今年中国贸易顺差增速料将放缓

2007年中国贸易顺差上升近50％，达到创纪录的2620亿美元，但在去年最后3个月，进口增速均超过了出口增速，表明存在争议的外汇储备大幅上升期可能正渐近结束。     

Skill-Specific rather than General Education: A Reason for US–Europe Growth Differences?

In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general education or a skill-specific, vocational education. General education is costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new production technologies. Firms weigh the cost of adopting and operating new technologies against increased profits and optimally choose the level of adoption. We show that an economy whose policies favor vocational education will grow slower in equilibrium than one that favors general education. More importantly, the gap between their growth rates will increase with the growth rate of available technology. By characterizing the optimal Ramsey education policy we also demonstrate that the optimal subsidy for general education increases with the growth rate of available technology. Our theory suggests that European education policies that favored specialized, vocational education might have worked well, both in terms of growth rates and welfare, during the 1960s and 1970s when available technologies changed slowly. However, in the information age of the 1980s and 1990s when new technologies emerged at a more rapid pace, they might have contributed to an increased growth gap relative to the United States.     

Economic Growth,Productivity Gains and Foreign Capital: A Comment

Journal of Quantitative Economics -     

Potential impacts of Bt eggplant on economic surplus and farmers' health in India

In this article, the potential impacts of Bt eggplant technology in Indian agriculture are analyzed. Several proprietary Bt hybrids are likely to be commercialized in the near future. Based on field trial data, it is shown that the technology can significantly reduce insecticide applications and increase effective yields. Comprehensive farm-survey data are used to project farm-level effects and future adoption rates. Simulations show that the aggregate economic surplus gains of Bt hybrids could be around US$108 million per year. Consumers will capture a large share of these gains, but farmers and the innovating company will benefit too. As the company has also shared its technology with the public sector, Bt open-pollinated varieties might become available with a certain time lag. This would make the technology more accessible, especially for resource-poor farmers, entailing further improvements in welfare and distribution effects. The wider implications of the private–public technology transfer are discussed. Furthermore, the potential benefits for farmers' health resulting from reduced insecticide applications are examined, using an econometric model and a cost-of-illness approach. These benefits are worth an additional $3–4 million per year, yet they constitute only a small fraction of the technology's environmental and health externalities. More research is needed for comprehensive impact analysis.     

TRADE,DEBT, AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN A NORTH-SOUTH MODEL

This paper examines a simple model of North-South trade and capital flows along structuralist lines. The South can choose its growth rate, but must finance its growth in excess of its savings by borrowing from the North. The long-run consequences of this process for the process of uneven development and for Southern debt-dependence are explored. The appropriate responses to a debt crisis are considered.     

Tasks and Organizations: A Signal Detection Model of Organizational Decision Making

This paper presents a mathematical model to study the joint impact of organizational design and of the task environment on the decision performance of hierarchical organizations with limited internal communication. The problem context is a special class of distributed situation assessment problems, where possible patterns of binary variables are to be classified on the basis of partial and noise-corrupted information. Structural properties of tasks and organizations are described using a graph formalism, and optimal decision strategies at all decision makers are determined. Organizational expertise is characterized in the form of a Team Relative Operating Characteristic (TROC) curve, thereby replacing the organization by an equivalent single decision maker. Implementing the model, issues of task decomposition and the process of matching organizations with tasks are discussed.     

Diversification strategy,profit performance and the entropy measure

Several industrial organization studies, using diversification index measures, examined corporate diversification and economic performance and failed to find any significant relationship between them. Rumelt and other strategy researchers used a semisubjective classification scheme and uncovered a systematic relationship between diversification strategies and performance. This study combines the strengths of the index approach, namely, simplicity, objectivity and replicability, with the essential richness of Rumelt's methodology. Using the Jacquemin-Berry entropy measure of diversification and the line-of-business data, this study finds that firms with predominantly related diversification show significantly better profit growth than firms with predominantly unrelated diversification.