国际投资协定透明度要求变化及其启示 ——以美国实践为考察对象

以美国BIT为代表的国际投资协定在透明度条款以及其他条款涉及透明度的规定中通过加强公众参与程度显著提升了透明度要求。这一变化是投资仲裁实践、国内贸易立法以及市民社会诉求合力作用的结果。透明度要求的提高一方面凸显了专业性社会组织对国际投资立法与实践的影响,另一方面则反映了美国借此维护本国利益的实质。对此,中国在对外投资协定的签署与实践中需要审慎对待透明度要求,同时加强本国专业性社会组织的培育和发展。     

Capital Inflows,Exchange Rate Flexibility and Credit Booms

Historically, capital flow bonanzas have often fueled sharp credit expansions in advanced and emerging market economies alike. Focusing primarily on emerging markets, this paper analyzes the impact of exchange rate flexibility on credit markets during periods of large capital inflows. It is shown that bank credit is larger and its composition tilts to foreign currency in economies with less flexible exchange rate regimes, and that these results are not explained entirely by the fact that the latter attract more capital inflows than economies with more flexible regimes. The findings thus suggest countries with less flexible exchange rate regimes may stand to benefit the most from regulatory policies that reduce banks' incentives to tap external markets and to lend/borrow in foreign currency; these policies include marginal reserve requirements on foreign lending, currency‐dependent liquidity requirements and higher capital requirement and/or dynamic provisioning on foreign exchange loans.     

China’s direct investment in the European Union: challenges and policy responses

The dramatic rise of Chinese direct investment into the European Union (EU) has sparked a debate about the control that China may be seeking to take over European economies. Quite naturally, these concerns have led to repeated calls that action be taken to slow down, if not to halt entirely, this growing trend. The objective of the article is to shed light on this debate. Following a thorough analysis of Chinese direct investment in the EU, this article suggests that the challenges posed by these inflows are widely overblown. Despite this, the article concludes that it is necessary to have a systematic approach to regulating inbound foreign investment (including from China) in the EU. Such an approach may help guard against the risk of a protectionist drift inside the EU, as well as the possibility that some investors may one day pose a threat to national security. This article concludes that although the current fragmented regulatory approach is unsatisfactory, because of the difficulties associated with a unified EU-wide review process, the most realistic option is to promote a more systematic and coordinated use of existing mechanisms such as competition policy. Also, pushing for the negotiation of a China–EU BIT is certainly a promising avenue to enhance the EU’s bargaining leverage based on the principle of positive reciprocity.     

Behavioral Environmental Economics: Promises and Challenges

Environmental issues provide a rich ground for identifying the existence and consequences of human limitations. In this paper, we present a growing literature lying at the interface between behavioral and environmental economics. This literature identifies alternative solutions to traditional economic instruments in environmental domains that often work imperfectly. But it also faces a set of challenges, including the difficulty of computing welfare effects, and the identification of a robust environmental policy based on context-dependent (socio-) psychological effects. We illustrate our critical discussion with two behavioral schemes that have been widely implemented: “green nudges” and “corporate environmental responsibility.”     

A never-decisive and anonymous criterion for optimal growth models

We address in this paper the question of the existence of a Social Welfare Function that would be sustainable and would allow us to obtain solutions to optimal growth models. We define sustainability by two new axioms called Never-decisiveness of the present and Never-decisiveness of the future. We first show that a SWF which has Never-decisiveness properties cannot be defined on a ball of $l_{\infty }^{+}$ . We must (i) restrict to the set of utility streams for which the value of the SWF is finite and (ii) introduce additional assumptions in order to obtain the Never-decisiveness properties. Our main result in this paper is therefore to show that the undiscounted utilitarian criterion is an anonymous and never-decisive criterion for optimal growth models. We consider the set of utilities of consumptions which are generated by a specific technology, namely a technology with decreasing returns for high levels of capital, and restrict ourselves to good programs, i.e., any program for which intertemporal utility is well defined.     

城市内涝治理系统设计要点及案例分析

城市内涝治理是一项系统性工程,在对内涝治理特征进行剖析的基础上,提出了达到治理目标的"三步法",并从源头减排、排水管渠及泵站、河湖水系、应急除险、信息化等方面总结了设计要点,从规划建设、运行维护、应急抢险等方面阐述了管理措施,介绍了几个典型城市的相关案例,为城市内涝治理提供参考和借鉴.     

西方社会土地产权的构成、演化与启示

西方社会将土地产权分为权能和客体两方面,并进行科学精准地界定、重组,以实现土地产权在政府管理层面与个人使用层面的均衡分配。人工不透水层作为承载社会经济发展用地类型的覆被类型,随着西方社会生态保护意识的增强而处于规划和管制当中,具体反映在土地产权主体占有地块内的建筑密度、容积率等控制指标。而土地用途分类和土地覆被分类作为土地产权的实体化反映,则构成以经济价值为维度的土地发展权的尺度性特征,实现了政府宏观管理与个体微观利用的兼容性。对我国土地产权管理的建议：土地管理应由强调土地所有制向构建土地利用管制制度转变;科学界定土地产权,转变政府职能,推动我国土地管理向民生化、微观化、精准化方向发展。     

环境规制强度与国际产业转移实证研究——以广西北部湾经济区为例

采用1993～2010年的年度数据,运用非线性Granger因果检验对广西北部湾经济区环境规制强度和国际产业转移进行实证研究,结果显示,环境规制强度与国际产业转移不存在非线性Granger因果关系,即在一定程度上加大环境管制力度,不会影响广西北部湾经济区对发达国家的产业承接,反而在促进区域经济发展的同时,使环境得到改善。     

Preservation and exogenous uncertain future preferences

Summary. We extend the Beltratti, Chichilnisky and Heal's (1993) and (1998) continuous-time stochastic dynamic framework to analyze the optimal depletion of an asset whose consumption is irreversible, in the face of uncertainty about future preferences. Their model is rather general and so the results are general qualitative theorems. We show that in some interesting cases it is possible to solve their model analytically. The cases involve constant elasticity utility functions and the assumption of a Poisson process for the evolution of preferences. Received: September 13, 1999; revised version: November 23, 1999