Consistency,Value Relevance and Sufficiency of Book for Market Values in Five Japanese Conglomerates Over the Period 1950–2004

Market and accounting data for five Japanese conglomerates, Toyota, Fuji, Sony, Itochu and Sumitomo, are analysed over the period 1950 to 2004. Annual market value is regressed on three accounting and six macroeconomic variables, using a general‐to‐specific approach to construct simple error correction models for each of the five firms. The results show that in four of the five firms there is evidence of a long‐run relationship between market value and the net book value of assets, which can be interpreted, with increasing degrees of strength, as book values being either consistent with, value relevant for, or sufficient for market value.     

Rating of Network-Integrated Corporations

While conventional rating systems are still focused on individual companies, in reality stand-alone business of a single enterprise respectively debtor is more likely the exception than the rule. Joint business activities of two or more companies (organizational networks) are becoming ubiquitous and have a critical influence on each partners’ success. In order to avoid that rating that turns into some rather useless ritual, network characteristics, such as network assets, network capital, network securities, network management competency, network business opportunities and network structure have to be taken into account when evaluating solvency of a network-embedded corporation. Using primary credit cooperatives as an illustrative object, this paper gives an overview on those new rating criteria becoming relevant in conjunction with network-embeddedness, so that workable opportunities can be shown to improve the reliability of ratings.      

全球产出缺口与中国的通胀变动:基于扩展的菲利普斯曲线研究

本文在考察全球产出缺口与国内通胀变动关系的基础上,应用扩展的菲利普斯曲线模型,对影响我国通胀变动的国内外因素进行了经验研究,验证"全球产出缺口假说"在中国的适用性。计量结果表明,国内产出缺口、通货预期、原油价格和食品价格都是影响国内通胀变动的主要因素,贸易加权、进口加权、产出加权的全球产出缺口对国内通胀变动具有正向影响,但影响程度还没有国内产出缺口高。对待全球化背景下中国的通胀变动,不仅要分析国内宏观经济均衡与波动周期,更要关注国际市场的外部冲击。     

全球金融危机对辽宁外贸出口的影响与对策

近年来辽宁对外贸易发展迅速,但由于美国次贷危机逐渐演化为全球金融危机,对辽宁对外贸易的发展必然产生新的压力和挑战。本文研究了辽宁外贸发展现状,分析了国际金融危机对辽宁对外贸易的主要影响,提出了相应的对策与建议。     

价值工程管理在工程建设采购中的应用研究

价值工程管理作为一门新兴的现代管理技术,自创立的半个多世纪以来,无论是在理论研究上,还是在实际应用上都取得了长足的进步。价值工程管理的核心是对研究对象进行功能分析,通过功能分析,找出并剔除不合理的功能要求和过剩的功能,从而降低成本,提高效益。     

关于浙江省中小企业“走出去”的思考

文章总结了近几年来浙江中小企业在走向国际市场中出现的新现象、新特点,同时对与浙江中小企业如何走得更好提出了一些建议和看法。     

我国出口额的影响因素分析

我国出口企业面临着越来越严峻的形式和考验，影响我国出口额的因素有很多，其中人民币实际有效汇率是影响我国出口额的最主要因素，就此提出了相应的对策和建议。     

Genetic engineering in agriculture: New approaches for risk management through sustainability reporting

Genetically modified crops and foodstuff have been highly controversial for environmental, health, and ethical reasons. The controversies have been worldwide, but most prominent in the European Union, for reasons that include distrust of the regulatory authorities, scientists and technocratic decision making. An informal moratorium in the EU came recently to an end, without solving the underlying problems. In response to the criticisms, the European governments have attempted to improve the risk assessment methods and their scientific basis, and to tailor public policies to the growing demand for transparency, accountability, and public participation.This paper proposes a novel approach to including the public in evaluating the impacts of food and agricultural biotechnology and present and future applications modeled after the growing practice of sustainability reporting by companies. The most visible among those, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), when implemented properly, includes a wide range of stakeholders, including the financial institutions, companies, NGOs and the civil society, in an interactive multi-stakeholder discourse and collaboration. The reporting exercise would open the discussion about the R&D around new GMO products, and could mitigate potential adverse effects in an early stage (Constructive Technology Assessment). We specifically propose initiating a broadly based societal initiative aimed at developing of a new sectoral supplement of GRI Guidelines, specifically designed for the food and agricultural biotechnology sector.This approach can be conceptualized as experimentation on a small scale with a multitude of stakeholders involved (Bounded Socio-Technical Experiment or BSTE) which is an effective venue for higher-order learning among participants. Sustainability reports and BSTEs have been so far applied in limited cases, none of which included highly controversial technologies such as biotechnology; they need further elaboration and testing to become possibly highly effective concepts and tools for mitigating conflicts on the societal implications of emerging technologies, and to lead to better public policies and greater social trust.     

Physical energy cost serves as the “invisible hand” governing economic valuation: Direct evidence from biogeochemical data and the U.S. metal market

Energy supply is mandatory for the production of economic value. Nevertheless, tradition dictates that an enigmatic “invisible hand” governs economic valuation. Physical scientists have long proposed alternative but testable energy cost theories of economic valuation, and have shown the gross correlation between energy consumption and economic output at the national level through input-output energy analysis. However, due to the difficulty of precise energy analysis and highly complicated real markets, no decisive evidence directly linking energy costs to the selling prices of individual commodities has yet been found. Over the past century, the US metal market has accumulated a huge body of price data, which for the first time ever provides us the opportunity to quantitatively examine the direct energy-value correlation. Here, by analyzing the market price data of 65 purified chemical elements (mainly metals) relative to the total energy consumption for refining them from naturally occurring geochemical conditions, we found a clear correlation between the energy cost and their market prices. The underlying physics we proposed has compatibility with conventional economic concepts such as the ratio between supply and demand or scarcity's role in economic valuation. It demonstrates how energy cost serves as the “invisible hand” governing economic valuation. Thorough understanding of this energy connection between the human economic and the Earth's biogeochemical metabolism is essential for improving the overall energy efficiency and furthermore the sustainability of the human society.     

Coordination cycles

Players repeatedly face a coordination problem in a dynamic global game. By choosing a risky action (invest) instead of waiting, players risk instantaneous losses as well as a loss of payoffs from future stages, in which they cannot participate if they go bankrupt. Thus, the total strategic risk associated with investment in a particular stage depends on the expected continuation payoff. High continuation payoff makes investment today more risky and therefore harder to coordinate on, which decreases today's payoff. Thus, expectation of successful coordination tomorrow undermines successful coordination today, which leads to fluctuations of equilibrium behavior even if the underlying economic fundamentals happen to be the same across the rounds. The dynamic game inherits the equilibrium uniqueness of the underlying static global game.