人口和计划生育利益导向政策研究:回顾与前瞻

人口和计划生育利益导向政策的发展经历了从最初简单的节育手术等节制生育的服务措施,到明确将利益导向政策上升到国家制度层面,再到全面建设和发展利益导向政策体系的几个重要阶段。随着计划生育政策目标由降低生育率向稳定低生育水平、统筹解决人口问题、实现人口长期均衡发展的转变,利益导向方法、手段与措施的不断丰富与拓展,人口和计划生育利益导向政策也面临着人口和计划生育利益导向政策的科学评估、普惠政策与利益导向政策协调机制的建立与完善、人口长期均衡发展背景下计划生育利益导向政策走向的明确等-系列新的研究课题。     

Relationships between macroeconomic time series in a fixed-exchange-rate economy: The case of Italy

This paper presents an empirical analysis that is useful for the task of characterizing the dynamic structure and causal orderings of the underlying macroeconomic model of a fixed-exchange-rate economy. Particular emphasis is given to the formulation and testing of versions of the ‘natural-rate’ hypothesis, the ‘small open economy’ hypothesis, and the ‘non-sterilization’ hypothesis. These issues are examined on the basis of quarterly time series for Italy (1956 1970)     

MONETARY ANTICIPATONS AND THE DEMAND FOR MONEY SOME UK EVIDENCE*

The Carr-Darby ‘shock-absorber’ hypothesis, that unanticipated changes in the money supply influence the demand for real money balances but anticipated changes do not, is tested on UK data for narrow money, M1. For comparison with earlier studies on US data we take the (real first order) partial adjustment model as one example of a ‘conventional’ demand for money function. However the Carr-Darby hypothesis is also tested taking a more general autoregressive distributed lag model as the ‘conventional’ demand function. For both ‘conventional’ demand for money functions we find that the shock-absorber hypothesis is not supported for M1 using UK data.     

中国未来生育政策的选择

近年来社会上对是否应该放开中国的计划生育政策有很多争论。争论的起因是由于一些调查数据反映的和某些学者估计出的我国目前生育率非常低;鉴于低生育率已经给比较发达的国家带来了很多问题,所以有人呼吁中国的生育政策应该放开。通过对放开生育政策和不放开生育政策两种情形可能导致的人口学后果进行估计,结合国外的经验和教训,从低生育率的长期后果来分析如何合理地选择生育政策。为了避免人口达到零增长后的快速负增长、快速老龄化和人口规模的迅速减少,国家应该密切关注人们生育意愿的变化,必须在适当的时候放开生育政策,使生育水平保持在2.0左右,从而尽可能地避免长期的、过快的负增长给国家和社会带来更为严重的人口与社会经济问题。     

Efficiency And Equity Aspects Of The

The joint impact of long term structural features, on the one hand, and of recent market-oriented reforms in the macroeconomic incentive regime, on the other, are inducing major changes in social and production organization throughout the Latin American region. The new economic model is quite different in structure and performance from the one Latin American countries exhibited during the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period. Non tradable activities such as telecommunications, energy or transport services, natural resource processing industries producing low value added industrial ‘commodities’ and assembly industries (‘maquiladoras’), producing computers, TV and Video sets and garments for the US market, together with the vehicle industry, which has managed to receive preferential treatment from the part of the various governments in the region, have performed much better than average, both in terms of labor productivity growth as well as in terms of ‘catching up’ with the international productivity frontier. Contrary to the above, unskilled labor, and engineering and knowledge intensive industries, have performed worse than average and are ‘falling behind’ international standards. Domestic subsidiaries of multinational corporations and large local conglomerates are gaining ground within GDP, while SMEs and public enterprises have been losing it. The paper examines some of the macro-to- micro relations underlying the above mentioned process of structural transformation and the interdependency between economic, technological and institutional forces inducing it. It argues that ‘main stream’ economics fails adequately to capture the role played by such interdependencies and offers a policy advice which can not deal with the new efficiency and equity problems resulting from recent structural changes.     

Fertility and economic development: theoretical considerations and cross-country evidence

The paper presents a theoretical background for the analysis of the relationship between fertility and a number of socioeconomic factors associated with the process of economic development and analyses empirically this relationship within a cross-country framework. Fertility is found to be negatively related with female education, urbanization and family planning and positively related with the levels of infant mortality and economic development, whereas no significant relationship between fertility and female labour force participation is established. Sensitivity analysis is performed and the policy implications of the empirical findings are briefly discussed.     

Fertility and economic development: theoretical considerations and cross-country evidence

The paper presents a theoretical background for the analysis of the relationship between fertility and a number of socioeconomic factors associated with the process of economic development and analyses empirically this relationship within a cross-country framework. Fertility is found to be negatively related with female education, urbanization, and family planning and positively related with the levels of infant mortality and economic development, whereas no significant relationship between fertility and female labor force participation is established. Sensitivity analysis is performed and the policy implications of the empirical findings are briefly discussed.     

The Legitimation of Post-crisis Capitalism in the United Kingdom: Real Wage Decline,Finance-led Growth and the State

Since the 2008 financial crisis, capitalist development in the UK has been marked by both continuity and change. Whilst the Coalition government effectively re-established the UK's ‘finance-led’ growth model, it simultaneously broke with the legitimation strategy which New Labour had advanced in the pre-crisis conjuncture. The Coalition advanced a distinctive ‘two nations’ strategy which sought to secure a limited but durable base of support in a context of fiscal consolidation. This strategy was conditional upon the deep and unprecedented period of real wage decline which took hold in the post-crisis conjuncture. However, the Coalition successfully transformed this potential liability into a political asset, constructing a series of ‘moralised antagonisms’ between wage earners and welfare recipients, on the one hand, and private and public sector workers, on the other. Whilst this strategy secured a limited base of popular support, it also re-embedded a series of structural weaknesses within post-crisis UK capitalism. These imbalances are likely to undermine the stability of the UK’s finance-led growth model in the future and will condition British politics as the country embarks upon the process of leaving of the EU.     

Population growth and economic and social development

This article sets forth 3 positions on population growth: 1) rapid population growth is a central development problem that implies lower living standards for the poor; 2) proposals for reducing population growth raise difficult questions about the proper domain of public policy, yet it is acceptable for governments to attempt to influence private decisions about family size; and 3) the experience in many developing countries shows that quick, effective measures can be taken to reduce fertility. Rapid population growth has slowed development because it exacerbates the difficult choice between higher consumption in the present and the investment needed to bring higher consumption in the future. As populations grow, larger investments are needed just to maintain current capital/person. It further threatens the balance between natural resources and people and creates severe economic and social problems in urban areas. Public policy must provide alternative ways for poor families to secure the benefits provided by large family size. That is, governments need to provide tangible evidence that it really is in the best interests of parents to have fewer children. Also required is greater infomation about and access to fertility control. When family planning services have been widespread and affordable, fertility has decline faster than social and economic progress alone would predict. There is a need for immediate action to improve women's status and to make education, family planning, and primary health care more available. Although economic and social progress help to slow population growth, rapid population growth hinders development. Thus, governments must act simultaneously on both fronts. Accumulating evidence on population growth in developing countries shows that is the combination of social development and family planning that reduces fertility.     

Correlates of fertility in Eastern Nigeria

The relative influences of marriage patterns, education, and religion on the high level of fertility in the East-Central state of Nigeria are examined, with data drawn from a KAP survey of 755 men and 916 women (745 rural and 171 urban). Polygynous marriages existed in 31% of rural and 7% of urban households surveyed. Fertility was relatively lower in all marriage duration groups among polygynists, but the differences were not significant (contingency coefficient 0.01000). Results are limited, however, by the instability of polygyny status, the subfecundity factor, the index of fertility used, and the older age of polygynously married women. 53% of rural women surveyed were Catholic, and their fertility was higher than that of non-Catholics (contingency coefficient 0.01217). But it cannot be ensured that the religious differential is solely a function of pronatalist religious belief or partly a reflection of ethnic differences or an attempt by the Ibos to ensure an increase in population to maximize their share of federal allocations. Uneducated women were more fertile than their educated counterparts (contingency coefficient 0.03129), implying that fertility will decline as the literacy level in the state improves. The potential of education to effectuate a decline in fertility is illustrated by the observation that education tends to give religious people the same liberal attitudes toward family planning as are held by those who are less religious. The gap between knowledge of birth control methods and the practice of family planning is a greater obstacle to fertility control than religiousity, and this gap is greater among those with lower levels of education.     

EDUCATIONAL GENDER INEQUALITY AND INVERTED U‐SHAPED FERTILITY DYNAMICS*

In this article, we examine the dynamic interactions between narrowing educational gender inequality and inverted U‐shaped fertility dynamics by constructing a two‐period overlapping generations model that includes both sexes. In the early stage of development, neither male subjects nor female subjects are educated. At some period, male subjects begin to be educated, whereas female subjects remain uneducated. At this stage, the male subjects' education levels, as well as the fertility rates, gradually increase over time. Fertility achieves a peak just before the onset of the female subject's education. Subsequently, fertility steadily decreases over time. Gender inequality in education also decreases during periods of fertility decline.     

Physiological constraints and the transition to growth: implications for comparative development

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the ‘latitude gradient’ changed sign in the course of the last half millennium. In particular, we develop a dynamic model of economic and physiological development in which households decide upon the number and nutrition of their offspring. In this setting we demonstrate that relatively high metabolic costs of fertility, which may have emerged due to positive selection towards greater cold tolerance in locations away from the equator, would work to stifle economic development during pre-industrial times, yet allow for an early onset of sustained growth. As a result, the theory suggests a reversal of fortune whereby economic activity gradually shifts away from the equator in the process of long-term economic development. Our empirical results give supporting evidence for our hypothesis.

     

Costly optimizers versus cheap imitators

A dynamic model is constructed with two types of agents, optimizers and imitators. The mix between the two types evolves according to the relative average performances of the two groups. The main conclusion is that imitators may have as high a long-run ‘fitness’ as optimizers. The model is used to sort issues concerning the conventional hypothesis that everyone acts as if unboundedly rational.     

A look at ‘overshooting’ in a two-tier float exchange rate system

This note examines the celebrated ‘overshooting’ hypothesis in the context of a two-tier float exchange rate regime. It is shown that monetary expansion leads to depreciation of both spot exchange rates and there is a presumption in favor of financial exchange rate ‘overshooting’.     

The Stagnation Tendencies of Neoliberalism: A Review Essay

In his 2012 book, From Financial Crisis to Stagnation, Thomas Palley argued that the financial crisis of 2008 would be likely to result in a period of long-term stagnation. Both the crisis and the predicted stagnation, Palley argued, were the outcomes of policies pursued since the 1980s; the persistence of those policies explains the stagnation. Underpinning the policies and their consequences are the flaws of the neoliberal macro model and the particular role played by finance in that model. The rejection of Keynesianism meant the abandonment of the commitment to full employment. The neoliberal paradigm rests upon a foundation of ‘bad ideas’ that are located in political philosophy as much as in economic theory. Palley’s argument has a bearing on recent discussions among mainstream macroeconomists, whose interest in secular stagnation has been revived by the ‘ongoing crisis’. These discussions have left mostly unanswered the question of the causes of stagnation. The present essay argues that Palley’s concept of ‘structural Keynesianism’ can benefit from a closer association with the analysis of structural transformation and its effects on policy regimes and stagnation tendencies.     

Is corruption grease,grit or a gamble? Corruption increases variance of productivity across countries

The effect of corruption on economic growth has attracted interest in empirical development economics. The conventional view of corruption as impediment for growth has been challenged by the ‘grease-on-the-wheels’ hypothesis. We take a new perspective on the issue and suggest corruption as macro risk, referred to as a ‘gamble’ hypothesis. Using cross-country data and two alternative indicators of corruption, we find corruption to be a significant driver of heteroscedasticity in total productivity. This supports the new gamble hypothesis. We also note some misleading interpretations in the previously published frontier applications. To avoid these shortcomings, we apply a flexible semi-nonparametric estimator.     

International technology transfer: A model of endogenous technological assimilation

This paper presents a formal analysis of the process of technological assimilation or ‘catch-up’ of a typical least developed country. In the context of a three sector dynamic model, the optimal time path of R&D and current production is determined, and the comparative static and dynamic properties of the model are examined.     

Socially responsible and conventional investment funds: performance comparison and the global financial crisis

We investigate the performance of socially responsible funds (SRFs) and conventional funds (CFs) in different market (geographical area and class size) segments during the period 1992–2012. From an unbalanced sample of more than 22 000 funds, we define a matched sample using a beta-distance measure to match any SRF with the ‘nearest neighbour’ CF in terms of sensitivity to risk factors. Using this matching approach and a recursive analysis, we identify several switch points in the lead/lag relationship between the two investment styles over time in different market segments. A relevant finding of our analysis is that SRFs played an ‘insurance role’ outperforming CFs during the 2007 global financial crisis.     

Economic growth and structure of domestic absorption: Evidence from internationally comparable data

Using the Chenery-Syrquin models of structural change, and internationally comparable data on GDP per capita and shares of consumption, investment and government spending for the 1960s and the 1970s, a study is conducted of changes in the structure of domestic absorption that accompany economic growth. Relative to the conventional data, ‘real’ data indicate the fall in the share of consumption to be somewhat lower and the rise in the share of investment to be larger, as GDP per capita rises. The share of government is observed to decline, although most previous studies indicate an increase in government share with economic growth.