Access regulation and the adoption of VoIP

The introduction of packet-switched telephony in the form of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) raises concerns about current regulatory practice. Access regulation has been designed for traditional telephony on public networks (PSTN). In this paper we analyze the effect of access regulation and retail price regulation of PSTN networks on the adoption of a new technology in the form of VoIP. In particular, we show that with endogenous consumer choice between PSTN and VoIP telephony, higher prices for terminating access to the PSTN network make VoIP less likely to succeed and lead to lower profits of operators that offer exclusively VoIP telephony.      

地方政府投资中的冲动与拖延——中国经济过热的一个行为经济学解释

我国地方政府由于任期制等原因而形成"短视"认知偏差,过分注重项目的短期收益状况,从而会表现出对能带来大量即期收益的"政绩工程"类项目的投资冲动和对需要大量即期成本支付的环保类项目的投资拖延。以此可以部分地解析地方政府过度投资在我国历次经济过热中的作用机制。绿色GDP的提倡和一票否决制度作为中央政府对地方政府投资的反偏差干预手段,也可在此框架内得到统一的逻辑解释。     

Trade Liberalisation in Developing Economies: Modest Benefits but Problems with Productivity Growth, Macro Prices, and Income Distribution

Microeconomically, the case for liberalisation is dubious under increasing returns to scale and when firms can invest directly in productivity enhancement. Distributional effects of commercial policy changes can be regressive and large, but the 'rents' they generate can serve as a basis for effective policy intervention contingent on firms' performance. Macroeconomically, the case of liberalisation rests on Say's Law, which is not always enforced. Recent combined current and capital market liberalisations have been associated with strong exchange rates and high interest rates and output and productivity growth have positive mutual feedbacks which liberalisation may well suppress.     

The diffusion of Internet telephony among consumers and firms: Current issues and future prospects

This paper analyses the current demand and market potential for Internet telephony—the transmission of voice over the public Internet or over a private Intranet—a technology that has attracted considerable attention as an appealing alternative to traditional telephony but that is likely to develop as a component within an integrated system of video, data and voice applications. The paper investigates technical, economic and social factors supporting and hindering the adoption of Internet telephony. In doing so, it relies upon the idea that the diffusion of Internet telephony is determined both by the attributes of the technological applications as perceived by the potential adopters, and by the characteristics of different users. According to this view, the research points out that relevant uncertainties reside on the demand side, particularly among residential users, and that in the future, businesses are more likely to adopt these applications than consumers. The assumptions concerning the future diffusion of Internet telephony are supported by the results of a survey carried out among a sample of Internet telephony service providers in Europe and North America.     

Fiber in the backbone! The impact of broadband adoption on firm growth in network markets

This article examined the relationship between the adoption of technology, via the deployment of broadband, on revenue growth, which is an important measure of financial performance, of the deploying firms using panel data for all of the major local exchange carriers in the US telecommunications industry from 1988 to 2001. The sector is an important network market context where the implications of deployment have substantial salience. The results show a positive relationship between broadband deployment and carriers’ revenue growth. This result implies that encouraging the adoption and deployment of broadband technologies in addition to the benefits of the consumers and firms at the receiving end of the new technology create the potential for better financial performance for the deploying firms. These results also imply that steps that can be taken to provide incentives that will hasten the further deployment of broadband will result in gains in financial performance within the sector.     

Gambling Taxation: Public Equity in the Gambling Business

Government's intrinsic role in sustaining a viable gambling industry, and its significant revenue stake in industry profitability, can make the public effectively shareholders in the industry. An important social cost of gambling is the potential for corruption of democratic processes through close industry and government links. Government can increase gambling revenues by expanding the tax base, rather than by raising tax rates. Gambling tax rates have fallen in recent decades, while revenues have increased dramatically. This paper analyses the forces encouraging governments to give excessive priority to protecting gambling revenues. It finds gambling taxation is regressive, and increasingly so as access widens. 'Children, madmen and fools' are significant to the market. The transition to a goods and services tax, along with the recent inquiry by the Productivity Commission into gambling, provides an opportunity for gambling policy to be made in a coherent social and economic framework, rather than as ad hoc and short-term solutions to State governments' revenue problems. Such an outcome rests on the Commonwealth government playing a leadership role.     

Cigarette demand and tax policy for race groups in South Africa

This paper calculates cigarette demand for race groups in South Africa. Elasticities are the most important information a tax policy analyst can have. Elasticities determine how the tax base will change with a change in the tax rate and thus how government revenues will respond to the tax. Elasticities also determine the excess burden that consumers will bear as a result of the tax. As such, own price, crossprice, and expenditure elasticities are calculated along with government revenue maximizing tax rates, and total and excess burdens. Parametric and semiparametric estimation techniques are used and compared. Results show that a tax on cigarettes will discourage nonsmokers from starting to smoke and mainly raise revenue from current smokers. Furthermore, it is found that consumption behaviours between groups are different implying different government revenue maximizing tax rates for each group affecting the distribution of income.     

Core competencies,matching and the structure of foreign direct investment

We develop a matching model of foreign direct investment to study how multinational firms choose between greenfield investment, acquisitions and joint ownership. Firms must invest in a continuum of tasks to bring a product to market. Each firm possesses a core competency in the task space, but the firms are otherwise identical. For acquisitions and joint ownership, a multinational enterprise (MNE) must match with a local partner that may provide complementary expertise within the task space. However, under joint ownership, investment in tasks is shared by multiple owners and, hence, is subject to a holdup problem that varies with contract intensity. In equilibrium, ex ante identical multinationals enter the local matching market, and, ex post, three different types of heterogeneous firms arise. Specifically, the worst matches are forgone and the MNEs invest greenfield; the middle matches operate under joint ownership; and the best matches integrate via full acquisition. We link the firm‐level model to cross‐country and industry predictions and find that a greater share of full acquisitions occur between more proximate markets, in hosts with greater revenue potential and within contract‐intensive industries. Using data on partial and full acquisitions across industries and countries, we find robust support for these predictions.     

房地产税渐进改革路径*——基于税制要素设计的实证研究

在保持房地产市场平稳的前提下，使房地产税成为地方重要税种是中国房地产税改革的重要政策目标，但在高房价收入比背景下，这二者相互冲突。本文基于房地产税制要素设计和微观家庭数据测算，探讨中国房地产税的渐进改革路径及其影响，认为鉴于居民纳税能力受高房价收入比限制，房地产税可从低税率、高减免起步；伴随房价收入比收敛，逐步提高税率、降低减免。起步阶段，税制改革应重视居民纳税能力和纳税意愿，优先实现房地产市场平稳软着陆；在中长期，房地产税可逐步成为地方政府主体税种，起到完善税制和地方税体系、提升地方治理能力的作用。     

Small-Group,Multi-Level Democracy: Implications of Austrian Public Choice for Governance Structure

This paper examines the process of mass democracy as the fundamental cause of transfer seeking and the centralization of governance, using Austrian-school theory and methodology such as decentralized knowledge, disaggregated phenomena, and the structure of capital goods. The alternative of decentralized, small-group governance reduces the demand for campaign financing and makes more effective use of decentralized knowledge. In addition, when public revenues originate in the local districts and are passed on to higher levels of governance, it provides incentives for revenue sources which do not have an excess burden on production. The governance structure of cellular, bottom-up, multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the upper levels, provides a contrast for a comparative systems analysis that can yield insight into the transfer seeking endemic in mass democracy.     

低碳产业补贴政策对福利分配的影响

从低碳产业的外部性出发,探讨了补贴对低碳产业发展的影响。首先,通过假定补贴政策对低碳产品的需求弹性不同,分析了补贴增加的福利总额在生产者和消费者之间的分配。其次,假定对低碳产业生产者进行补贴,将会使整个低碳行业生产者收益增加,推动低碳产业的快速发展。最后,提出了构建低碳产业的补贴政策要根据低碳产业发展规划分步实施的政策思路。     

培育经济发展新动能的技术、产业、政策机理研究

伴随着国际、国内经济形势发生深刻变化，我国经济过去主要依靠投资、劳动力、自然资源投入的粗放型发展模式已经难以为继，急需培育促进经济实现高质量发展的新动能。现有成果主要围绕技术基础、产业载体及政策制度等培育经济发展新动能的丰富内涵和多样化模式展开，针对内在机理的探讨较少。从新兴技术对产业结构优化起基础支撑作用、新兴产业载体释放经济新动能、市场与政府相结合的政策制度助力经济高质量发展三大维度论述基本原理，系统梳理新兴技术聚合迸发新动能、传统产业升级培育新动能以及政策制度创新生成新动能3种主要模式。最后，提出以推动技术引领发展、促进产业调整升级和出台政策“靶向支撑”为核心的“创新链-产业链-政策链”对策建议。     

China's Outward Direct Investment in Africa

The empirical determinants of China's outward direct investment (ODI) in Africa are examined using an officially approved ODI dataset and a relatively new OECD–IMF format ODI dataset. China's ODI is found responding to the canonical economic determinants that include the market seeking motive, the risk factor, and the resources seeking motive. It is also affected by the intensity of trade ties and the presence of China's contracted projects. A host country's natural resources have an impact on China's decision on how much to invest in the country rather than on whether to invest in the country or not. China's drive for Africa's natural resources is mainly a recent phenomenon and, probably, became prominent after the “Going Global” policy adopted in 2002.     

Conjoint analysis of demand for IP telephony: the case of Japan

With the recent diffusion of broadband (BB) services, Internet protocol (IP) telephony is expected to spread significantly in Japan. This article investigates the demand for IP telephony by using conjoint analysis. Projecting IP telephony demand also contributes to Japanese info-communication policy discussions. Two points are made. First, IP telephony is still currently considered an optional supplement or an add-on service option of high-speed BB Internet access services in Japan rather than a close substitute of existing plain old telephone service (POTS). At this point, we find little evidence that many households will promptly forsake their fixed line service for IP telephony. Second, we conclude that the key condition for the proliferation of IP telephony is the complete guarantee of quality of service (QoS), including voice quality, number portability, fax usage and emergency access, comparable to or exceeding that of existing POTS.     

Endogenous trade policy in general equilibrium: An interaction of redistribution rule,trade openness,and labor market condition

Using a general equilibrium framework, the paper derives trade policy endogenously for a small country. It shows that, contrary to the existing literature, a lobbying industry is not guaranteed trade protection; it may even face trade taxes. Besides lobbying, trade policy depends on other factors such as the trade revenue distribution rule, income distribution across groups, trade openness, factor substitutability in production, industry employment size, and labor market flexibility. The paper also shows that the observed phenomenon of government preference for import tariffs over export subsidies—a long overdue puzzle—is an inherent outcome of lobbying equilibrium. It also shows that trade policies such as import tariffs and export taxes that have the same impact on economic market—Lerner symmetry (1936)—are driven by the same forces in the political market.     

Tobacco consumption and policy in the United Kingdom

In recent years, several structural changes and sequences of shocks have occurred in the market for tobacco in the UK, including an explosive growth in smuggling. This study examines whether it is still possible to estimate a reliable, plausible tobacco demand equation from time series data for the UK whilst allowing for all of the various shocks and structural changes. A second objective of this study is to use the estimated demand function to evaluate tobacco policy in the UK, including the scope for using tax increases to achieve reduced consumption and increased revenues. It is found that smuggling has diminished the revenue yield of higher rates of duty, but total consumption of tobacco has been reduced. In addition to the introduction of further measures to control smuggling, policy may need to place more emphasis in the future on health campaigns and smoking restrictions.     

Asymmetric Demand Information and Foreign Direct Investment*

We examine the FDI versus exports decision of firms competing in an oligopolistic (quantity‐setting) market under demand uncertainty and asymmetric information. Compared to a firm that chooses to export, a firm that chooses to set up a plant in the host market has superior information about local market demand. In addition to the well‐known tension between the fixed set‐up costs of investment, the additional variable costs of exports and oligopoly sizes, the incentive to invest abroad is explained by the strategic learning effect. FDI may be observed even if trade costs are zero. The analysis is robust to price competition and to the possibility that a foreign firm can engage in both FDI and exports.     

INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT – THE EMERGENT PPP EQUITY MARKET

Increasingly governments are looking to private sector actors to invest in infrastructure projects. An emergent mechanism for such investment is the market in PPP equity. This is an aspect of PPPs that has to date had little empirical attention. This paper reports on the size and scope of the market in PPP equity sales within the UK. In the process, the nature of PPP projects and the existing rationales for the policy are critiqued. The paper concludes by laying out a number of potential research agendas focused on PPP equity sales including a call for reassessing theoretical perspectives.     

Change in income distribution and aggregate spending: constraints on full-employment?

During the 1980s, rising income inequality in the UK resulted partly from market conditions, and partly from supply-side policies that reduced social security benefits and income supports for low-wage earners. Greater Inequality, plus low levels of investment spending (relative to consumption)hinder the ability of demand management to raise the level of output and employment in the UK economy. Higher income earners have higher import propensities. Consequently, at any stage of the economic cycle, the trade dificit is now larger than it was before 1980. Increases in demand leak into a demand for imports, further reducing the incentive to invest. The paper argues for lower interest rates to encourage investment, and a fiscal policy that redistributes income towards those with lower incomes to solve these problems.