发展就是扩展自由——阿马蒂亚·森和他的《以自由看待发展》

“重建经济学的伦理层面”的阿马蒂亚·森 (Amartya Sen)被称做“经济学的良心”.他认为,自由是发展的首要目的,自由也是促进发展的不可缺少的重要手段。经济发展就其本质而言,是自由的扩展和增长。     

INTERFAMILY TRANSFERS AS ALTERNATIVES TO GOVERNMENT TRANSFERS TO PERSONS*

How have government transfers altered the distribution of income, the level of work effort, and the rate of personal saving? Most scholars approach this question by comparing the current level of government transfers with the unrealistic counterfactual of a zero-transfer situation. This method overlooks the fact that nongovernment transfers existed before government transfers and the possibility that private transfers might have grown more if government transfers had grown less. This paper explores the significance of one private alternative to government transfers-namely, direct interfamily giving of cash, food, and housing. Fragmentary evidence suggests that such interfamily transfer was quantitatively more important than governmental transfer for these purposes thirty years ago, but is now only half as great. If current government transfers are conversions of, or substitutes for, interfamily transfers, then it follows that some of the benefits of government transfer “slide” over to “secondary beneficiaries,” i.e. those who would have made the private transfers. Further, it follows that the effects of government transfers are not much different from those of the private transfers which they replace.     

分而治之:防范合谋的不对称机制

歧视现象广泛存在于各种类型的组织中,但经济学家一直未能就其合理性做出令人满意的解释。在本文中,我们采用一个简单的锦标赛模型指出了组织中歧视的作用在于有效地防范合谋。我们证明了带有显性歧视的不对称机制优于无歧视的对称机制。进一步地,通过引入委托人对信息的操纵,我们揭示了隐性的歧视机制的作用,并且证明了它优于显性的歧视机制。     

SOCIAL CHALLENGES TO ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO SOCIAL ACCOUNTING

The question addressed in this paper is: Why can't we have a good measuring rod of the economic and social performance of our society? The answers are basically positive but lie mostly in the direction of (1) avoiding simplistic solutions such as turning the national income accounts into a measure of social welfare and (2) providing the elements of an information strategy to obtain such a measure or more accurately such a set of measures. The proposed information strategy highlights five activities: (1) the presentation and analysis of welfare outcomes, an activity which is analogous to but broader than “social indicators”; (2) social accounting which includes economic accounting, demographic accounting, and time-use accounting; (3) model building and operation which, unlike accounting, are concerned with behavioral or causal relationships used to explain and project welfare outcomes; (4) hypothesis testing to develop new insights into economic and social behavior; and finally (5) the building and maintenance of a data base required for carrying on the aforementioned four activities.     

WHEN TO RUN AND WHEN TO HIDE: ELECTORAL COORDINATION AND EXIT

Elections represent a coordination problem for voters and candidates for office. Electoral coordination is also the causal mechanism behind any explanation of the relationship between electoral systems and the number of parties. I present a dynamic model of electoral coordination with candidate exit. The model extends two important results from the literature to a dynamic setting. The extension of Duverger's Law and the median-voter theorem also offers a simultaneous prediction of the number of parties and their ideological positions. Coordination failure is shown to be possible in a mixed-strategy equilibrium.     

人民币走向自由兑换的时机选择

汇率制度的选择是一个动态的转换过程。我国目前采用的是钉住美元的汇率制度,这一汇率制度存在着明显弊端,已不适应我国市场经济发展的需要,我国经济的发展迫切需要人民币汇率由钉住汇率转向真正的管理浮动汇率。从现在起到未来的一两年内,是人民币走向浮动,实行人民币自由兑换的最佳时机。     

ARE CONSUMERS MORE LOYAL TO NATIONAL BRANDS THAN TO PRIVATE LABELS?

The evolution of private labels (PLs) can be understood in terms of a strategy adopted by the retail industry with the aim of competing with national brands (NBs). In the 1990s, this strategy led to the development of ‘me too’ products, which currently represent the largest share of store brand products. Since the early 2000s, retailers have widened the range of their store brands by introducing high‐quality products. The aim of this study was to estimate consumers’ attachment to ‘me‐too’ and niche PLs respectively, as compared to NBs. We captured the degree of maturity of these PLs through their price‐elasticities, computed for three staple goods offered by three mass retail companies. It was found that price sensitivity does not differ much between the ‘me‐too’ PLs and the corresponding NBs. This result confirms that ‘me‐too’ products are now considered reliable quality brands. However, in the high quality segment, consumers remain more sensitive to the price of PLs than to that of NBs, a characteristic which may relate to their recent introduction on the market.     

TO TAX OR NOT TO TAX? THE CASE OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

Despite the intensifying debate over the taxation of Internet commerce, the relevant issues have not been given a systematic treatment in the context of the literature on optimal taxation. This article presents such an analysis and investigates separately the taxation of business purchases of intermediate goods, the taxation of consumer purchases of final goods and services, and the various issues of administration and compliance costs as they apply to the development of E-commerce. The authors conclude that generally the optimal tax literature cannot be used in support of a blanket tax exemption for Internet purchases. Certain conditions could lead to the optimality of an exemption, but those conditions are not likely to be met in practice.     

从城堡开始

皇帝和侯爵、元首与鼓动者、发明家和学者……从中世纪开始,纽伦堡就如德国历史的一面镜子,上演着一幕幕壮观耀眼、跌宕起伏而又难以参透的悲喜剧.每年,有数十万人来这里做“时间旅行”,零距离体验近代和中世纪的生活万象. 纽伦堡城堡是时间之旅的起点,亦是终点.宏伟的城市防御工事、庄严华丽的教堂、梦幻般的喷泉、昔日全球贸易的见证,一路走来,仿如坠入历史长河,置身中世纪的寰宇大都市.     

THE TRANSITION TO EMU

This paper examines the problems of the transition to EMU, on the assumption that stage 3 of the EMU process begins in 1999. A number of issues are addressed, ranging from the attachment to national countries to problems of fiscal adjustment in the final path to EMU, and I suggest that the Maastricht fiscal criteria may turn out to be more flexible than many commentators suggest. Other problems relate to the possibility of a final parity realignment between the participants of EMU, and the relationship between those countries joining EMU, and the excluded countries. Finally, the paper concludes that there is no need to rush quickly from stage 3A to stage 3A to stage 3B of the EMU process until public and political support for the introduction of the Euro is built up.