Determinants of China's bilateral trade balance in global value chains

This paper identifies the determinants of China's bilateral trade balance using a new measure based on international input–output data, the so-called ‘trade in value-added’ (TiVA), which can prevent double counting in the estimation of bilateral trade balance. Our results show that using a measure based on gross exports, rather than TiVA, causes relatively large overestimation of the impact of the RMB exchange rate on China's bilateral trade balance. This overestimation is mainly because that the increasing production of exports may require increasing intermediate imports as a consequence of international fragmentation of production in global value chains. In addition, our results also show that the impact of FDI inflows on China's bilateral trade balances depends on the position and role of China and its trading partners in GVCs.     

Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do workers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use 30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online piecework platforms with different histories and worker demographics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that structural constraints (availability of work and degree of worker dependence on the work) as well as cultural‐cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism) limit worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and cultural‐cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have developed informal practices, tools, and communities to address these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes rather than on worker control is a more fruitful way to assess flexible working arrangements.     

Review: Chinese public administration and finance—a call for a new theory,research and dialogue

In implementing its national strategy to achieve global leadership, China needs a new public administration theory that integrates political administration, economic management and social regulation. Even so, China has already started to promote its brand of political and economic development abroad. Therefore new comparative research and dialogue is called to explore the universality of Chinese and Western public administration ideas.     

The exchange regime and trade balance in Turkey

Over the last 15 years, high trade deficits have become a source of external vulnerability for the relatively stabilized Turkish economy. This corresponds to the period where authorities have been following a floating exchange rate regime. Thus, this study aims to empirically show whether the adopted exchange rate regime has an impact on the trade balance for the period of 1987 Q1 to 2015 Q2. Estimation results indicate that there is a long-run relationship between the real effective exchange rate and trade balance under both fixed and floating regimes in Turkey, but there is no evidence for the J-curve hypothesis.     

FX Intervention in the New Keynesian Model

We develop an open-economy New Keynesian Model with foreign exchange (FX) intervention in the presence of a financial accelerator and shocks to risk appetite in international capital markets. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal monetary and FX intervention policies assuming the central bank cannot commit to future policies, and we compare the solution to that under policy commitment. We show how FX intervention can help reduce the volatility of the exchange rate, of inflation, and of the output gap, thus mitigating welfare losses associated with shocks in the international capital markets. We also show that, when the financial accelerator is strong, there is a risk of indeterminacy (self-fulfilling currency and inflation movements) although FX intervention can reduce this risk and thus reinforce the credibility of the inflation targeting regime. Model simulations match well the impact of a VIX shock obtained by local projections on a panel of inflation targeting emerging markets.     

我国国家公园体制建设中利益相关者关系研究

我国自然保护地将国家公园作为主体,保护具有国家代表性的生态系统和自然景观的原真性和完整性,同时具有全民公益性。从利益相关者视角出发,以国家公园管理部门、旅游投资公司和社区居民为主要利益相关者,分析三者的行为目标与策略选择,通过三方博弈提出解决国家公园体制建设过程中的最优策略,即应改变管理部门与旅游投资企业在国家公园试点中进行不合作博弈的狭隘认知,而应选择国家公园管理部门、旅游投资企业和社区居民三方合作博弈。同时,提出了相应的建议以期进一步保护国家公园自然资源并将可持续利用制度顺利实行。     

New development: China renews reform of central–local fiscal relations and provides for basic national public services

China’s reform on central–local fiscal reform has slowed down in recent years. The appointment of a new finance minister experienced in local government affairs is expected to renew the reform affirmed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress in late 2017. China has unprecedentedly identified a comprehensive list of 81 national basic public services as entitlements. Eighteen of them are subject to national and local standards, and co-financed by central and local governments. A new cost-sharing method for 10 of these services classifies sub-national jurisdictions into five tiers, in which the central government’s share declines from 80% to 10%. These measures, effective in 2019, aim at creating a ‘harmonious and moderately prosperous society’.     

在校大学生饮食营养健康问题调查研究——以开封高校为例

随着社会的进步,人们生活水平有所提高,对饮食营养健康问题也越来越关注。研究发现在校大学生群体的日常饮食还存在着不健康、不营养等问题,因此,本文运用调查问卷法对大学生的日常饮食问题进行分析,阐述问题产生的原因,并提出适合的解决策略,为提高在校大学生的健康饮食意识,提高身体素质提供借鉴。     

从传统绩效预算走向新绩效预算的路径选择

从传统绩效预算走向新绩效预算，代表了现代预算制度的发展方向。20世纪50年代，胡佛委员会倡导的传统绩效预算由于种种原因失败了。随着政府治理变革的不断深化，新绩效预算重新出现在当代预算改革的视野中。本文通过对比传统绩效预算与新绩效预算的成败得失，分析新绩效预算的主要特点——取得了立法机关的支持、适时的政府会计改革、更科学的绩效评价体系和更致力于绩效信息的使用。这些经验对于中国现代预算制度的建设具有重要的启示价值。     

Why do auditors fail? What might work? What won’t?†

Auditing failures and scandals have become commonplace. In response, reformers (including the Kingman Review in the U.K. and a recent report of the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority) have proposed a variety of remedies, including prophylactic bans on auditors providing consulting services to their clients in the belief that this will minimize the conflicts of interest that produce auditing failures. Although useful, such reforms are already in place to a considerable degree and may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Moreover, this strategy does not address the deeper problem that clients (or their managements) may not want aggressive auditing, but rather prefer a deferential and perfunctory audit. If so, auditors will realize that they are marketing a ‘commodity’ service and cannot successfully compete based on their quality of services. Rationally, they would respond to such a market by seeking to adopt a cost-minimization strategy, competing by reducing the cost of their services and not investing in new technology or higher-priced personnel.

What could change this pattern? Gatekeepers, including auditors, serve investors, but are hired by corporate management. To induce gatekeepers to better serve investors, one needs to reduce the ‘agency costs’ surrounding this relationship by making gatekeepers more accountable to investors. This might be accomplished through litigation (as happens to some degree in the U.S.), but the U.K. and Europe have rules that discourage collective litigation. Thus, a more feasible approach would be to give investors greater ability to select and remove the auditor. This paper proposes a two part strategy to this end: (1) public ‘grading’ of the auditor by the audit regulator in an easily comparable fashion (and with a mandatory grading curve), and (2) enabling a minority of the shareholders (hypothetically, 10%) to propose a replacement auditor for a shareholder vote. It further argues that both activist shareholders and diversified shareholders might support such a strategy and undertake it under different circumstances. Absent such a focus on agency costs, however, reformers are likely only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.