全面建成小康社会——由量变到质变的决定性发展

由＂全面建设小康社会＂到＂全面建成小康社会＂,不仅是全党全国新时期新阶段发展的宏伟目标,更是站在新的历史高度,在我国小康社会建设已经取得的重大现实成果基础上做出的重大决策。未来五至十年,对于中国能否跨越中等收入陷阱,实现国民经济持续稳定的增长,使人民获得更多发展的实惠,继续深入推进基本公共服务均等化,以生态文明建设增强可持续发展的能力,都具有决定性的意义。     

城乡居民收入变迁对经济增长影响的实证分析

本文根据1985~2010年的经济数据,利用协整理论、误差修正模型和 Granger 因果检验等方法对城乡居民收入与经济增长之间的互动关系进行了实证分析.研究表明,从长期来看,农村居民收入与经济增长之间存在长期稳定的双向因果关系,而城镇居民收入与经济增长之间只存在单向的因果关系,而且农村居民收入增长对经济增长的促进作用强于城市居民收入增长带来的作用;短期内农村居民收入增长对经济增长经历了先阻碍后促进的过程,而城市居民收入增长虽不断促进经济增长,但是促进的作用逐渐下降.因此,在持续增加农村居民收入的同时,也要兼顾城市居民收入的增长.     

农村微型金融机构风险与经营绩效的动态关系——基于8所机构的变截距面板数据分析

农村微型金融机构在弥补正规金融支农不足、促进农村事业稳步发展发挥着重要作用。文章构建变截距面板数据模型实证检验了8所农村微型金融机构2008年~2010年风险指数和经营绩效之间的动态关系,面板协整结论认为农村微型金融机构的风险指数与经营绩效之间呈现负相关关系;面板回归结果进一步指出,农村微型金融机构的风险指数每增加一个百分点,经营绩效将下降0.435179百分点。文末提出了相应的风险控制措施。     

Continuous rainbow options on commodity outputs: what is the real value of switching facilities?

We develop real rainbow option models to value an operating asset with the flexibility to choose between two commodity outputs. We provide a quasi-analytical solution and a numerical lattice solution to a model with continuous switching opportunities between two commodity outputs, taking into account operating and switching costs. The models are applied to an illustrative case, demonstrating that the quasi-analytical solution and the lattice approach provide near identical results for the asset valuation and optimal switching boundaries. We find that the switching boundaries generally narrow as prices decline. In the presence of operating costs and temporary suspension, however, the thresholds diverge for low enough prices. A fertilizer plant with flexibility between selling ammonia and urea is valued in an empirical section using our real option models. Despite the high correlation between the two alternative commodities, ammonia and urea, there is significant value in the flexibility to choose between the two. Both strategic and policy implications for stakeholders in flexible assets are discussed, with some generalisations outside the fertilizer industry.     

Fishing and consumption patterns of anglers adjacent to the Oak Ridge Reservation,Tennessee: higher income anglers ate more fish and are more at risk

The risks from consuming self‐caught fish are receiving international attention because of high levels of contaminants in some species. The ethnic, income, and educational differences in fishing and fish consumption patterns of 202 anglers fishing along the Clinch River arm of Watts Bar Reservoir adjacent to the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) or along Poplar Creek within ORR boundaries were analyzed to understand how to design a risk communication strategy. Because of elevated PCB concentrations in striped bass (Morone saxatilis), catfish (Ictalurus spp.), and sauger (Stizostedion canadense) due partly from contaminants released from the ORR in East Tennessee, the Clinch River arm of Watts Bar Reservoir is under a fish consumption advisory, while portions of Poplar Creek are under advisories because of mercury. Most studies find that a high proportion of anglers eat their catch, and people with lower incomes and less education generally eat more self‐caught fish than others fishing in the same region. Calculating fish consumption individually for each person indicated that a considerable number of people ate more fish from the study area than the amount used to calculate risks when developing fish consumption advisories, and people who ate fish more often usually ate larger portions. Unlike previous studies of fish consumption, this study indicated that a smaller proportion of anglers ate their fish, and those that ate the most were the high income anglers for this fishing population, rather than those with lower incomes. This suggests that risk communication strategies must include site‐specific information on the population at risk from fish consumption, and that targeting only low income, low education anglers will miss some people who are most at risk.     

Earnings quality,bankruptcy risk and future cash flows

Prior research suggests that the quality of accruals may be compromised where the magnitude of accruals is abnormally high, due to the presence of errors in the accruals‐estimation process (Dechow and Dichev, 2002; Richardson, 2003). A consequence of this is that abnormal accruals may not map into realised future cash flows to the extent that would normally be expected of accruals data. Indeed, the association may be insignificant if abnormal accruals consist primarily of estimation noise. Our study investigates whether abnormal accruals for UK firms provide incremental insight into future cash flows. In particular, our paper may be viewed as a development of Subramanyam (1996). We find a significant positive association between abnormal accruals and one‐year‐ahead operating cash flows. This provides a rationale for the pricing of abnormal accruals by the market (Subramanyam, 1996; Xie, 2001) and suggests that abnormal accruals are not merely the products of noise in the accruals‐estimation process. However, our results are conditional upon the probability of one‐year‐ahead bankruptcy risk (Charitou et al., 2004). We also find that abnormal accruals possess small but significant explanatory power for future cash flows even when controlling for the disaggregation of accruals into individual items (Barth et al., 2001).     

New evidence of regional income divergence in post-reform Russia

This article investigates regional income convergence in Russia during 2000–2008. We test the hypothesis in which income divergence across regions of the country should give place to income convergence as the country moves toward free market economy with strong market institutions. The study contributes to the existing literature by using the exponential smooth autoregressive Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) unit root test in a panel setup, a novel econometric technique, which encompasses cross sectional dependence. Results show strong evidence of on-going regional income divergence in post-reform period.     

Does microfinance affect income inequality?

This study addresses the question whether participation of the poor in microfinance contributes to reducing a country’s level of income inequality. Using data from 70 developing countries, we show that higher levels of microfinance participation are indeed associated with a reduction of the income gap between rich and poor people. We also show, however, that the effects of microfinance on reducing income inequality are relatively small. The results of this study add to the discussion on the impact of microfinance on poverty by showing that, although access to microfinance does seem to improve the relative income position of the poor, this improvement is modest, which is probably because the use of microfinance is generally small as compared to the size of the economy of the countries in our sample. Microfinance should, therefore, not be seen as a panacea for bringing down income inequality in a significant way.     

Economic structure and factor payments

There is a growing body of evidence that the labour payment share in national income varies across countries and over time, suggesting that the popular aggregate Cobb–Douglas production function may not capture income share dynamics. There remains conflicting evidence on the importance of natural resource rents among low income economies and on estimates of the rate of return to produced capital. This paper focuses on the structural differences among countries, confirming the importance of the agriculture sector in estimates of labour and land’s share of factor income based on 81 countries at diverse levels of economic development in the year 2005. I find that cross-country data are best modelled by a CES production function with an elasticity of substitution of 0.8 and that many low income countries have a higher return to capital than the United States.     

The Future Be Damned: Economists’ Optimism and Nuclear Proliferation

Lower income households make much heavier use of costly financial services, such as payday loans, check cashing services, auto title loans, and many more. These services are crafted for, targeted to, and distributed through outlets in lower income neighborhoods. In other words, there are extensive provisioning systems designed specifically to deliver such products and services to these households. Such marketing aimed at lower income groups reduces both their wealth and welfare relative to upper and upper middle groups.