Trade, foreign firms and economic policy in Indonesian and Thai manufacturing

This paper first examines the rapid growth and changing composition of manufactured exports in Indonesia and Thailand, highlighting the rapid growth of office and computer machinery and electric machinery, somewhat slower growth of non-electric and transportation machinery, as well as the low growth of previously large exports of textiles apparel. Second, the important contributions of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) to export growth in the machinery industries, particularly in electric, office, and computing machinery, are documented. Third, the paper describes trade policies in all these industries in some detail, emphasizing how low protection was a key facilitator of rapid export growth in the MNEs that dominated the electric, office, and computing machinery industry, while high protection reduced incentives to export among MNEs in the transportation machinery industry.     

Indonesian Local Government Spending,Taxing and Saving: An Explanation of Pre‐ and Post‐decentralization Fiscal Outcomes*

As a result of Indonesia's decentralization program, local governments have gained significantly more responsibility for service delivery, considerably larger fiscal resources, and much greater authority over the use of those resources than before. The present paper develops a simple budget model to describe and explain the substantial differences in pre‐ and post‐decentralization local government fiscal behavior related to spending, taxing and saving. During the post‐decentralization period special attention is paid to the fiscal behavior of natural resource rich regions. Among other things, the evidence suggests that: post‐decentralization local government spending is partly responsive to increasing needs and partly the subject of elite capture; local government taxation has become more aggressive under decentralization and appears to be mostly driven by local bureaucratic expectations related to routine overhead budgets; and the increased savings of local governments during the post‐decentralization period is determined to a large degree by delayed central government transfer payments.     

The impact of environmental regulation on productivity in German industries

The objective of this paper is to adjust a traditional total factor productivity (TFP) measure for the direct effect of environmental regulation on material and capital input. For this purpose we consider the fact that part of material input and pollution abatement capital have not been used to increase output but to cover the cost of using the environment as a factor of production. Therefore TFP growth rates are lower if part of the material input is allocated to abatement activities instead of producing output. We propose to treat compliance with environmental regulation as an unproductive input linked to the use of productive material input. Our aim is to answer and discuss two questions: How to measure the effect of environmental regulation on TFP, and does the effect matter. We examine data from 1975–1991 for ten pollution intensive German industries.We would like to thank Cornelia Oßwald for valuable research assistance. We are especially grateful to two anonymous referees for many helpful comments.     

Pricing-to-market tests in instrumental regressions: Case of the transportation equipment industry

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that exporting monopolistic firms adjust their destination-specific mark-ups in the face of exchange rate shocks. A large proportion of the existing evidence for PTM comes from Wald tests applied to OLS- and IV-estimated parameters of single-equation models. Such tests can seriously over-reject in the presence of endogeneity and weak instruments so that some of the available results supporting PTM could be spurious. In this paper we revisit the PTM evidence for Japanese and German exporting firms in the transportation equipment industry. Using the model of Marston (1990), we apply exogeneity and LR-LIML-based tests for which the error probability is controlled irrespective of the quality of the available instruments. Our results show right-hand-side endogeneity in almost all of the examined PTM equations. In addition, we find that statistical decisions often differ depending on whether they are based on the traditional Wald test or on our proposed test.The authors would like to thank Philippe Barla, Jean-Thomas Bernard, Christos Constantatos, Larry Schembri, seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Richard Marston for providing data. Finally, a special thanks to Marjorie Santos for excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are our own and should not be attributed to the Bank of Canada.First version received: May 2002/Final version received: December 2002     

培育和扩大山西中等收入阶层的对策和建议

为了尽快提高山西中等收入阶层的比重,构建"橄榄型"社会阶层结构,必须不断加强培育和扩大中等收入阶层的舆论导向;以培育和扩大中等收入阶层为重点,深化收入分配制度改革;大力发展教育,促使低收入阶层向中等收入阶层转化;制定合理的产业政策,推进产业结构的优化升级;切实解决"三农"问题,促进农民成为中等收入者;大力发展非公有制经济和中介服务业.     

Expected utility theory and the experiments

The experimental evidence against expected utility theo or unconvincing. When one modifies the experiments to mi tends to support traditional theory.Dewey H. Johnson Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, College of Business Administration, University of South Carolina. I am grateful for comments from seminar participants at the University of Melbourne, University of South Carolina, University of Stockholm, and the University of Western Ontario. John Hey provided a firm, but sympathetic, editorial hand.     

Stationary solution to the overlapping generations model of fiat money: Experimental evidence

Overlapping generations model of fiat money yields an infinity of competitive equilibrium solutions, only one of which is stationary. Economies reported in this paper involved a sequence of overlapping generations of three or four individuals; each individual lived for two periods. In their young age individuals were endowed with chips that could be traded for fiat money wish the individuals of the old generation. In their old age, individuals could exchange their units o flat money for the consumption good. Results of the experiments exhibit some support for the stationary solution. The results are robust to two designs of exchange institutions (double oral auctior and supply schedule auction) and to two different endogenous ways of converting money into chips at the end of the game (average price prevailing during the last period the game is actually played and the average price forecast made during the last period the game is actually played).A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Economic Science Association and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The authors are grateful for comments received from various participants at both presentations. Financial support was provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Honeywell Foundation, National Science Foundation (SES 89-12552), and Richard. M. and Margaret Cyert Family Funds.     

Price determination and dynamic adjustments: An inverse demand system approach to meat products in the United States

In this study the process of retail meat price determination is depicted in the form of an inverse demand system taking into consideration the dynamic adjustments present in monthly consumption data. The general dynamic framework identifies both long run and short run effects in a systematic manner and allows direct estimation of the long run price and scale flexibilities that are consistent with theory. The empirical application based on monthly U.S. meat products data provides reasonable and promising results.The authors are senior econometrician, Department of Risk Management, TRS, American Express Co., Phoenix, and assistant professor, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, respectively. The work was performed when the first author was an assistant research scientist at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames. Journal Paper No. J-15784 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 3109.     

学习技术还是学习思想——西方经济学教学中的难点评析

在西方经济学的教学中,思想和技术的学习应该完美地结合起来,缺一不可。而中国大学西方经济学的课时安排与教材选择,基本的倾向是侧重于技术的学习而忽略了思想的学习。经过几年尝试性的试验,我们认为,应该在现在的教学模式上再增加一些基础课时来学习经济学基础,这对今后理解和掌握西方经济学并且借鉴西方经济学的有益部分不无好处。