Topology of economic systems

An economic topology can have many uses to the academician, student and practitioner. Refining a topology of economic systems helps to bring together seemingly disparate characteristics and to point out potential long run trends. The progression of economic systems over time and also brief explanations of each system are given. We argue that most modem economic systems have some remnants of earlier forms, that is, most economies today are some mixture of what might be considered pure systems. Measurable characteristics to identify a particular system are developed that allows progress to or from a particular classification to be charted for individual countries.     

Income inequality and economic growth in an open economy

Income inequality has a strong impact on fiscal policy when majority voting enables those individuals with less-than-average income to decide on tax rates. This study analyzes the impact on economic growth of income inequality in an open economy where tax revenues are partially used for international transfers. In any case, income inequality is harmful for growth. In an economic union, positive effects of international integration raise the growth rate as long as net transfers do not grow proportionally. In a political union, unionwide voting makes distributive politics depending on the union's median voter. In this case, additional output growth on aggregate level is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a majority of voters to accept union membership.     

Political versus economic institutions in the growth process

After a decade of research on the relationship between institutions and growth, there is no consensus about the exact way in which these two variables interact. In this paper we re-examine the role that institutions play in the growth process using data for developed and developing economies over the period 1975–2005. Our results indicate that the data is best described by an econometric model with two growth regimes. Political institutions are the key determinant of which regime an economy belongs to, while economic institutions have a direct impact on growth rates within each regime. These findings support the hypothesis that political institutions are one of the deep causes of growth, setting the stage in which economic institutions and standard covariates operate.     

Comparative responses to the energy crisis in different economic systems: An extensive analysis

In this paper we present an extensive analysis of the responses of different economic systems to the quadrupling of the world price of crude oil since October 1973. The results of government energy policies are determined by comparing the actual responses to the energy crisis in each country with those that would have occurred given market-clearing actions on the part of suppliers and demanders. The analysis indicates that the responses to the energy crisis were affected less by the type of economic system than by the magnitude of domestic crude-oil productive capacity.     

Storming cycles and economic systems

Year-end storming in manufacturing output is characteristic of centrally planned economies (CPEs) and is not present in capitalist countries. Storming in CPEs is not due to climate, and the absence of a clear pattern of quarter-end storming in manufacturing implies that the fulfillment of quarterly plans is much less important in CPEs than is annual plan fulfillment. The continued presence of storming cycles after the reforms of 1968 in Hungary cast doubt on the extent of marketization under these reforms.     

Alternative perspectives on connections in economic systems

This paper explores the significance of Potts’s (2000) claim that the key difference between orthodox and heterodox economics lies in the former viewing the economy as a mathematical field in which everything is connected to everything else, and the latter viewing it as a complex system in which only some elements are connected. It focuses on the types of connections in economic systems that different economists have identified and the significance of the degree of connectivity for how economic systems function. Topics explored include separable consumer networks, separable utility functions, checklist-based decision rules, lifestyles, goodwill, the nature of business strategies and evolution.     

Inflation in open economies: Supply-determined versus demand-determined models

This paper provides a formal presentation of an increasingly popular pure cost-push model of the international spread of inflation. The model, which is based on the division of the economy into competitive (tradeable) and sheltered (non-tradeable) sectors, has been developed in the Scandinavian countries. The paper then tests the predictive performance of the model against two simple demand-pull explanations and finds that the Scandinavian model is a relatively poor predictor. Next, the implications of the Scandinavian model for price and income elasticities of demand on the two sectors are derived, and in the last section these are used to reinterpret the model as part of a structure including both supply and demand sides.     

Psychological versus economic models of bounded rationality

That the rationality of individual people is ‘bounded’ – that is, finite in scope and representational reach, and constrained by the opportunity cost of time – cannot reasonably be controversial as an empirical matter. In this context, the paper addresses the question as to why, if economics is an empirical science, economists introduce bounds on the rationality of agents in their models only grudgingly and partially. The answer defended in the paper is that most economists are interested primarily in markets and only secondarily in the dynamics of individual decisions – specifically, they are interested in these dynamics mainly insofar as they might systematically influence the most useful approaches to modeling interesting markets. In market contexts, bounds on rationality are typically generated by institutional and informational properties specific to the market in question, which arise and are sustained by structural dynamics that do not originate in or reduce to individuals' decisions or psychological dispositions. To be sure, these influences interact with psychological dispositions, so economists have reason to attend to the psychology of valuation. But no general model of bounded rationality should ever be expected to feature in the economist's toolkit, regardless of the extent to which psychologists successfully identify specific human cognitive limitations. Use of moderate rational expectations assumptions should be understood in this light. Such assumptions are readily relaxed in specific applications, and in ways customized to modeling circumstances, that modelers, experimentalists, and econometricians are making steadily more sophisticated.     

The role of scanning in open intelligence systems

Every month, SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI) professionals assemble more than 100 short abstracts of developments that they perceive to be signals of change, discontinuities, inflection points, outliers, or disruptive developments. The effort is part of a continuous scanning process and Scan program that allows SRIC-BI to gauge the ongoing turbulent confluence of culture, commerce, and technology that defines today's business environment. For more than 25 years, scanning has played an essential role in SRIC-BI's and SRI International's foresight capabilities by providing a systematic means for surveying the broad external environment for change vectors. Traditional monitoring processes in most organizations are largely arbitrary, depending on what concerned individuals or leaders in the organization are reading, thinking about, and sharing informally with each other. But in today's world, arbitrary is insufficient. No foresight function can operate with confidence without a disciplined process for spotting new patterns of change and bringing those issues into the organization for early consideration and action. This article describes the scanning process as SRIC-BI practices it, the importance of open intelligence systems, what benefits the scanning process can provide to organizations, and what problems organizations typically run into when setting up scanning systems.     

An applied general equilibrium analysis of the economic effects of tourism in a quite small,quite open economy

A computable general equilibrium model is used to project the effects of tourism on the industrial and regional structures of the Australian economy. The most striking conclusion is that Queensland, usually thought to be the most tourism-oriented of the Australian states, would be a net loser from an economy-wide expansion of tourism. As well as having a relatively large share of its GSP accounted for by tourist-oriented activities, Queensland is also relatively heavily dependent on agriculture and mining, traditional export sectors which are crowded out by the expansion of international tourism.     

Inequality of firm sizes in different economic systems

Conclusions Our empirical results seem to indicate that the lognormal model may have a more general application than it has been possible to establish before⁶. We have indicated some reasons why the assumptions of the model are valid in socialist as well as non-socialist countries. With regard to the first assumption, the law of proportionate effect, we have argued that planning agencies in socialist countries act as a check on the size of operations, as do cost curves in nonsocialist countries. Furthermore, we have argued that the population of enterprises is more likely to remain constant in a socialist economy than in a non-socialist economy. Although the arguments for the lognormal model differ a little between the two economic systems, our results seem to be consistent with those obtained by Granick (1960). In studying Soviet management he concluded that the similarities between the two systems were astonishingly great.The findings herein discussed point to two interesting subjects for future research. First, there is a need for studies of changes in size distributions in socialist countries over a period of time. Such studies could usefully include an analysis of changes in concentration as well as of transitions between different size classes (cf. Adelman, 1958; Archer & McGuire, 1965; and Hart & Prais, 1956).Second, comparisons between socialist and non-socialist countries with respect to industrial structure would be of great interest, even if there would be some difficulties in comparing the economic units of the two systems.The two studies suggested could generate further information on the main conclusion of this paper, i. e. that size distributions of firms in socialist countries seem to be skewed in a way similar to that of size distributions in capitalistic countries.This research has been carried out at GSIA, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa. It has been made possible by grants from among others The Swedish-American Foundation and The Research Foundation of Swedish Savings Banks. I am indebted to Professor Herbert A. Simon for valuable comments.     

Coevolution of economic and ecological systems

This paper analyzes a model of economy–environment coevolution in which economic activities induce the genetic evolution of a biological species. This model is applied to the problem of pesticide resistance management. Just as in Munro (Environ Resour Econ, 9:429–449, 1997), we consider three main types of interactions: (1) a large pest population reduces economic revenues, (2) economic activities select for resistant genes and (3) the spread of resistant genes affects the size of the pest population. The model differs from Munro in that it includes evolutionary modeling of economic strategies. Economic agents are assumed to be boundedly rational, i.e they cannot compute the optimal level of pesticide use that minimizes resistance among pests. Economic evolution represents the change in the distribution of pesticide strategies in the population of economic agents and is modeled by a replicator dynamics equation. The interactions between economic evolution of pesticide strategies, pest population dynamics and genetic evolution of resistance of pests are studied in a system of three differential equations. We explore the dynamics and stability properties of the system using numerical simulations.     

Optimal input trade policy under economic uncertainties in a small open economy

This article theoretically analyses optimal input trade policy under economic uncertainties in a small open economy. The benchmark model explains both key business cycle moments and asset prices of a representative emerging economy, and the corresponding deterministic version of the model finds no gain by deviating from the free input trade policy. The main findings are as follows: (1) it is optimal for the government to subsidize imported intermediate inputs in the benchmark model and (2) the result is robust to various shocks, various key structural parameters and various preference specifications.     

中国区域经济发展的经济学分析

1.生产力层次推移理论 生产力层次推移理论是国际上的一种区域经济理论,即无论在世界范围内还是一国范围内,客观上存在着经济技术上的不同层次。     

Interdisciplinary policy analysis in economic forecasting

Economic policy formulation suffers from many ills, not the least of which is a basic inadequacy in the methods of long-range economic forecasting. This article discusses the need for a longer time perspective in economic policy and the shortcomings of current methods in regard to philosophical assumptions, theoretical limitations, economic modeling problems, and institutional issues. Interdisciplinary policy modeling is suggested as a partial solution to these shortcomings, and two examples are offered—one in regional policy simulation and other in world food-supply modeling.     

Gaming-simulation of the functioning of economic systems

This article attempts to provide a structure-functional analysis of economic activity and propositions based on this analysis about applications of gaming-simulation for an institutionalist study of the functioning of economic systems. Modern institutionalism in contrast to neoclassical economics, which is to a great extent mathematicized, does not actually use any quantitative methods and models. Simulation games represent such models that can be designed and promote the implementation of research in the spirit of neoinstitutional economics. In this sense, gaming-simulation may be considered as institutional modeling. In this work we shall, first be concerned with a ‘static’ structure of economic activity deriving from the three-level scheme by Parsons. Next, a ‘dynamic’ structure of economic activity will be analyzed in terms of the concept of limited rationality by Simon. In the final section, we characterize the methods of reflection of different components of economic systems in gaming simulation models, as well as ways of implementing the research on such models.     

Modeling economic systems as locally-constructive sequential games

Real-world economies are open-ended dynamic systems consisting of heterogeneous interacting participants. Human participants are decision-makers who strategically take into account the past actions and potential future actions of other participants. All participants are forced to be locally constructive, meaning their actions at any given time must be based on their local states; and participant actions at any given time affect future local states. Taken together, these essential properties imply real-world economies are locally-constructive sequential games. This paper discusses a modeling approach, Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), that permits researchers to study economic systems from this point of view. ACE modeling principles and objectives are first concisely presented and explained. The remainder of the paper then highlights challenging issues and edgier explorations that ACE researchers are currently pursuing.