可持续开发提供参考.     

县域土地利用生态系统服务价值评估研究——以内蒙古和林格尔县为例

土地利用生态系统服务价值是土地资源价值的组成部分。随着社会经济的发展,土地的生态功能和生态价值日益受到关注。基于内蒙古和林格尔县1997～2007年的土地利用变化数据,运用经济学和环境科学的评估方法并借鉴了科斯坦萨(Costanza)和谢高地等人的评价模型,评估了和林格尔县土地利用生态系统服务价值的变化情况。研究结果表明:1997～2007年和林格尔县土地里利用生态系统直接服务价值逐年增长,间接服务价值呈现出"先增后减"的变化趋势,土地利用生态系统服务价值与GDP具有一定的相关性。研究结果不仅量化了土地资源生态价值,也可为今后制定土地利用政策和构建土地生态补偿机制提供科学依据和支撑。     

论生态价值的实质

生态价值的源泉是生态系统的服务功能。从生态服务功能的产生或供给来看，是纯自然的，从生态服务功能的利用或需求来看，是纯人类的。根据价值的哲学概念和经济学中的传统理论，对生态价值的自然范畴和人类范畴进行分析．可得出生态价值的实质就是人类社会系统对自然生态系统服务功能客观需要的主观价值反映。它反映着人类社会系统和自然经济系统两个整体之间的关系．是在一定技术条件下人与物的关系。     

新疆平原地区森林生态系统服务功能间接经济价值比较

本文利用多种生态经济学方法,估算了新疆各地州平原人工林和胡杨林的生态系统服务功能的间接经济价值,比较了这两类林地的生态系统服务功能的经济价值差异,并分析了同种森林生态系统中不同服务功能的经济价值特征。通过这些比较和分析,为生态系统的保护重点及生态规划提供了依据。     

陕西省高速公路生态服务功能价值的研究

以水土保持学、生态学、生态经济学理论为指导,在确定了各评价指标计算方法的基础上,研究了陕西省不同区域高速公路水土保持的生态服务功能价值。可以看出各个区域高速公路水土保持措施的总生态服务功能价值和单位里程生态服务功能价值变化并不一致,总生态服务功能价值反映了高速公路水土保持措施对整个区域生态环境贡献的大小,单位里程生态服务功能价值则反映了高速公路水土保持措施对生态环境贡献率的高低。     

生态资源价值观念理论基础初探

长期以来,人们在旧的商品价值观念指导下,一直认为自然资源和环境资源(统称生态资源)没有价值。人们在生产中只重视眼前的经济效益而忽视长远的生态效益,利用和破坏生态资源不予补偿,使得掠夺破坏自然资源、肆无忌惮地污染人类生存环境的现象普遍发生、屡禁不止。因此生态资源价值问题乃是目     

浅述生态系统服务功能价值的估算方法

生态系统服务功能价值估算已成为生态学、生态经济学、环境经济学领域的研究热点和前沿,在生态系统服务功能含义、价值构成研究的基础上,系统地总结了目前关于生态系统服务功能价值进行定量评估的方法———实际市场评估技术、替代市场法、假想市场法等。     

生态经济学源流

<正> 生态经济学是国际上近一、二十年来出现的新兴边缘学科,至今还没有形成完整的理论体系。然而,由于它关系到当今人们的生产和生活、关系到人类未来的生存和发展,近年来许多国家,都在努力探索,积极研究,不少学者发表了大量有关生态经济的文章和专著。无论在生态经济学基本理论研究方面如人类经济活动与自然生态的关系、合理利用自然资源和保护环境的关系等,还是在部门生态经济研究方面如森林生态经济、农田生态经济等,以及在生态经济学的应用方面如生态技术经济、生态经济数学模型、生态经济技术管理等,都取得了一些成果。值得注意的是,生态经济学的发展,与环境经济学相互交叉,与资源经济学密     

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.