Social viewpoint

Forum for Social Economics -     

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.     

Tax reform from the gradient projection viewpoint

This paper examines the problems of gradual tax reform. Desirable small moves of the tax system are determined using the principles of the well-known gradient projection algorithm. Three classical models of public finance are considered. For each of them a continuous time dynamic process is exhibited along which the social welfare function increases until convergence to local second best extrema. Although the selection of trajectories according to the gradient projection method has some arbitrariness, it leads to intuitively and economically appealing rules such as a tax reform analog of the classical optimal taxation result on production efficiency.     

从纳斯达克看中国二板市场

1961年,为了改善对证券业和证券市场的规制,美国国会通过一个法案要求美国证券交易委员会(Securities and Exchange Commission,简称“SEC”)对美国的证券市场进行一项特别研究。1963年,美国证券交易委员会完成该项研究并公布了一份完整的研究报告。在报告中,美国证券交易委员会特别谈到了柜台间(over-the-counter,简称“OTC”)证券市场的问题,指出该市场条块分割并缺乏透明度,因而造成该市场缺乏效率,同时缺乏对投资者的保护。     

Delphi: An investigation from a Bayesian viewpoint

This paper presents an analysis of Delphi from a Bayesian point of view and brings to attention several hitherto neglected, but highly relevant findings of research in areas other than Delphi proper. The aim has been to seek avenues of improvement in the Delphi technique. This has led to development of a methodology, which is based on a concept of second order probabilities as a measure of one's fuzzy thinking. The justification of this new methodology lies in explicit recognition and implementation of an optimum, determined by the trade-off between advantages and complexities of hierarchial inference. It is essential that conventional Delphi applications, at the very least, be accompanied by a Turoff-type cross impact analysis. It is indicated that the tremendous potential of Bayesianized Delphi in appropriate situations has remained utapped.     

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.     

Inequality and the business cycle: A consumption viewpoint

Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data, we obtain summary measures of the distributions of income and consumption for each quarter between 1980 and 1994. We find that the trends in the distribution of income and consumption and the response of these trends to changes in inflation and unemployment were similar during this period. We find that unemployment does not significantly affect the inequality measures and that inflation has a progressive effect, i.e., that a decrease in inflation is associated with an increase in inequality. Finally, we find that the relationship between inequality and macroeconomic variables during the 1990s may be similar to the relationship that existed prior to 1980. First version received: September 1996/final version received: September 1997     

The CDM framework: knowledge recombination from an evolutionary viewpoint

ABSTRACT

Since Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse published their ground-breaking article (‘Research, Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level’, 1998), the CDM framework has known a large diffusion, despite being published in a non-indexed journal. The present study is an exploration of the spread and recombination of ‘knowledge’ in the ‘CDM universe’, comprising all papers in Scopus indexed journals citing CDM or/and CDM cited papers. We assess first the speed and range of diffusion of CDM and investigate next the ‘origins’ and further ‘genealogical’ make up of the knowledge recombinations within the CDM universe. We find that CDM is cited by a growing number of papers, which spread over a variety of fields, and that it compares very well with the most cited comparable articles in indexed journals in its domain of research. We further find that the CDM universe is mainly constituted of three large clusters and for each of them we are able to identify knowledge paths going from the CDM and earlier cited papers to the subsequent main citing papers. We intend to provide a detailed interpretation of these findings in future work.     

A fresh look on economic evolution from the kinetic viewpoint

Dynamic economic theory and evolutionary economics are both subject to the trade-off between explanation power and accounting for novelty. The present paper makes a contribution to filling in this gap basing on a general equilibrium model including production and taxes. Our notion of an "open loop evolution equilibrium" is based on arguments from the gradual vs. bang-bang tax reform controversy and from the debate on optimal macroeconomic policy design. The term "kinetic" indicates that, in contrast to traditional comparative statics, our approach neither hinges on the uniqueness of equilibria, nor is confined to the analysis of prescribed parameter variations. JEL Classification: B52, C62, D50, D58     

Wal‐Mart innovation and productivity: a viewpoint

Abstract Technology effects, business process development, and productivity growth are considered in the context of a single company: Wal‐Mart. The starting point is the 2001 McKinsey Global Institute report, which finds that over 1995–2000, a quarter of U.S. productivity growth is attributable to the retail industry, and almost a sixth of that is attributable to Wal‐Mart. Wal‐Mart is interesting as well because of its rapid growth in Canada. This is now Canada's largest private sector employer. We also consider other evidence relevant to public policy formation concerning Wal‐Mart and conclude with a discussion of options for partially filling important data gaps.     

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。     

Perfect foresight models and the dynamic instability problem from a higher viewpoint

Dynamic macroeconomic models incorporating perfect foresight expectations can display a dynamic instability of the saddle point type. So that unless the initial values happen to place the system on the stable arm of the saddle point, the economic variables will diverge ever more from the equilibrium. We consider the dynamic instability problem in a simple model of monetary dynamics which is non-linear and assumes adaptive expectations which are characterized by an expectations time lag. This model is shown to have a stable limit cycle. By considering perfect foresight as the limit as the expectations time lag tends to zero we are able to view the perfect foresight model from a dimension higher than that from which is it is normally viewed. We are thus able to see that the stable limit cycle continues to exist for the perfect foresight model as well. In this framework there is no longer a dynamic instability problem since whatever the intial values time paths are tending to the stable limit cycle.     

换一种眼光看资产重组中的关联交易

上市公司利用关联交易进行资产重组近几年来一直是人们最为关注的问题之一。然而,由于我国证券市场的不规范、公司治理结构的不完善等多方面因素,资产重组中的关联交易成了“阳光下的阴影”:上市公司滥用关联交易操纵利润,广大投资者从一次次惨重损失中“觉醒”,舆论界也将其视为“关联交易陷阱”。实际上,笔者认为这是对资产重组中关联交易的严重扭曲。无论从宏观经济角度还是从微观企业集团角度,资产重组中的关联交易均有其存在的必然性和积极的作用。严格地讲,它是一个中性的经济范畴。