Social viewpoint

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视点

环保总局:依法对《无极》剧组处罚并限期恢复生态植被国家环保总局有关负责人最近通报了电影《无极》剧组破坏云南香格里拉碧沽天池生态环境的调查情况:《无极》剧组拍摄活动中违背了环境影响评价法的有关规定,造成了一定程度的生态破坏,已责成云南省环境保护局依法对剧组进行处罚,限期恢复拍摄地生态植被。据介绍,2004年5月至6月,电影《无极》剧组进入云南省香格里拉县碧沽天池进行外景拍摄。该地位于风景名胜区千湖山片区,属于“三江并流”世界自然遗产地。剧组在此搭建了3个临时工棚、1座取名“海棠精舍”的钢筋水泥建筑物,铺设了一条长1…     

Welfare from a benefit viewpoint

Summary Individual welfare is most naturally measured in terms of individual utility but this has the well-known disadvantage that utility levels of different consumers cannot be meaningfully compared. This difficulty is traditionally avoided by using various willingness-to-pay measures, such as compensating and equivalent variation. These measures are based on price changes. This paper develops alternative welfare measures using willingness-to-trade concepts as originally proposed by Dupuit (1844). These measures are based directly on commodity bundle changes. These welfare measures can be represented as integrals under certain inverse demand functions.An important property of the proposed welfare measures studied here is that they can be meaningfully aggregated to form overall welfare measures. These measures in turn directly quantify a compensation criterion. It is shown that competitive prices provide a first-order approximation to the welfare measures. Furthermore a second-order approximation can be found by forming a suitable aggregation of the individual second-order effects.Finally, it is shown that the representations for consumer welfare as integrals under inverse demand curves can be extended to the aggregate measures as well. This then provides a complete complement to traditional measures based on price changes.This research was supported by Grant SES-9022881 from the National Science Foundation. The author wishes to thank Andrew Yates for valuable suggestions on this paper.     

Macroeconomic forecasting in Austria an agnostic viewpoint

Zusammenfassung In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein relativ einfaches Prognoseverfahren, nämlich Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing, zur Vorhersage wichtiger makroökonomischer Größen, wie des Brutto-Inlandsproduktes und seiner Verwendungskomponenten, der Verbraucherpreise und der Arbeitslosenrate herangezogen. Es zeigt sich dabei, daß diese Technik —mit Ausnahme der Investitions- und Verbraucherpreisprognose — Vorhersagen liefert, die denen des WIFO mindestens gleichwertig sind.

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Helpful comments of Johannes Ledolter, Kurt Rothschild, Fritz Schebeck, Erich Streißler and Gunther Tichy are gratefully acknowledged.     

The European Union's debt question: A conceptional viewpoint

The state can be conceived as an organization to protect personal freedom and to provide public goods. Consequently, we expect a constitution to consist of two different sets of rules; rules on personal freedom and rules for making collective decisions on public goods (mostly budgetary rules). The constitution of the European Union as laid down in the treaty of Maastricht (1992) provides both types of rules, but the emphasis is mainly on the former rules. This paper investigates budgetary rules, in particular the welfare economic logic of deficit spending.     

论社会和谐、社会发展与社会矛盾的关系

通过对社会和谐、社会发展、社会矛盾之问的关系进行分析,指出从中国改革开放事业发展到今天,我们既取得了举世瞩目的伟大成就,同时又出现了一系列新问题、新矛盾,而且一些问题和矛盾还比较突出,迫切需要解决。因此,只有把握好和谐、发展、矛盾之间的关系,中国特色社会主义事业才能不断推向前进。     

创新社会科学推动社会进步

江苏无锡市哲学社会科学界现有学会、研究会、协会总计１３４个,其中绝大多数是社科联的团体会员,个人会员有６万余人,全市社会科学专业技术人员已达９３５８８人。这些众多的社科学术团体和成千上万的会员,活跃在我市城乡各条战线,各个行业,各个部门,他们都是我市改革     

Reputation,Social Identity and Social Conflict

We interpret the psychology literature on social identity and examine its implications. We model a population of agents from two exogenous and well defined social groups. Agents are randomly matched to play a reduced‐form bargaining game. We show that this struggle for resources drives a conflict through the rational destruction of surplus. We assume that the population contains both rational players and behavioral players. Behavioral players aggressively discriminate against members of the other social group. The existence and specification of the behavioral player is motivated by the social identity literature. For rational players, group membership has no payoff‐relevant consequences. We show that rational players can contribute to the conflict by aggressively discriminating and that this behavior is consistent with existing empirical evidence. Our paper relates to the empirical literature which finds that social heterogeneity tends to be increasing in economic variables which we interpret as indicating inefficiency. We provide an explanation that, as social groups compete for surplus, disagreement and inefficiency can result. Our work also relates to the social conflict literature, which examines the relationship between macro level factors such as unemployment and civil disturbances. This literature finds that the amount of social conflict tends to be increasing in the inequitability of the environment.     

社会发展与社会发展观刍议

社会发展观的研究是近年来的热点之一。何为社会发展观？社会发展观是人类在长期的发展中逐渐积累和形成的关于社会长期稳定发展的看法,它是人类进入文明社会后不断摸索、总结中形成之结晶。构成人类社会发展的基本要素是相类似的,包括维系社会发展最基本的生存要素如人口、土地、粮食、水、天然资源（动植物、矿产资源等）众多因素,     

论转型时期的社会分化与整合

我国当前正处于急速的社会转型时期,社会结构的快速分化对原有的整合方式提出了挑战,以至于在社会分化和整合之间出现了断裂,对我国的社会稳定产生了不可忽视的影响.在新形势下,我们必须建立一种新的社会整合方式以适应社会的急速分化,维护社会的稳定.     

Social movements

The new social movements—environmentalism, feminism, pacifism, etc.—are not really new, but recurrent for at least two hundred years. They play an important role in the process of ongoing modernization, even if they intend to be antimodernistic. They push for the periodical readaptation of the industrial system to its natural and cultural context.     

国有资本经营预算的学术观点和理论溯源

建立与社会主义市场经济体制相适应的国有资本经营预算是当前我国财政改革的一项重大课题,也是贯彻党中央关于深化国有资产管理体制改革系列探讨的一项重要内容。文章通过对理论界有关国有资本经营预算的主要学术观点及其理论根源的分析,厘清国有资本经营预算的理论脉络,澄清国有资本经营预算的概念,并对国有资本经营预算工作的实施和未来发展提供理论借鉴。     

我国经济社会转型与社会治理创新

当前,我国经济社会正经历的深刻转型对社会治理形成正反两方面重要影响。从积极方面看,持续的经济增长为社会治理提供了坚实的物质基础,行政改革为推进服务导向的社会治理提供了体制环境。同时,社会阶层结构与治理主体结构持续优化,网络信息技术发展助推社会治理智能化。从消极方面看,我国社会治理面临多方面挑战:经济风险可能向社会领域传导;农村地区基层治理与服务半径加大;中产阶层增长缓慢与群众诉求多元化并存;人口大规模流动及人口老龄化、少子化冲击社会秩序;网络信息犯罪增多而相关管理规范相对滞后。未来应将社会治理目标与政策逐渐融入经济社会体制改革,在大发展、大服务、大预防、大调解中协同解决社会治理问题。     

浅议社会工作人才与社会工作者的关系

社会工作者是指专业从事社会工作,以社会工作为职业的人员,国际社会工作界普遍认可的社会工作者应符合以下要求：一是具有社会工作执业执照;二是具有社会工作专业教育背景;三是受社会工作专业伦理约束;四是社会工作专业组织的成员;五是以社会工作作为一种职业。但是,在社会工作相对发达的西方国家,作为社会工作者首要的一条是必须取得社会工作执业执照,而在我国,由于社会工作事业起步时间较短,社会工作者职业资格管理仍处在探索发展阶段,全国性的社会工作者职业资格考试也刚刚开始,因此,现阶段的社会工作者更强调必须具有社会工作专业教育背景,以社会工作为职业。     

社会保障税与社会保障制度优化

社会保障税是指定用于社会保障的工薪税。本文分析了工薪税的税收归宿和劳动供给弹性的影响。当劳动供给弹性较小时 ,税收主要由劳动力负担 ,而且可能会增加就业压力 ;工薪税在劳动同质程度较高时可以取得较好的再分配效应。本文还描述了社会保障制度优化的理论过程。社会保障制度优化是指现收现付计划和强制储蓄计划的最优搭配 ,它以“黄金律”条件下的隔代帕累托改进为标准。就同代收入再分配而言 ,将收入再分配计划的目标定为提高受益人的受教育水平 ,而不是直接为其提供免费的社会福利 ,将有助于缓解收入再分配的代价。     

The source of global stock market risk: A viewpoint of economic policy uncertainty

This study explores the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in four countries or regions (China, Japan, Europe, and the United States) on the contagion risk of investments in the global stock market. The stock returns of 22 stock markets worldwide are analyzed to determine which region’s EPU exhibits the greatest effect on regional systematic risk in the global stock market and on volatility risk in individual stock markets. First, all of the samples, the markets of different continents and the spillover indices of the developed and emerging markets, are calculated to observe the dynamic correlation among these markets with the aim of quantifying regional systematic risk and further examining the contagion risk effect of EPU. The results indicate the following: EPU in China is the most influential, and its contagion risk spreads to different regional markets, except for Europe; the effect of EPU in the United States is inferior to that in China; EPU in Japan merely influences contagion risk in emerging markets; contagion risk in European markets is not influenced by the four EPU indices; and EPU in Europe is not influenced by contagion risk in the global stock market. However, according to the volatility risk in each market, the EPU in Europe and China respectively influence Asian countries and European countries the most. These results may be attributable to the extremely high trade dependence among these countries because the performance of international enterprises is mainly determined by the economic policies of their trading partners.