PERCEPTIONS, PROBLEMS AND METHODS OF PREPARING LABOUR FORCE ACCOUNTS IN INDIA

The paper concerns the links between labour force accounts and national accounts. It first discusses the variation in the perception of labour force among countries which results in much disparity in recorded participation rates. This obviously makes international comparison difficult. Since benchmark labour force information is often tied to population censuses which are infrequent and vary in concepts and approaches, even comparisons within a country over time are difficult. Finally a discussion of the use of labour force data to estimate the unrecorded economy is followed by suggestions on the direction for future work.     

土地利用规划系统现状与问题

土地利用规划系统对于科学、合理地利用有限的土地资源,及时了解与掌握土地利用变化数量和空间分布规律,保持耕地总量和土地持续利用都具有十分重要的意义。当前,结合了GIS技术的土地利用规划系统建设已成为主导趋势。文章对主要的土地规划系统及其功能等进行了系统的总结,并对存在的问题做了分析。虽然当前的土地利用规划系统都采用了先进的GIS技术作为平台,但是仍还不完善。在土地信息历史档案管理、土地评价方法以及系统扩展能力等方面,还有需要改进的地方。     

退休年龄、教育年限与社会保障

在本文中,我们用养老金的缴纳费率和养老金替代率代表社会保障制度,采用有限生命预期的连续时间状态代际交叠模型作为基本框架,分析了社会保障制度对消费者接受教育的年限、退休年龄、工作年限的选择、GDP增长率和利率的影响。同时,我们还分析了消费者的预期寿命对个体消费者接受教育的年限、退休年龄、工作年限的选择以及对社会保障制度的影响。     

SOCIAL COHESION, INSTITUTIONS, AND GROWTH

We present evidence that measures of "social cohesion," such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn causally determines growth.     

TWO OR THREE PROBLEMS CONCERNING SOCIAL STABILITY AND OUR MEASURES OF WELFARE: WHAT CAN ECONOMISTS LEARN FROM OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES?*

This paper takes up several problems that are related to psychology, political science and ethics—disciplines that we regard as neighbours on the boundaries of economics. I pay particular attention to such topics as mass psychology and social stability, democracy and economic performance and the notions of wellbeing and happiness. After laying out some of the history of academic discourse on these problems and notions, I reconsider the nature of discrepancy between microlevel motivations and macrolevel phenomena, trade‐offs between equality and liberty and the problem of measurement of social welfare and “happiness” from the perspective of “dissociation of intention and consequence”.     

社会价值、市场效率与收入分配

本文介绍我们所研究的总量消费者剩余方法。我们将老子的"为而不争"对应为市场经济的优化原理,定义为老子第二原则。老子第二原则在个人水平上的实现使市场有效率并达到个人水平上的帕累托最优。而老子第一原则"天之道利而无害"对应于帕累托改进,代表着社会进步的方向。由于自由市场不能自动实现最优收入分配,遵循"老子第一原则"的最大可能的社会进步的实现超越于自由市场力量之外。     

SAVING AND SOCIAL INSURANCE

In a model which is both intertemporal and uncertain, this paper shows that risk averters increase saving in response to increases in the probability of income losses and reduce saving in response to social insurance.     

GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL SPENDING

Abstract. We provide evidence indicating that countries with well developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade‐off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the importance of a reverse causality from competitiveness to social spending, and find that this is weak. We also present some possible explanations for our empirical finding. Finally, we interpret our findings in the framework of a theoretical model in which risk affects the size of the social sector and social spending affects the production function of the private sector.     

RUMORS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

This article studies the transmission of rumors in social networks. We consider a model with biased and unbiased agents. Biased agents want to enforce a specific decision and unbiased agents to match the true state. One agent learns the true state and sends a message to her neighbors, who decide whether or not to transmit it further. We characterize the perfect Bayesian equilibria of the game, show that the social network can act as a filter, and that biased agents may have an incentive to limit their number.     

SOCIAL NORMS,LOCAL INTERACTION,AND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANNING*

This article examines optimal social linkage when each individual's repeated interaction with each of his neighbors creates spillovers. Each individual's discount factor is randomly determined. A planner chooses a local interaction network or neighborhood design before the discount factors are realized. Each individual then plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game with his neighbors. A local trigger strategy equilibrium (LTSE) describes an equilibrium in which each individual conditions his cooperation on the cooperation of at least one “acceptable” group of neighbors. Our main results demonstrate a basic trade‐off in the design problem between suboptimal punishment and social conflict. Potentially suboptimal punishment arises in designs with local interactions since in this case monitoring is imperfect. Owing to the heterogeneity of discount factors, however, greater social conflict may arise in more connected networks. When individuals' discount factors are known to the planner, the optimal design exhibits a cooperative “core” and an uncooperative “fringe.”“Uncooperative” (impatient) types are connected to cooperative ones who tolerate their free riding so that social conflict is kept to a minimum. By contrast, when the planner knows only the ex ante distribution over individual discount factors, then in some cases the optimal design partitions individuals into maximally connected cliques (e.g., cul‐de‐sacs), whereas in other cases incomplete graphs with small overlap (e.g., grids) are possible.     

ECONOMIC SYSTEMS, POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The paper deals with the estimation of comparable human rights ratings (defined as a composite of political rights, civil liberties and state power indices) for 154 countries, excluding territories, of the world in 1983. It then develops a theory to gauge the sensitivity of these ratings to a specific disaggregation suggested by the theory of political economy and establishes the close nexus existing between economic systems, political structures and human rights. The results indicate that increasing government intervention, whether economic or political, unequivocally tends to worsen the human rights situation. Moreover, it is seen that affluence and income distribution are significant predictors of human rights ratings across countries.     

SOCIAL CONTRACTS AND PIPE DREAMS

Economists' debate over the public utility "regulatory contract" has increasingly focused on three issues created by sunk costs: (i) Protection of sunk capital, (ii) Division of "windfalls" in a world of uncertainty, and (Hi) Mechanisms to control the regulator who administers long-term agreements. This article uses these three criteria to evaluate regulatory alternatives in the natural gas industry. Facing similar problems under criteria 1 and 2 are: government regulation of pipelines as integrated gas merchants, government regulation of pipelines as gas transporters, and private regulation through competitive contracting. Private contracting, however, offers superior control over the contract administrator, because it removes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's monopoly on contract administration.     

EMPLOYEE BENEFITS AND SOCIAL SECURITY

Future growth in employee benefits has a significant linkage with the long-range actuarial position of Social Security (OASDI). Earlier research by this author explained the sensitivity of the projected long-range OASDI deficit to the assumption about the rate of growth of fringe benefits. ¹ This paper summarizes, updates, and extends the discussion of the implications of fringe-benefit growth to include distributional effects     

SOCIAL INSURANCE AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY

This article studies how insurance from progressive taxation improves the matching of workers to occupations. We propose an equilibrium dynamic assignment model to illustrate how social insurance encourages mobility. Workers experiment to find their best occupational fit in a process filled with uncertainty. Risk aversion and limited earnings insurance induce workers to remain in unfitting occupations. We estimate the model using microdata from the United States and Germany. Higher earnings uncertainty explains the U.S. higher mobility rate. When workers in the United States enjoy Germany's higher progressivity, mobility rises. Output and welfare gains are large.     

金融体系特征、风险特性与企业创新

本文基于中国工业企业库和专利数据库，利用2006—2008年中国证券市场资本化总额占比的快速上升和企业风险特性的差异，探讨了金融结构和金融发展对企业创新的影响。实证结果表明，市场主导程度更高的金融结构，而非更大的金融市场总体规模，通过缓解外部融资依赖程度更高行业中的私有企业的融资约束，显著促进了高风险私有企业的创新。以上实证结果并非由金融体系特征变化前的时间趋势所驱动，并对遗漏变量等问题保持稳健。本文对于深入理解转型升级，构建支持企业创新的金融体系具有重要政策含义。     

MONEY,SOCIAL STATUS AND ENDOGENOUS GROWTH IN A GENERALIZED CASH‐IN‐ADVANCE MODEL

This paper analytically examines the equilibrium growth effect of money/inflation in a standard one‐sector AK model of endogenous growth with the most generalized cash‐in‐advance constraint and relative wealth‐induced preferences for social status. We show that on the economy's unique balanced growth equilibrium path, the sign of the correlation between money and output growth depends crucially on: (i) the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption; and (ii) the liquidity‐constrained ratio of consumption to investment expenditure. Moreover, our model economy always exhibits a positive output–growth effect in response to changes of the strength for social status. We also undertake numerical experiments to assess the quantitative importance of our theoretical results under an empirically plausible set of parameters.