The Nested PIGLOG Model: An Application to U.S. Food Demand

A new demand system is introduced, the Nested PIGLOG model, nesting thirteen other demand systems including five that are also new. This new model and its nested special cases are applied to models of U.S. food demand that include food-at-home (FAH), food-away-from-home (FAFH), and alcoholic beverages. Although nested tests and out-of-sample forecasting performance favor generalizing models to a certain degree, statistically insignificant improvements to in-sample-fit and even poorer out-of-sample forecast accuracy undermine further generalizations. Based on a subset of preferred models, FAFH is found to be price and income elastic compared to FAH which is price and income inelastic.     

Price Rigidity and the Selection of the Exchange Rate Regime

We evaluate and qualify Friedman's, 1953, “case for flexible exchange rates” in the presence of sticky prices in a two country model. We find that a flexible regime performs indeed better when the degree of nominal price rigidity is high while a bilateral peg does better when prices are fairly flexible. This result obtains independent of whether monetary policy is activistic or not and is mostly due to the negative relationship between employment and productivity shocks when prices are relatively sluggish (Gali, 1999). A unilateral peg tends to produce the lowest level of world welfare but it sometimes represents the best monetary arrangement for the pegger. JEL Classification Numbers: E32, E52, F33, F42     

Operational Research and the environment

The discipline of Operational Research (OR) is primarily concerned with improving the effectiveness and efficiency of decision processes. These processes take place everywhere in society: industry, banking, agriculture, government, politics. Frequent use of mathematical optimization models is typical of OR. Since the early '80s these models are increasingly packaged in a user-friendly way, as Decision Support Systems. In the following we will illustrate how OR can be used to describe and solve a number of environmental problems.     

企业财务制度改革有关问题初探

每一次税收的重大改革都伴随着企业会计制度的重大变革：我国企业会计制度的改革经过几十年的改革已基本完善和健全，但实际工作中仍存在许多不足之处。作者总结多年的实际工作经验，提出现代企业财务制度改革的新方法、新思路和新观点。     

企业理念识别系统的构建

企业文化包括精神层、制度层、物质层。企业文化的精神层即理念识别系统是物质层与制度层的思想内涵，是企业文化的核心与灵魂。企业理念识别系统应建立在对企业理念概念及其特征认识和解析的基础之上，其内容应是企业价值观、企业精神、企业宗旨、企业目标、经营理念、管理理念等一整套观念性因素的综合。     

民营企业内部控制制度建设探索

我国民营企业的内部控制及其制度体系存在产权“独吃”与内部决策的“独断”、内部组织与人事控制薄弱且手段落后、内部控制制度不健全且执行体系涣散等问题，必须通过组织结构控制制度建设、人事控制制度建设和业务控制制度建设构建我国民营企业现代内部控制制度体系。     

消费税制的国际比较及其对我国的启示

消费税制改革是我国新一轮税制改革的任务之一。改革和完善我国消费税制，应借鉴国外一些成功经验，丰富和完善我国消费税的立法原则，适当扩大征税范围，调整税收负担，改革计税依据和征税方法。     

A resilience-based framework for evaluating adaptive co-management: Linking ecology, economics and society in a complex world

Adaptive co-management brings together collaborative and adaptive approaches in pursuit of sustainable resource use and social-ecological resilience. Enthusiasm for this management approach, however, is countered by recent critiques regarding outcomes. A lack of evidence from consistent evaluation of adaptive co-management further exacerbates this situation. This paper revisits the issue of evaluation in natural resource management and recasts it in light of complex adaptive systems thinking. An evaluative framework for adaptive co-management is developed which directs attention toward three broad components: ecosystem conditions, livelihood outcomes and process and institutional conditions. Scale-specific parameters are offered for each component to facilitate systematic learning from experience and encourage cross-site comparisons. Conclusions highlight the importance of systematically incorporating evaluation into the adaptive co-management process and recognize the challenge for resource agencies and researchers to shift from a conventional to a complex adaptive system perspective.     

我国生态工业园区的建设、发展与完善——基于烟台开发区生态工业园区发展状况的调查分析

本文通过对烟台开发区生态工业园区发展现状与建设经验的调查分析,指出树立科学发展观,发展循环经济,建立促进循环经济发展的法律法规体系和科学的评价指标体系,有利于推动我国生态工业园区的发展与完善,对指导和发展我国生态工业园区有特别重要的意义。     

Money as Social Exergy

Synopsis It has been proposed that open thermodynamic systems will act to dissipate available energy gradients by self-organizing into coherent structures that, with time, evolve and develop into nested hierarchies – panarchies – that adapt to internal and external changes according to a characteristic adaptive cycle. This paper seeks to apply these ideas in the purely societal realm by investigating the role of money in economic systems. Money represents the value embodied in goods; a value that is separate from the exact nature of those goods. We suggest that money thereby liberates the ‘free value’ of economic desire and that this free value has properties analogous to energy. The result is the self-organization of structures and systems (‘econosystems’) that dissipate this ‘free value’. Econosystems act at different scales, and nested levels of econosystems form a panarchy, having effects that can be observed. In particular, it appears that money facilitates the creation of relationships between econosystem actors, increasing the connectedness of the econosystems that envelop those actors. We have identified a phenomenon whereby freed social value (i.e. money) can aggregate, or pool, at a larger econosystem scale in structures such as banks. These pools act as gradients that actors at the neighborhood scale can exploit for self-organization in the econosystem. Thus, econosystem actors appear to be freed from thermodynamic constraints by using money as a means of self-organization. However, because of these pools of aggregated social exergy, connectedness is increased at the larger scale of the econosystem. The potential consequence of this dynamic is that money may act to push larger scale econosystems toward a state of heightened vulnerability to collapse, while freeing smaller scale actors from apparent constraints. In this way, we propose that money acts to skew information feedback loops between econosystem actors and larger scale structures such as economies and ecosystems.