浙江省创意指数及指标体系研究

创意经济作为一种新的经济形态,其活力、竞争力以及对经济发展的贡献迫切需要一种新的、科学的指标体系进行评价。在综述全球创意经济竞争力指数体系研究(包括Florida的3Ts指数、欧洲创意指数、全球创意指数、香港创意指数、台湾创意绩效指标系统和上海城市创意指数)的基础上,结合浙江省创意经济发展的特点,构建了浙江省创意指数的基本框架,并通过分析促进创意经济发展的关键要素,提出了产业政策决策的建议。     

中国创意经济基础性研究及展望

创意经济是经济增长的引擎、文化传承的动力、社会和谐的稳定器.各国对创意经济的理解和对创意经济理论模型的构建也越来越清晰和具有深度.本文在传统研究框架的基础上,对创意经济的内涵、范畴和关键点进行了综述和探讨,提出创意经济不仅是经济现象,还是包含社会、文化和环境等众多因素共同作用的系统;它不仅是宏观经济特征和方向的体现,也贯穿于微观和中观的经济活动和社会活动中.文章的最后在此基础上为中国创意经济的发展提出了未来研究方向的思考和建议.     

环渤海地区民营企业发展创意产业的优势与对策分析

在全球创意经济勃兴的年代,创意产业的发展对环渤海地区经济提速和一体化发展具有重要的战略意义。在创意产业的发展过程中,民营企业具有重要的推动作用。文章在分析环渤海地区创意产业发展现状的基础上,分析了民营企业发展创意产业的优势与可行性,剖析了该区域民营企业发展创意产业存在的问题,进而提出了相应的对策建议。     

创意产业勃兴与创意阶层崛起

创意产业已成为世界各国经济增长的新引擎,创意阶层是经济增长的关键。创意产业的发展和创意阶层的崛起都依赖于创意人才的培育和吸引,这是实现城市经济繁荣重要源泉。     

科技创新、人力资本对创意经济的影响研究

创意经济被认为是未来经济发展的主要形式,对结束我国依靠投资和外贸驱动的粗放式经济增长具有重要意义。运用随机前沿函数SFA方法,对我国创意经济全要素生产率的增长和变动状况进行分析,并运用相关计量经济学模型比较分析人力资本、技术进步对创意经济增长和发展的贡献。通过分析发现,人力资本是推动创意经济增长的主要动力。实用型创新对创意经济具有正向影响作用,但水平较低。外观创新对创意经济增长具有较强的拉动作用。发明创新对创意经济增长有一定的反向作用。要使我国创意经济持续增长,还需相关政策支持和推动。     

创意产业的经济学属性分析

创意产业或创意经济可谓是当今世界最为炙手可热的概念。自20世纪90年代英国最早提出创意产业这一概念，经过十几年的发展，创意产业已经在英国、美国、欧洲、日本、东亚以及中国的广大地区迅速蔓延开来，并已成为信息时代之后又一个席卷全球的经济现象。文章结合中国的实际情况。从经济学的角度认识创意产业，探析创意产业的经济属性，以分析创意产业发展的方法与问题解决方案。     

创意经济的广虚向度

从广义虚拟经济视角看,创意经济创造的价值是满足人们心理需求的虚拟价值,其终极产品往往并不体现为物质产品,而往往体现为一种满足人们心理需求的体验过程;在创意经济的价值循环中,与传统的物质生产的生产、分配、消费循环不同,它只是把创意变成了可供人们消费的信息,是信息流构成了此类经济活动的循环.现代经济的第一位的特点就是同质化、规范化.创意经济追求产品差异性,是以异化为主要诉求的.这就决定了文化创意经济本质上一种后现代经济.工业时代的同化是一个陷阱,它使人类趋向"同而不和",而不是"和而不同",而和而不同意义上"异化"才是走出全球困境的必由之路.我们现在开发的人力资本仅仅是冰山的一角,人类社会的发展将不可避免地依赖人力资本.这给我们的体制和文化提出了更高的挑战.我们的经济系统也需要一个能够充分驾驭和管理它的机构和社会体系,否则就无法完全释放自己的潜能.企业应当从创意经济业态中获得对财富革命的新认知,确认财富与信息的关联机制,从而创造自己的创意的文化、创意的用人和分配机制、创意的财富认同方式,创意产业化的方法,并开拓自己创意的领域.     

基于特征分析的城市创意经济发展支点研究

通过对创意经济经典文献的分类综述,文章对创意经济的主要特征进行了分析。在此基础上提出创意经济的发展受到教育水平、经营环境以及媒体平台三大支点的影响和制约。通过采集跨国横截面数据进行结构方程建模,进一步检验了三者对消费性创意经济和生产性创意经济的支撑原理。实证说明,三大支点对于创意经济的发展具有不同程度的正向影响。最终依据实证结论,给出了我国城市发展创意经济的政策建议。     

创意产业的投融资分析

21世纪是创意主导的世纪,创意产业已在全球掀起浪潮。资金是创意产业起步的基础争件,投融资问题已成为很多国家和城市振兴其创意产业的瓶颈。本文从创意产业投资的特点出发,系统探讨了创意产业的投融资模式,并对融资流程进行了简单描述．同时针对我国创意产业的发展现状提出相应的对策建议。     

长三角发展创意产业问题及对策分析

近几年,创意产业在中国迅速崛起,尤其在长三角地区,创意产业成了经济中的新热点.但是长三角在发展创意产业过程中仍存在诸多问题,比如观念需要更新、要更加注重文化和科技、聚集优秀创意人才,打造原创品牌等,本文对这四大问题分别提出了对策分析.     

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.