人力资本投资、就业促进与社会保障

人力资本投资、就业促进既可以提高一国社会保障的供给能力,又可以相对减少对政府社会保障支出的需求。为构建社会主义和谐社会,加快建立和健全社会保障体系,提高财政支出中社会保障支出的比例是必需的,同时必须将人力资本投资和就业促进摆在优先地位。     

社会保障支出对城乡居民消费差距的门槛效应——基于地区差异与支出结构的分析

在城镇化视角下,通过理论模型推导,构建门槛面板模型,采用1997~2015年省际数据实证检验了社会保障支出对城乡居民消费差距的门槛效应。研究发现:在城镇化视角下,社会保障支出对城乡居民消费差距具有显著的门槛效应。在城镇化水平中级阶段,社会保障支出缩小了城乡居民消费差距;在城镇化水平高级阶段,社会保障支出拉大了城乡居民消费差距。分地区看,东中西部社会保障支出既存在城镇化水平的门槛效应,又存在地区差异。基于社会保障支出结构,社会保障各项目支出对城乡居民消费差距具有不同的门槛效应。此外,人力资本和城乡收入差距对城乡居民消费差距具有显著影响,人力资本负向影响城乡居民消费差距,城乡收入差距正向影响城乡居民消费差距。     

我国财政社会保障支出与居民消费关系的实证分析

基于1986－2008年数据,运用协整分析和Granger因果检验等计量经济学方法,对我国财政社会保障支出与居民消费之间的关系进行了实证研究。研究结果表明：我国社会保障支出与居民消费之间存在着长期均衡关系,社会保障支出对居民消费存在正向的显著影响。     

社会保障与人力资本积累:研究综述

一直以来,新古典经济学对社会保障的研究着眼于社会保障与储蓄率的关系,而人力资本理论为社会保障的研究拓宽了范围,将社会保障与人力资本投资联系起来.本文对目前的研究现状和主要观点进行了归纳总结,分三个方面综述了社会保障与人力资本的关系:社会保障与人力资本数量、社会保障与人力资本质量、社会保障管理与人力资本.基本结论主要有:无积累的现收现竹制降低生育率和劳动力流动率,但促进家庭人力资本投资和企业在职培训,从而提高经济中的人力资本水平;社会保障的管理重心应从财务收支平衡转向就业和人力资源管理,可以发挥社会保障从源头规避社会风险的功能.     

我国财政社会保障支出与居民消费关系的实证分析

基于1986～2008年数据,运用协整分析和Granger因果检验等计量经济学方法,对我国财政社会保障支出与居民消费之间的关系进行了实证研究,研究结果表明:我国社会保障支出与居民消费之间存在着长期均衡关系,社会保障支出对居民消费存在正向的显著影响.     

黑龙江省社会保障水平与经济增长的实证分析

随着我国人口老龄化程度的加剧,社会保障支出规模正在逐年扩大,那么,社会保障支出是否发挥了其应有的作用就成为了重要的问题。以1998—2011年黑龙江省GDP与财政社会保障支出的相关数据为样本,分析了黑龙江省社会保障水平的现状,并采用计量分析方法来界定经济发展对财政社会保障支出的影响程度。最终得出结论:应该加快我国社会保障体系的建设,完善社会保障制度,使经济发展与财政社会保障支出形成相互促进的关系,并且为建设社会主义和谐社会提供有力支持。     

吉林省社会保障支出与经济增长关系实证研究

采用吉林省1995-2008年的GDP和社会保障支出数据,通过计量经济的方法,研究吉林省社会保障支出与经济增长的相关关系,研究结果显示吉林省的经济增长与社会保障支出之间存在单向因果关系,即社会保障支出并不是经济增长的原因,而经济增长是社会保障支出增长的原因,在分析了其原因后,提出了相关建议.     

增长失衡与政府责任——基于社会性支出角度的分析

当前中国的发展出现了以国富与民生关系失衡为本质特征的增长失衡。本文从教育、医疗和社会保障等与民生有关的政府责任切入,指出当前中国与民生状况直接相关的政府社会性支出的不足,是导致增长失衡的重要原因。为此,政府应在提供教育、医疗和社会保障等方面承担起基本的责任,加快财政支出结构转型,增加社会性支出的比重,改善民生状况,纠正增长失衡;并通过社会性支出的增加,促进人力资本积累,推动增长路径的转变,实现经济长期健康发展。     

北京市人口老龄化及对社会保障支出的影响

北京市人口老龄化形势日益严峻,北京市老年人口的高龄化、空巢化和庞大的老年人口基数和发展速度使北京市的社会保障体系面临很大压力。就北京市人口老龄化程度对社会保障支出的定量关系分析做了探索,对北京市未来社会保障支出比重作了预测。对北京市人口老龄化特点和社会保障问题提出了建议。     

我国财政社会保障支出困境及出路

完善社会保障制度是政府的重要职能,而社会保障支出则是完善这一职能的物质基础。学术界通常把社会保障支出占财政支出的比重作为衡量社会保障支出水平的主要指标。政府不应只将其看作一种消费,而要看到财政社会保障支出对经济增长的乘数效应,确保社会保障支出的稳步增长。本文着重对财政社会保障支出现状及影响因素做出分析,并提出提高财政社会保障支出的政策建议。     

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.”     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

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.