安徽非公经济发展研究

在当代中国,非公经济发展与改革开放及制度变迁原本是相通的,欠发达地区经济发展的实质就是非公经济的发展;安徽非公经济发展滞后的深层机理在于既定制度格局下的路径依赖。本课题深入分析了既定制度格局影响安徽非公经济发展的机制过程,以此为基础,提出了进一步加快发展的思路和对策。     

高强品牌的功能与法律保护综合研究

使用市场营销学、法学、经济学、语言学与心理学的方法对品牌功能进行综合研究,认为高强品牌具有保障产品质量、降低消费者搜寻成本并能满足消费者心理需求等功能,高强品牌同时还可以使品牌所有者通过各种途径来扩大其经济利益。通过对高强品牌的功能研究发现不仅仿冒行为会损害高强品牌的价值,而且其他与高强品牌相联系的行为均会造成高强品牌价值的贬损。因此,美国法律也随着品牌功能的不断变化而逐步扩大其保护的范围(尤其是对高强品牌的保护),以适应品牌发展的需求。     

湖南省休闲农业发展战略研究

湖南具有丰富的乡村景观资源,较为优越的区位交通条件。该文在调查的基础上,分析了湖南休闲农业的现状,找出了湖南休闲农业存在的问题,提出了湖南休闲农业发展目标及战略重点:长株潭经济发展区重点发展以农业科技主题园和参与、体验性强的休闲景观群,结合农业产业带,发展特色休闲农业;湘中南区重点发展丘陵生态观光农业、风景区观光农业和农耕文化休闲农业;环洞庭湖区重点发展水乡特色的农渔风光等特色体验休闲农业,建设观光、保护等于一体的湿地休闲基地;湘西山区大力发展森林生态休闲,大力发展和挖掘民俗风情,体验民俗文化。     

Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalized groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements’ internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining) and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense, one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies, and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilization and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.     

Relative Guarantees

Many real-world financial contracts have some sort of minimum rate of return guarantee included. One class of these guarantees is so-called relative guarantees, i.e., guarantees where the minimum guaranteed rate of return is given as a function of the stochastic return on a reference portfolio. These guarantees are the topic of this paper. We analyse a wide range of different functional specifications for the minimum guaranteed rate of return, hereunder both so-called maturity and multi-period guarantees. Several closed form solutions are presented.     

Software for Learning and for Doing Statistics

The community of statisticians and statistics educators should take responsibility for the evaluation and improvement of software quality from the perspective of education. The paper will develop a perspective, an ideal system of requirements to critically evaluate existing software and to produce future software more adequate both for learning and doing statistics in introductory courses. Different kinds of tools and microworlds are needed. After discussing general requirements for such programs, a prototypical ideal software system will be presented in detail. It will be illustrated how such a system could be used to construct learning environments and to support elementary data analysis with exploratory working style.     

The Long-run Effects of the Italian Pension Reforms

The paper analysesthe reforms of the Italian mandatory pension scheme for employeeslegislated in the 1990s. To assess the effects of the reforms,a microsimulation model calibrated on cross-section data is developed.The model is aimed at estimating the average income of a memberof a cohort, as well as the average per capita income of allindividuals alive in a given year. The long-run effects of thereform are analysed, comparing the characteristics of alternativefinancing schemes. A substantial improvement of the equity aswell as the long-run sustainability of the Italian public pensionschemes emerges. However, the dreary demographic scenario callsfor further tightening of eligibility rules sometime in the nextdecades if long-run sustainability of public debt is to be achieved.On the basis of sensitivity analysis, some changes aimed at hedgingthe system against unexpected shocks are suggested.     

Believing in employment discrimination: The case of Forrest Mims,Scientific American,and title VII protection

This article reviews the law regarding Title VII employment discrimination protection from religious discrimination. The issues surrounding the principal legal protection in this regard are explored in the context of a recent controversial case in which an author, Forrest Mims, was not hired as a regular contributor forScientific American magazine, ostensibly because of his belief in the theory of creation over the theory of evolution. The definition of what constitutes a protected religious belief or practice is seen to have expanded over time. However, a belief in creationism is not necessarily seen as being tantamount to a religious belief under present legal interpretation of Title VII. The implications of this finding for future needed Title VII revision are discussed.     

Accrual accounting and Australian fiscal policy

Australian governments have recently moved from cash accounting to accrual accounting. Accrual accounting has been accompanied at the national government level by the introduction of a new key fiscal policy measure: the ‘fiscal balance’. This paper explains and evaluates this new fiscal measure. It concludes that, given the present fiscal policy of the Australian government, fiscal balance is a superior fiscal policy measure to the ‘cash’ budget balance measure which it replaced. However, from the alternative ‘golden rule’ policy standpoint, fiscal balance is not a meaningful fiscal policy measure — although its stock counterpart, net financial liabilities, certainly is.     

随机生产前沿方法的发展及其在中国的应用

本文对随机前沿生产函数模型的发展及其在中国生产率分析中的应用进行了评述。文章首先介绍随机前沿方法的基本原理、估计方法和在面板数据下对全要素生产率增长的分解,随后评述随机前沿生产函数模型的最新进展和在经验分析中的优势与作用,最后总结了在中国行业和地区经济增长研究中随机前沿方法的成果和不足,并探讨今后研究的发展方向。