Policy Discrimination with and without Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility

Can the Pareto criterion guide policymakers who do not know the true model of the economy? If policymakers specify ex ante preferences for agents, then Pareto improvements from a distorted status quo are usually possible, and with more commodities than states, one can implement almost every Pareto optimum. Unlike the standard second welfare theorem, planners cannot dictate allocations: agents must trade. Unfortunately ex ante preferences impose interpersonal comparisons. If policymakers merely aim to maximize some social welfare function then optimal policies form an open set; hence small changes in the environment do not necessitate any policy response. Planners with symmetric information about agents can sometimes intervene without making interpersonal comparisons.     

DEALING WITH UNCERTAINTY: ROBUST RULES IN MONETARY POLICY

We argue that in seeking to insure against model uncertainty, monetary policy makers are often ready to trade ex post performance for greater certainty in the outcome. They thus look for rules that although not optimal ex post, have certain properties that qualify them as robust. We apply first, Gul's approach of ‘disappointment’ aversion to describe policy makers' aversion to uncertainty and then define the properties the notion of ‘robustness’ entails. With these two tools we then link the desirability of such robust rules to the degree of policy makers' aversion to uncertainty. We thus show that provided such robust rules exist, a larger degree of disappointment aversion leads to a greater emphasis on robustness in policy implementation.     

产业集群的驱动因素分析及政策建议

产业集群是一种世界性的经济现象。中国产业集群发展还在起步阶段,对产业集群驱动因素的分析,有助于发展、提升产业集群的竞争优势,加快区域经济的发展。     

Environmental quality indicators: Background,principles and examples from Norway

The need for a simple and general overview of the development in the state of the environment has led to work on environmental indicators in several countries and international organizations. Except for the basic common requirement of providing an overview, the works vary a great deal with regard to final aim, target groups, classification and, hence, choice of indicators. This paper gives an overview of the work carried out in the Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway within this field, with emphasis on the basic principles behind the choice of indicators. A hierarchical system of indicator sets is proposed, and examples of indicators are presented. Also, a brief overview of work carried out elsewhere is included.     

Environmental tax policy in a model of growth cycles

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to consider environmental taxation which would control emissions of firms in a model of growth cycles. In the model presented below, the economy may experience two phases of growth and environmental quality: “the no-innovation growth regime” and “the innovation-led growth regime”. Aggregate capital and environmental quality remain constant in the no-innovation growth regime, while they perpetually increase in the innovation-led growth regime. The paper shows that the tax plays a key role in determining whether the economy stably converges to one of the two regimes or fluctuates permanently between them. It also shows that there is a critical level of the tax and that the economy obtains higher growth rates of capital and environmental quality by raising (or reducing) the tax if the initial tax is below (or above) the critical level. Received: April 2, 2001; revised version: March 21, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This research reported here was conducted within the research project “Project on Intergenerational Equity” at Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. I am deeply grateful to an anonymous referee for his or her insightful comments, which greatly improved the paper. I also thank Hiroshi Honda, Yasuo Maeda, Yuji Nakayama, and participants in workshops at Hitotsubashi University, Kyoto University, Nagoya University, Osaka University, University of Tsukuba, Yokohama National University, and University of Tokyo for their valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine.     

国有股权重、政策性负担与绩效——国有银行战略引资方案探析

本文结合当前国有银行战略引资的改革背景,构建银行业混合寡占、国有银行混合持股的古诺竞争均衡模型,研究认为战略引资后的均衡股权结构与国有银行所承担的政策性负担及私有银行数量密切相关;国有银行政策性负担与私有银行的经营绩效正相关,但从整体来看则损害了社会总福利.另外,政策性负担不影响市场可容纳的最大银行数量,但会影响达到这一数量时国有银行的股权结构.     

Implementation of land and ecosystem accounts at the European Environment Agency

The European Environment Agency has started the implementation of a programme of land use and ecosystem accounts, following the System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) guidelines of the United Nations. The purpose is to integrate information across the various ecosystem components and to support further assessments and modelling of these components and their interactions with economic and social developments. This programme reflects the increasing demand for environmental policy integration in Europe, both vertically through thematic policies as well as horizontally across policies in those sectors that contribute most to environmental impacts. The construction of land and ecosystem accounts is now feasible due to continuous improvements in monitoring, collecting and processing data and progress with the development of statistical methods that facilitate data assimilation and integration. The accounts are based on explicit spatial patterns provided by comprehensive land cover accounts that can be scaled up and down using a 1 km² grid to any type of administrative region or ecosystem zone (e.g., river basin catchments, coastal zones or bio-geographic areas). Land cover accounts have been produced for 24 countries in Europe and first results published in the European Environment State and Outlook2005 report of the EEA.¹     

Regulatory and environmental effects on public transit efficiency: a mixed DEA-SFA approach

This paper assesses the impact of regulatory and environmental factors and statistical noise on the efficiency of public transit systems within a DEA-based framework. Using a panel of Italian companies, we implement a DEA-SFA mixed approach based on [H.O. Fried et al. (2002) Journal of Productivity Analysis, 17(1–2), 157–174] to decompose DEA inefficiency measures into three components: exogenous effects, managerial inefficiency and stochastic events. Besides providing evidence on the determinants of input-specific efficiency differentials across companies, the results point out that managerial skills play a minor role, and emphasize the relevance of regulatory policies aimed at replacing cost-plus subsidization with high-powered incentive contracts as well as improving environmental conditions of public transit networks.      

国际资本流动对中国货币政策影响的实证研究

在开放经济的"三元冲突"中,中国选择了固定汇率,较严格的资本管制和较大的货币政策独立性,即用少量货币政策独立性的丧失换取有限度的资本流动.但在这种组合下,随着我国资本流动规模的扩大,货币政策独立性也将进一步丧失.对于中国,货币政策的自主权至关重要,除非有能力继续维持更严格的资本管制,我国必须逐步扩大汇率的浮动区间.     

环境会计计量构架、方法及其应用研究

环境会计计量困难是制约环境会计推行的关键。本文构建了环境会计计量构架,以此为基础从企业资源环境的产权界定、实物计量、货币计量、货币计量方法在会计系统中的应用四个环节研究环境会计计量。