Distributional Effects of Public Education in an Economy with Public Pensions*

We study how the allocation of government expenditures between two major outlays—education and pay‐as‐you‐go social security—affects human capital distribution in an economy with heterogeneous agents. We consider an overlapping generations economy where the government maintains both programs, and allocates tax revenues to finance them. In our model, human capital is one of the factors of production. It is itself produced as a combined result of public inputs and private inputs. Parents' decisions to invest time and material resources in education of their children are motivated by altruism, heterogeneous in its strength across the population, which leads to heterogeneity of incomes. We investigate the effect of an increase in public funding for education on the human capital distribution. We show that in this framework, contrary to some earlier results, increased spending on public education may lead to higher inequality. Our results depend crucially on the interaction of education funding with the social security budget and on the elasticity of substitution in the learning technology.     

The Political Economy of IMF Conditionality: A Common Agency Model

The paper models the relationship between an aid‐providing international financial institution (IFI) and an aid‐receiving government whose economic policy choices are influenced by a domestic interest group. Two assistance schemes are evaluated: conditional aid in which the IFI makes assistance contingent on less‐ distorting economic policies and unconditional aid which is provided without such conditions. Conditional aid is shown to raise welfare of the receiving country and the world as a whole relative to unconditional aid. The paper also examines how conditional and unconditional aid schemes are influenced by the IFI's opportunity cost of providing assistance and the receiving government's political dependence on a domestic interest group.     

公共年金制度的效果--运用内生增长模型分析

本文运用导入外部效应的内生增长模型和叠代模型，分析了社会保障制度中不同财政运行方式的年金制度对经济增长率以及社会福利所产生的效果。得出的结论是，不同的年金制度会通过影响个人的生涯可支配收入而对经济增长和社会福利产生不同的影响。由于完全基金方式的年金制度不改变个人的生涯可支配收入，因此具有中性。但是，现收现付的年金制度却有可能改变个人的生涯可支配收入，从而对经济增长率和社会福利产生负面影响。     

A Political Economy Model of Earnings Mobility and Redistribution Policy

This paper presents a politico‐economic model that includes a mutual link between life cycle earnings mobility and redistributive politics. The model demonstrates that when an economy features a high opportunity of upward mobility and high risk of downward mobility, it attains a unique equilibrium where unskilled, low‐income agents support a low redistribution because of the hope of upward mobility in future. In contrast, the economy attains multiple equilibria when mobility opportunity and risk are low: one is an unskilled‐majority equilibrium defined by low mobility and the other is a skilled‐majority equilibrium defined by high mobility. The paper gives a comparison between the political equilibrium and the social planner's allocation in terms of mobility, and shows that the skilled‐majority equilibrium realizes mobility close to the optimal one.     

Heterogeneous Dynasties and the Political Economy of Public Debt

We consider a small open overlapping generations economy with descending altruism. Heterogeneity is introduced by assuming that each parent procreates a fixed proportion of selfish children. Altruistic parents can recognize the type of each child. There is no Ricardian equivalence and an active public intergenerational transfer policy is attractive to altruistic dynasty members, although there may be no unanimity among them. We display reasonable conditions for indirect preferences to be single-peaked and we apply the median voter theorem. We then describe political equilibrium paths and discuss their compatibility with the steady path of an underlying closed economy with autonomous labor productivity growth.
JEL classification : D 31; D 64; D 72; D 91; H 63     

Bargaining Over Environmental Budgets: A Political Economy Model with Application to French Water Policy

In decentralized water management with earmarked budgets financed by user taxes and distributed back in the form of subsidies, net gains are often heterogeneous across user categories. This paper explores the role of negotiation over budget allocation and coalition formation in water boards, to provide an explanation for such user-specific gaps between tax payments and subsidies. We propose a bargaining model to represent the sequential nature of the negotiation process in water districts, in which stakeholder representatives may bargain upon a fraction of the budget only. The structural model of budget shares estimated from the data on French Water Agencies performs well as compared with reduced-form estimation. Empirical results confirm the two-stage bargaining process and provide evidence for systematic net gains from the system for agricultural water users.     

Risks, Financing Constraints, and High Savings Ratio in the Rural Economy of China: A Model Incorporating Precautionary Savings and Liquidity Constraints

This paper makes an in-depth investigation on the phenomenon of high savings rate in the rural economy of China between 1978 and 2003. On the basis of precautionary savings theory, we construct a model incorporating the risks, liquidity constrains, and aging population to explain the existence of high savings rate in the rural economy of China. We measure risks with Gini coefficient and marginal propensity to save. We find that these risk indices are positively associated with the higher savings rate and the higher degree of prudence of rural households. Our findings pose an urgency of the reform of rural financial system and the improvement in social security system in the rural economy of China. Translated from Economic Science, 2005, (1) (in Chinese)     

The Constitutional Political Economy of Public Deficits: The Spanish Case 1

This paper makes an argument for the reshaping of the current design of the Spanish budgetary system, pivoting around its legal submission to the balanced-budget rule. Based on a political economy approach to budgeting within the present context of the European Monetary Union, it is argued that such a rule is sorely needed in order to make the traditional Spanish model compatible with the new institutional technology presently developing in the European Community which deals with fiscal policy.     

产权改革战略对法治发展的影响 --产权的政治经济学分析

当俄罗斯“大爆炸”式私有化开始时，西方对俄所鼓吹的主导范式是。只要授予人们财产控制权就可以赢得他们对法治(能够保护私有产权)的支持。但是俄罗斯的实际情况并非如此，本文构建了一系列简单的模型对此予以解释。模型集中分析了在均衡状态下抑制法治需求的两种伎俩：1)资产掠夺，为人们延续非法治状态提供了机会；2)行贿，会导致对垄断的保护进而阻碍那些支持法治的政治局外人的进入。此外，本文认为政治环境具有公共物品的特性。我们所给出的结论是，鉴于理性、政治环境的公共物品特性及均衡，“大爆炸”式私有化后将很难产生对法治的支持。     

Political Economy and Organizational Leadership: A Hope-based Theory

Unlike other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, economics has neglected leadership. This paper proposes that a distinctive leadership role is to facilitate the development of hope so that organizational members can sustain their commitments. The conceptual grounding for this approach can be found in the work of Amaryta Sen, Albert Hirschman and Jon Elster, who have tried to explain the effect of commitment and emotions on behavior. It is also proposed here that the authority organizational leaders have to call meetings gives them the capacity both to influence social interactions to carry out this role, and to gauge the organization's cultural strength and its members' receptiveness to inspirational information that can shape the choice of leadership styles.     

Fundamentals of Myanmar's Macroeconomy: A Political Economy Perspective

The serial underperformer of the region, Myanmar's economy is largely without the institutions and qualities necessary to achieve genuine economic growth. This paper explores the fundamentals of Myanmar's economy, from a perspective that emphasizes policy and institutional failure as the principal determinants of the country's present circumstances. The paper explores Myanmar's economy in a multifaceted way, examining concerns over economic growth, public finances, monetary and financial policies, corruption, and international trade. Notwithstanding the change in the form of Myanmar's governing institutions following the elections of November 2010, the paper concludes pessimistically as to the likelihood of meaningful economic reform in the foreseeable future.     

城镇新旧养老保险模式中养老金水平比较研究——以2005年资料为依据的模拟分析

人们普遍担心新型城镇基本养老保险制度中的养老金水平会有所降低,这直接会影响到城镇基本养老保险制度的可持续发展。文章借用生命周期理论和世代交叠模型理论的基本原理,以模拟测算的方式对此问题进行了必要的探讨和研究。其结论为:一是新方案的养老金水平比旧方案要低,养老金发放水平的总体差距比原来有所拉大,但新方案的结构可能更趋合理;二是男女之间养老金发放水平的差距将进一步拉大。根据这一研究结果,文章建议采取在同一代人之间和世代交叠之间两个层面上效率与公平的统筹兼顾策略,并提高女性退休年龄等措施来缩小差距,以保证基本效率基础上的社会公平。     

政治经济学的现状、问题及改革的思考

改革开放以来,政治经济学的改革讨论进行过多次.目前该学科存在的主要问题是"两部制"的体系结构造成理论冲突和学科定位的二重性.文章就这一学科创新提出了构想,即把政治经济学分设马克思经济理论和中国经济学两门课,并对中国经济学构建中如何坚持马克思理论、经济人假设、主题等六个方面提出了自己的看法.