The Competitive Advantage of Collaboration – Throwing New Light on The Nordic Model

ABSTRACT

In one of the most influential contributions to modern political economy, Hall and Soskice have launched a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘coordinated’ market economies, placing the Nordic countries firmly in the latter category. We argue that, while the H&S distinction may serve classificatory purposes, seeing the Nordic model in terms of ‘coordinated capitalism’ blurs the distinctive features of the Nordic countries’ success as productive and fair economies. We contend that the central formula behind this success lies in what we call the Nordic model’s ambidexterity – the capacity to combine collaborative and competitive elements and skilfully navigate between them. Using an interdisciplinary perspective (inspired by organisation theory, cultural semiotics and evolutionary analysis), we provide a conceptual basis for reinterpreting the Nordic Model as an ambidextrous combination of culturally rooted, collaborative strategies that are subsequently competitively exposed. The article illustrates the workings of this ambidexterity in three societal domains: work life (including female participation), resource management – illustrated by the Norwegian petro-economy – and international business management and regulation with a focus on CSR. In each case we will show how collaboration is intertwined with pragmatic competitive exposure, yielding high productivity, high welfare, as well as fair income and wealth distribution.     

资本主义福利国家的必然性、局限性与面临的挑战——基于经济全球化视阈的历史唯物主义诠释和启示

资本主义福利国家的产生和发展是第二次世界大战后资本主义社会应对生产力发展和生产方式变化的自我调整，具有历史必然性，也具有自身局限性：形式上的“国家回归”没有改变资本主义私有制生产关系，无法消除资本主义社会的根本矛盾和经济危机；社会普遍高福利的实现（部分）依赖于凭借显著竞争优势在世界市场上获取的超额利润，福利模式具有排他性和剥削性，不能为落后国家所复制，也不能成为世界福利模式。因而，资本主义福利国家成为发达国家的特权，且当经济危机爆发或出现经济滞胀时，其会采取削减甚至拆除社会福利的措施以追求资本和财富的积累。随着经济全球化发展，资本积累与社会福利的矛盾日益凸显，资本主义福利国家模式面临实践上的可持续性和价值上的普适性双重挑战。借鉴资本主义福利国家的经验教训，后发国家应努力提升“结构的或根本性的竞争力”，寻求经济与社会的平衡发展；中国还应充分发挥国家制度和国家治理体系的显著优势，积极建设国家主导、福利要素多元、福利机制灵活的中国特色社会主义福利社会。     

区块链技术在信用经济建设中的运用研究

2008年全球金融危机后,出口和固定资产投资增速逐渐放缓,消费成为了拉动经济增长的关键点,信用经济是各行各业的连接器,也是拉动内需的“法宝”和撬动经济增长的“利器”。当前,我国信用经济发展面临数据“孤岛”、个人信用信息保护不足、“羊群效应”明显等问题,随着区块链发展上升到国家战略层面,区块链与社会经济发展融合成为趋势,区块链和信用经济十分契合,可以解决信用经济发展过程中遇到的问题。为推动“区块链+信用经济”创新发展,必须加强顶层设计,完善信用法律体系;保护用户信息安全,完善风险管理体系;强化信用监管,营造良好发展环境;推广智能合约,拓展业务场景;搭建人才支撑发展体系,提供智力保障。     

Tariffs and formation of free trade agreements networks

This paper examines the formation of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) on the basis of country heterogeneity in the tariff level. We demonstrate that a country's unilateral incentive to form an FTA depends on the relative magnitudes of the (negative) market concession effect and the (positive) market expansion effect, both of which are determined by the tariff levels of the two FTA partner countries. Global welfare is maximised when all country pairs form FTAs. Two countries in equilibrium are more likely to form an FTA when their tariff gap is smaller or when their tariff levels are neither very high nor very low. This finding is robust to several extensions of the model. Our preliminary empirical analysis provides some evidence for the finding.     

Capital controls and the location of industry

This paper studies capital controls on the outflow of capital in a two-region new economic geography model. Capital controls are set in a non-cooperative or cooperative manner by social planners. Capital controls are relatively higher in the North in the non-cooperative equilibrium. This leads to relatively more firms located in the region where more consumers reside under the non-cooperative equilibrium. The locational bias towards the North in the non-cooperative equilibrium becomes larger as trade barriers are reduced. That is, firms locate to the North at a relatively higher rate in the non-cooperative equilibrium as trade is liberalised. Contrary to previous findings, it follows that global welfare is relatively higher in the non-cooperative equilibrium, although the social planner sets capital controls by maximising joint regional welfare in the cooperative equilibrium.     

Employment Dynamics and Linkages in the Rural Economy: Insights from Senegal

Evidence on rural wage employment is thin and lacks nuance for different employment sources, insights on dynamic effects, and an understanding of the channels of effects. We assess conceptually and empirically the direct and indirect welfare effects of entry and continuation in different types of wage employment in rural Senegal. Using panel data, fixed effects and first-difference estimation, we show substantial positive welfare and linkage effects. We find that participation in wage employment increases per capita income by 143%, and reduces poverty, poverty gap and food insecurity by, respectively, 63%, 89% and 48%. While the direct effect on income is larger for non-agricultural and contractual wage employment, the indirect income effects through self-employment are more pronounced for agricultural and casual wage employment. Our results imply that job creation is important for rural development, that wage employment in agriculture can lead to considerable growth multiplier effects, and that synergies exist between large-scale and small-scale agriculture.     

Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare-State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

Welfare-state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.     

“市民社会”及其在《资本论》中的逻辑地位(一)——兼与沈越教授商榷马恩著作的翻译问题

市民社会在马克思著作中具有两类四种含义,应基于马克思独特的思维方法把握不同含义之间的内在关系。作为资产阶级意识形态核心理念的"市民社会",与所谓普世价值密切相关,它是马克思理论集中批判的对象。如果说马克思具有某种市民社会理论的话,也只能看成基于唯物史观把握资本主义生产内在机理的理论。应从原则高度明确反对将两种性质的市民社会理论有意无意地混淆起来的做法。沈越教授将市民社会臆想为没有阶级属性的永恒的"中产阶级"社会。认为西方经济学、西方哲学等只是这种没有阶级属性的市民的意识形态,不具有资产阶级性质,应该不加批判地原原本本地"拿来"。他还试图通过个别德文词的辨析,一方面将苏俄马克思主义和中国既有的马克思主义理论贴上"伪马克思主义"的标签,另一方面把马克思理论整体性地改造成没有阶级属性的意识形态意义上的市民社会理论。实质上是有意识地将马克思理论与西方意识形态混为一谈。     

Advertising effects on consumer welfare: Prices paid and liking for brands selected

The effect of advertising on consumer welfare has been the subject of dispute among economists, arising largely from disagreement among scholars regarding the persuasive versus the informative role of advertising. This paper reports two experiments that explore the welfare implications of advertising effects. Experiment 1 shows that the same advertisements can either increase or decrease prices paid for selected brands, depending on the degree to which the choice situation requires brands to be recalled in order to be considered. However, an increase in prices paid caused by advertising does not necessarily imply detrimental effects on consumer welfare. Experiment 2 shows that, even under circumstances in which differentiating advertising leads consumers to select brands with higher average prices, it can provide useful information to consumers that allows them to make purchases that are more in line with their personal tastes than are the choices of consumers not exposed to the advertisements.     

内蒙古重要发展战略及政策效果分析

本文认为,改革开放以来,内蒙古自治区的重要区域发展战略一直以资源优势为依托,进行产业布局和产业结构调整,取得了一定成效,但总观全区经济发展,其中存在着深层问题,经济总量偏小,城乡居民收入水平偏低;经济增长方式粗放,结构性矛盾突出;城镇化发展不合理,规模小,管理水平低;科技教育总体落后,劳动者素质不高;生态环境压力较大,基础设施建设滞后。文章提出,要更加注重资源节约与综合利用,努力建设资源节约型社会,继续走资源优势转变为经济优势之路,实现经济的可持续发展。要加大基础设施、生态保护与环境建设力度,发展产业集群,加快产业结构升级,努力实现资源产业的可持续发展。