Boussard's 'Effectiveness of Inflation Accounting Adjustments': A Comment

Boussard's (1984) notion that Current Cost/Constant Dollar Accounting does not provide 'meaningful rates of return' when inflationary conditions are compared with non-inflationary conditions is based on a misleading example.     

Consumption and Portfolio Policies With Incomplete Markets and Short-Sale Constraints: the Finite-Dimensional Case1

We use a martingale approach to study optimal intertemporal consumption and portfolio policies in a general discrete-time, discrete-state-space securities market with dynamically incomplete markets and short-sale constraints. We characterize the set of feasible consumption bundles as the budget-feasible set defined by constraints formed using the extreme points of the closure of the set of Arrow-Debreu state prices consistent with no arbitrage, and then establish a relationship between the original problem and a dual minimization problem.     

Continuity and Change: Some Observations on the Landscape of Agricultural Labourers in North Bihar, India

This paper is an attempt to catalogue and analyse the changes over two decades in the world of agricultural labourers in a backward region in India. It is primarily based on a series of field visits to two villages in Purnia district, located in the north-eastern part of Bihar. Changes in the living conditions of labourers are obviously connected to developments in the rural economy of the region and there are important linkages with developments elsewhere, including changes in the overall macro-economic policy regime. An attempt is made to trace these. Agricultural wage workers in the surveyed region are extremely poor by any reckoning, although a few of them have made some progress through state-sponsored programmes and migration. These developments have also contributed significantly to altering the relations of dominance and subordination, thus creating greater elbow-room for labourers. However, it is important not to overstate these small gains and there are serious doubts as to whether they can be sustained. It appears that some of the material correlates of labourers' well-being in the surveyed region are being affected adversely by the currently ascendant neoliberal policy regime. There are no signs of the emergence of mechanisms that might imply sustained significant improvements in the very fragile life and work conditions of these labourers.     

社会市场营销在我国的应用前景

针对社会市场营销的现状、特点、构成和意义，指出了社会市场营销在我国计划生育、疾病控制、营养和健康促进、环境保护、公共政策等方面有着广阔的应用前景。     

The Significance of an 'Orientation Postulate'

Until the 1930s, the 'orientation postulate' was a popular means of rationalizing bookkeeping practice. This was during a period when the balance sheet was the focal point of reporting and inductive theory formulation was popular in accounting. However, after the 1930s, the balance sheet was no longer the focus of financial reporting. By the 1960s accountants sought a deductive mode of theory formulation and the 'orientation postulates' were abandoned. Evidence adduced suggests that an 'orientation postulates'can be useful in addressing income statement as well as balance sheet issues, and is also useful in diminishing chaos and promoting logical and cohesive theory formulation. If a discipline has a common orientation, then less ad hoc principle formulation is likely to occur.     

Government involvement in tourism in developing countries

The article examines the case for involvement of government in the tourism sector in developing countries and makes definitional distinctions between passive and active involvement. It is argued that in most developing countries government involvement in tourism is required not only to attain long-term objectives but to compensate for the absence of a strong and tourism-experienced private sector. Five areas of concern for government involvement are discussed, and conclusions relate to the need for government-private sector cooperation for development purposes.     

On Valuing Participating Life Insurance Contracts with Conditional Heteroscedasticity

In this paper, we consider a novel approach for the fair valuation of a participating life insurance policy when the dynamics of the reference portfolio underlying the policy are governed by an Asymmetric Power GARCH (APGARCH) model with innovations having a general parametric distribution. The APGARCH model provides a flexible way to incorporate the effect of conditional heteroscedasticity or time-varying conditional volatility and nests a number of important symmetric or asymmetric ARCH-type models in the literature. It also provides a flexible way to capture both the memory effect of the conditional volatility and the asymmetric effects of past positive and negative returns on the current conditional volatility, called the leverage effect. The key valuation tool here is the conditional Esscher transform of Bühlmann et al. (1996, 1998). The conditional Esscher transform provides a convenient and flexible way for the fair valuation under different specifications of the conditional heteroscedastic models. We illustrate the practical implementation of the model using the S&P 500 index as a proxy for the reference portfolio. We also conduct sensitivity analysis of the fair value of the policy with respect to the parameters in the APGARCH model to document the impacts of different conditional volatility models nested in the APGARCH model and the leverage effect on the fair value. The results of the analysis reveal that the memory effect of the conditional volatility has more significant impact on the fair value of the policy than the leverage effect.     

产业政策研究的新进展——中国工业经济学会2007年年会学术观点综述

本文对中国工业经济学会2007年年会暨“产业政策：反思与评价”研讨会的主要学术观点进行了综述。涉及产业政策理论、区域和国际比较、产业规制政策研究等前沿内容，反映了当前产业经济学研究中关于产业政策研究的新进展。     

借鉴国际经验 构筑我国中小企业发展的财政政策支持体系：财政支持非公有制经济发展的重要举措

大力发展非公有制经济是我国“十五”期间经济结构调整的重点内容之一，中小企业是非公经济的最主要形式，已在我国的经济中占有越来越重要的地位，特别是对促进经济增长、缓解就业压力、增加地方财政收入等方面发挥着不可替代的作用。但目前中小企业的进一步发展面临着融资困难、人才缺乏、负担过重等多种障碍，因此，如何促进中小企业的发展是成为我国面临的一个重要课题。西方发达国家在利用财政促进中小企业发展方面有许多可供借鉴的成功经验。本文在借鉴西方各国促进中小企业发展的财政政策基础上，结合当前我国中小企业发展中存在的实际困难，立足我国现实国情，选择适合的财政政策促进我国中小企业发展，使之成为我国的一个新的经济增长点和财源增长点。