绿色贸易措施的政治博弈

随着贸易自由化和全球经济一体化,世界各国出于维护本国国际竞争比较优势战略目标和实现贸易与环境协调发展的客观需要,以可持续发展为口号,以保护环境和人类健康为目的或借口,以产品标准、环境标志、绿色包装、贸易制裁等为手段的绿色贸易措施正在成为国际社会特别是发达国家越来越频繁使用的新的国际贸易保护手段。形形色色的绿色贸易措施正在向系统化、制度化和国际化方向演进。本文通过对近期一些国外经济学家的相关文献回顾,对绿色贸易措施产生的政治博弈过程进行简单的综述,为我国参与新一轮的WTO谈判提供一些理论参考。     

生产性服务业外资企业投资分布演化——基于江苏省的实证研究

随着全球生产制造活动向我国的大规模转移,近年来服务业外国直接投资也表现出了快速增长的势头。本文以制造业外国直接投资较为集中的江苏省为研究对象,重点从集聚的"路径依赖"效果和产业关联作用两个角度考察了生产性服务业外资企业的投资分布状况及其空间演化。结果表明,短期内,路径依赖效果和产业关联作用都产生了显著影响,但长期影响效果还不是很明显。     

《公民权利和政治权利公约》与我国的人权保障

中国政府于1998年10月签署《公民权利和政治权利公约》,但至今未报经全国人大批准。主要原因在于我国对人权保障的理解及宪法中的相关规定与该《公约》存在重大差别：对人权来源的认识和规定不同;对＂人民自决权＂的理解存在差异;关于＂平等权＂＂迁徙和选择住所的自由＂＂无罪推定原则＂＂人人有权享受思想、良心和宗教自由＂＂结社的自由＂等方面的规定不同。我国应该加强人权理论研究和宣传教育的力度;完善我国宪法法律关于人权保障的相关制度和机制,逐步推动我国人权保障事业的发展。     

Supply Chain Management Competency and Firm Financial Success

Supply chain management (SCM) plays a major role in creating (or destroying) shareholder value by influencing the three major drivers of firm financial performance: revenue, operating costs, and working capital. Yet, the relationship between SCM competency and firm financial performance is not well‐established. Drawing on the resource‐based view of the firm, this study assesses this relationship using Delphi‐style opinion data from AMR Research’s Supply Chain Top 25 rankings to assess SCM competency and Altman’s (1968) Z‐score statistic as the measure of financial success. The study findings show that firms recognized by industry experts for SCM competency have significantly higher Z‐scores than their close competitors and industry averages.     

历史情境教育在高校思想政治工作中的合理运用

历史作为一门人文类学科,通过再现历史、分析历史,体现了对人类社会的终极关怀。虽然历史教育的现状不容乐观,但它对当代大学生家国认同感、健全人格、开阔视野和时代创新力培养的作用是不可取代的;同时历史教育也以其自身无可比拟的优势渗透在高校思政教育的各个方面,发挥着其强大的育人功能;更挖掘自身内涵与先进文化创造的交互作用,以创新、延伸的姿态适应时代发展的要求。     

Party Discipline and Environmental Policy: The Role of “Smoke‐filled Back Rooms”*

We adopt the view that greater party discipline induces legislators to commit to promised policies after being elected. We then develop the hypothesis that the effect of party discipline on the stringency of environmental policy is conditional on the degree of government corruption. Our empirical work suggests that greater party discipline results in more stringent environmental policies when the level of corruption is relatively low, but in weaker policies when the level of corruption is comparatively high.     

Why sustainable and ‘nutritionally correct’ food is not on the agenda: Western Sydney,the moral arts of everyday life and public policy

Within a context of delivering food security into the future, dietary guidelines are being reframed, corporations are replacing unsustainable products, and consumers are being encouraged to become ecological citizens. While there is a growing literature on the food practices of ‘alternative’ consumers, ‘mainstream’ consumers are less well understood. This paper describes qualitative research undertaken in a socio-economically disadvantaged area of Sydney, Australia, which aimed to uncover consumer views towards sustainable and healthy diets. Most participants indicated a discrepancy between their desired and actual behaviours: while they want to support Australian, or local, food producers they gravitate towards cheap and tasty food from ‘anywhere’; and while they associate nutritious food with fresh food, they will buy processed foods which can be less expensive, appeal to children and are prone to less waste. Reflecting mainstream Australian political culture, participants were compromising household food budgets in order to pursue a socially acceptable standard of living (including decent housing, car-reliance). They were also incorporating the pleasure and desires of family members as part of ‘the moral arts of everyday life’. Using social theories of consumption and practice sociology we argue that food choices and practices – easy or not – need to be interpreted as part of the role that consumption plays in political citizenship and moral subjectivity. In the Western Sydney context, food practices are essentially household budget and family nourishment practices rather than nutrition and sustainability practices; a position which is not addressed in the government’s new food policies or wage determination processes.     

GMO standards,endogenous policy and the market for information

The paper develops a composite index of GMO standards restrictiveness for 60 countries, assigning objective scores to six different regulatory dimensions. Using this index and its components, we empirically investigate the political and economic determinants of GMO regulations for 55 countries, controlling for spatial autocorrelation. Results show that many of the determinants highlighted in the theoretical literature, such as the structure of the agricultural sector and the institutional environment are important determinants of the restrictiveness of the GMO regulation. As a key result there emerges a prominent role of the market for information, showing that the structure of domestic mass media (public vs. private) is an important driver of GMO standards.     

Cash holdings of politically connected firms

Politically connected firms benefit from soft-budget constraints and are unlikely to suffer from liquidity constraints. This argument suggests that politically connected firms should hold less cash than non-connected peers. Another view posits that these firms exhibit acute corporate governance problems. In this setting, politically connected firms are more likely to hold more cash than non-connected firms. Using a sample of 50,119 firm-year observations from 31 countries, we find that politically connected firms hold more cash than their non-connected peers. We put forth two explanations for this result. Firstly, politicians use politically connected firms as “cash cows” to advance their political agendas. Secondly, political connections are conducive to agency problems. In additional analyses, we find that the positive relationship between political connections and cash holdings is stronger when corporate governance is weak.     

On the size and number of preferential trading arrangements

This paper uses a multi-country political economy model to investigate the possibility of achieving global free trade through the expansion of Preferential Trading Arrangements (PTAs). It is shown that bloc expansion would result in global free trade if blocs have an open membership. However, that would not be the case if membership were selective: at some point, the members of the bloc would stop accepting new members and this would lead to the creation of a second bloc. The likelihood of such a second bloc would make the members of the first bloc choose a larger bloc size than they would have chosen if only one bloc was allowed to form.