Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

Non-farm entrepreneurship in rural sub-Saharan Africa: New empirical evidence

We report on the prevalence and patterns of non-farm enterprises in six sub-Saharan African countries, and study their performance in terms of labor productivity, survival and exit, using the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). Rural households operate enterprises due to both push and pull factors and tend to do so predominantly in easy-to-enter activities, such as sales and trade, rather than in activities that require higher starting costs, such as transport services, or educational investment, such as professional services. Labor productivity differs widely: rural and female-headed enterprises, those located further away from population centers, and businesses that operate intermittently have lower levels of labor productivity compared to urban and male-owned enterprises, or enterprises that operate throughout the year. Finally, rural enterprises exit the market primarily due to a lack of profitability or finance, and due to idiosyncratic shocks.     

Impacts of seasonal patterns of climate on recurrent fluctuations in tourism demand: Evidence from Aruba

This study estimates the effect of seasonal patterns of pull and push climate elements (rainfall, temperature, wind, and cloud coverage) on recurrent fluctuations in tourism demand from the United States (USA) and Venezuela to Aruba. The seasonal patterns were first isolated from the series using the Census X-12 decomposition method, after which the analysis included panel data unit root testing, panel data regression, and Euclidean distance calculation. The results show that both pull and push seasonal factors of climate were relevant in determining the seasonal variations in tourism demand from both countries. The study derives two theoretical propositions: (1) climate is a significant push and pull factor affecting tourism demand; and (2) tourism demand and climate are bounded by intertemporal climate constraints.     

Climate change,fossil fuel prices and depletion: The rationale for a falling export tax

This paper examines how world prices affect depletion of exhaustible fossil fuels for export and the role of an export revenue tax in curbing depletion. Both effects are studied for a small open economy affected by climate change. We find that setting an export revenue tax rate to fall over time at the marginal social cost of depletion due to lower productivity from climate change encourages a resource exporter to leave an optimal stock in the ground – unextracted and unburnable. Growing prices during the past decade similarly curb depletion. Falling prices bring forward extraction. Because production is independent of consumption, the marginal social cost is independent of utility parameters which are difficult to estimate. Slowing fossil fuel extraction and the effective export of emissions is a contemporary challenge for climate policy. Our findings identify both why an export revenue tax should decline over time and an estimable target rate of decline to help meet this challenge amid changing world prices.     

Probabilistic assessment of fleet-level noise impacts of projected technology improvements

Demand projections for civil aviation have forecast increases in operations in future decades. Increases in demand are beneficial to the growth and advancement of the aviation industry, but also come with the threat of significant increase in environmental impacts. In response, the industry is focusing on programs to develop technologies for reductions in fuel burn, NO_x emissions, and noise. While aircraft-level impacts are an obvious metric of success, it is difficult to make informed robust technology investment decisions with respect to noise without understanding the fleet-level impacts. Fleet-level predictions of noise for technology explorations are especially complicated because it is computationally expensive, highly combinatorial, and airport-specific. Recently, rapid automated airport noise models have been developed, which can be simulated using Design of Experiments (DOE). The results of these simulations are used to generate surrogate models for airport noise contour area, which can be summed to yield a fleet-level impact. These models make use of simplifying assumptions to provide estimates of airport-level noise that are substantially cheaper to compute. They can be used to perform parametric trade-off analyses in conjunction with the equivalency assumption. Equivalency asserts that environmental impacts of a technology infused aircraft can be represented by scaled operations of the baseline aircraft in the same class. This simple assumption allows for the modeling of technology and market penetration factors under the same units: operations. This research uses surrogate models in conjunction with the equivalency assumption to examine two potential technology scenarios in a target forecast year, simulating technology and market performance factors to identify vehicle classes that could have the greatest impact in reducing contour area. Results show that technology and market performance of future notional Small Single Aisle and Large Single Aisle vehicle aircraft have the highest positive correlations with potential reductions in contour area.     

中小保险企业发展瓶颈探析

中国保险市场的高速发展,使新兴的中小保险企业如雨后春笋般遍布全国的大街小巷。但新兴的中小保险企业正面临着诸多发展瓶颈。本文探索了中小保险企业陷入困境的根源,为中小保险企业寻找科学发展之路奠定了理论基础。指出按现代企业经营机制走专业化科学发展之路是中小保险企业的必由之路。     

青春如歌的正午——迟子建笔下的"小人物"分析

作为坚守民间写作立场的作家,迟子建更衷情于＂小人物＂,她的目光始终投注在处于社会底层的普通乡民和蓬门荜户的市井百姓身上。她小说中的人物是现实土壤滋养出来的,是作家贴近平民生活、用爱与同情浇灌的艺术形象。这些＂小人物＂总是和他们的生存环境紧密相依,绝没有超越环境的性情与行为,这使得他们与各自的环境如同骨与肉一样生长在一起,甚至显得不是那么鲜明,却又正是无数面目模糊、＂无足轻重＂的底层人物的文学再现。     

Macroeconomic effects of structural reforms and fiscal consolidations: Trade-offs and complementarities

This paper studies the impact of product and labour market structural reforms and the effects of their joint implementation with alternative debt consolidation strategies. The set-up is a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated for the Greek economy. The results show that structural reforms produce important long-run GDP gains that materialize earlier, the faster the reforms are implemented. When implemented jointly with fiscal consolidations, structural reforms may amplify the short-run costs of fiscal tightening. The GDP dynamics depend on the fiscal instrument used for public debt consolidation. In the long run, however, there are complementarity gains irrespective of the fiscal instrument used.     

基于系统动力学的中小企业云计算服务商选择风险分析

全面的认识和评估风险是做出正确决策的关键基础。本文对中小企业云计算服务商选择风险进行全面分析，将风险分为机会成本、信息不对称、逆向选择、连锁风险以及冲突风险五个方面，并建立系统动力学模型，进行仿真，最后得出中小企业云计算服务商选择风险发展趋势并对趋势进行分析。     

实践《小企业会计制度》的问题与对策

《小企业会计制度》的实施是我国会计界的大事,企业实践该制度过程中,有许多实际问题值得研究和探讨。