南水北调中线工程几点思考

本文从四个方面对南水北调中线工程进行了思考:①进行费用效益分析可以使决策更加科学化;②将水资源本身价值纳入经济分析之中实属必要;③需水区节水与调水投资效益比较十分重要;④选择合适的调水时间.对南水北调中线工程决策具有参考价值.     

新型无机高分子混凝剂聚硅硫酸铝的混凝性能

作者对新型无机高分子混凝剂聚硅硫酸铝(PASS)制备的工艺条件进行了研究，制备出性能稳定，效果良好的产品。用该产品对不同水质进行混凝试验，结果表明PASS有良好的混凝效果和广泛的适用范围。     

Financial acumen, women speculators, and the Royal African company during the South Sea bubble

Price bubbles provide a unique opportunity to study the financial acumen of shareholders. We focus on the 1720 South Sea episode as experienced by the Royal African Company whose stock was more speculative than other joint stocks. During 1720 the company had a new large stock issue. This paper examines the financial acumen of those women who traded senior and engrafted stock across 1720. We find that depending on the pricing regime, these women at worst broke even on their activities or had positive speculative gains. Our findings are consistent with a growing literature on the positive link between gender, capital gains and financial markets.     

Convertibility risk: the precautionary demand for foreign currency in a crisis

This paper presents theoretical work linking money demand to the perceptions of households about the risk that domestic currency may become inconvertible or that it may be devalued. An empirical investigation of the size of this effect is carried out using monthly data for Korea to estimate an augmented demand-for-money equation. It is found that the fear of inconvertibility arising from the 1997 Korean currency crisis may have caused broad money demand to fall by 4–5% points,equivalent to the loss of reserves of $6–7.5 billion (or about 30% of reserves as measured at end-November 1997). This is a revised version of IMF Working paper WP/2001/210; it was written while Professor Black was Senior Policy Advisor at the IMF Institute and Christofides and Mourmouras were staff members in the IMF’s Policy Development and Review Department. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. For useful comments and suggestions we thank an anonymous referee, Tim Lane, Ydahlia Metzgen, Roberto Perelli, Tony Richards, Christian Mulder, Steve Russell, as well as seminar participants at the IMF Institute, the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department, Federal Reserve Board, and Bank of Indonesia. We would also like to note similar (unpublished) empirical results using our approach by Dr. Rino Effendi for Indonesia and Angana Banerji for Russia     

Structural Changes in China’s Import Market: A Comparison with Korea’s Exports to China

The article examines the structural changes of China’s import market for domestic demand and the corresponding structural changes of Korea’s exports to China for Chinese domestic demand. Using 8-digit HS code data covering the period 2006–2014 and analyzing the processing steps as well as by industry, this study reveals that while the share of ordinary trade in total China’s imports has increased rapidly, the share of processing trade has decreased continuously since the mid-2000s. The article also shows that Korea’s exports to China is still processing trade-oriented. The slowdown of Korea’s exports to China is because of the concentration on processing trade, intermediate goods, electronics and chemistry.     

Whither seniority? Career progression and performance orientation in South Korea

Framed by institutional theory, this study reassesses the influence of seniority on (HRM) in South Korea today. We analyze first the overall influence of seniority in business, second its significance for career progression (i.e. promotion), and third its relation to individual performance orientation. By conducting in-depth interviews among local and expatriate managers, we find that the role of seniority is still pronounced. Seniority-based promotion remains significant, and individual performance evaluation systems, as are typically found in Western countries, hardly fit the cultural environment and tend to be ineffective. By contributing to the extant theories on institutional dynamics and the convergence–divergence–hybridization debate alike, our results strengthen the culturalist approaches, holding that informal institutions persist and do not disappear quickly. Further, rather than moving towards global convergence, we see the Korean HRM system as being in a state of hybridization caused by coercive isomorphism resulting from experimentation with foreign best-practice systems. As a result, some HRM practices are dysfunctional. We recommend that firms should reinterpret their valuation of individual performance towards team achievements and pay more attention to the optimal team composition.     

Analysing job creation effects of scaling up infrastructure spending in South Africa

In a first for South Africa, this article draws on literature on infrastructure productivity to model dynamic economy-wide employment impacts of infrastructure investment funded with different fiscal tools. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model, the South African investment plan is modelled, given the infrastructure externality. Alternative fiscal scenarios to finance the policy are modelled in the article. In the long run, unemployment decreases for all types of workers under one of the scenarios. In the short run, only elementary occupation workers benefit from a decrease in unemployment; for the rest, unemployment rises.     

Role of formal standards in transition to the technology frontier: Korean ICT systems

According to traditional wisdom, latecomer countries improve their technological capabilities in reverse of the product cycle, that is from mature towards new technologies. However, improvement of standards capabilities in this process has not been revealed clearly. This paper confirms similar patterns for improving formal standards capabilities as for the technological capabilities, but records some possible differences in the rate of catch-up when latecomers approach the technology frontier; a forward moving position where technology leaders (typically advanced countries) develop or conceptualize new technologies before being turned into products or systems. A number of case studies of South Korean ICT systems reveal that transition to the technological frontier is increasingly related to how they target and carry out formal standardization. The common elements driving differences in rates of successful catch-up for ICT systems standards are not only limited to generic standards capabilities, but also rely on characteristics of technology trajectories, national strategic focus, and organizing for standardization.³ This implies that a nation should not be discouraged by slow progress in standards-setting during earlier stages. Once a minimum level of capabilities is achieved, a nation pro-active in standards from the beginning may attain higher rates of catch-up near the technology frontier.