The Production of Territory in North Korea: ‘Security First,Economy Next’

One of the prevalent stereotypes about North Korea is that it is the world's most isolated country. This view derives from North Korea's ruling ideology – juche – which calls for territorial isolation from external influences. For this reason, any territorial strategy like the introduction of special economic zones is generally regarded as an inevitable economic choice forced upon it. However, I argue that it is not that North Korea has no choice but to open its territory due to economic suffering but that North Korea's own territorial imperative, ‘security first, economy next,’ determines how it produces territory. To do so it deploys various territorial strategies such as de-bordering, re-bordering, and zoning. In this sense, North Korea's production of territory manifests Jean Gottmann's idea of territory first as shelter for security and next as a springboard for opportunity.     

Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen on technological determinism,individualism and institutions

This article investigates Joseph Schumpeter's affinities with Thorstein Veblen with respect to technological change and determinism, the future of capitalism, individualism and institutions. From a methodological point of view, a common point in their analysis is their anti-teleological view regarding economics as a discipline. Also, in the Schumpeterian system, technology is the cornerstone of economic evolution and appears as the making of new combinations. In the Veblenian theoretical framework, the bearer of change is to be found, inter alia, in technology, just like in Schumpeter's works, although not without differences. They also share the opinion that technology revolutionises capitalism and has serious implications for its future as a system. Furthermore, regarding individualism, in his work Schumpeter stresses the importance of the social milieu on individual action, a fact which bears strong resemblance to the Veblenian notion of evolution as ‘depersonalized evolution’. In this sense, Schumpeter is very close to Veblen, although Schumpeter's approach could be classified in what is called institutionalist individualism, whereas Veblen could be classified as holist. Undoubtedly, the role of institutions is of great importance in both Schumpeter and Veblen. Ιnstitutions in the Schumpeterian schema play a central role closely related to the future of capitalism. Institutional and non-institutional factors enter into complex forms of interaction just like in Veblen's approach. There, institutions are part of the social milieu and their underlying framework, much wider than mere economic and social. Of course, the theoretical analyses of Schumpeter and Veblen are not devoid of differences springing mainly from their methodological approach such as the role of the individual in the capitalist process which is probably the most significant difference regarding the importance attributed to it in Schumpeter's early works. Also, the way technical change appears constitutes another difference. However, his views are quite close to Veblen's. After all, Schumpeter began to write in a social, political, theoretical and ideological environment at a time when evolutionary ideas dominated social thought.     

经济政策不确定性、FDI稳定性及研发投资密度 -基于资产专用性视角的研究

基于资产专用性衡量外商直接投资(FDI)异质性,在实物期权理论框架内探究经济政策确定性程度变化对FDI规模、稳定性及技术结构的影响机制,并采用制造业24行业外资企业数据进行验证。研究表明,经济政策确定性程度的下降对FDI规模存在抑制作用,并导致其高水平的波动,且受到资产专用性的正向调节。实证研究表明,2001年我国加入WTO后,可预期的政策环境中FDI呈现稳步增长态势;2008年金融危机后,政策不确定性的攀升引致制造业FDI增速下滑并伴随着波动性上升。进一步的研究发现,蕴含高水平资产专用性投资的研发密集型FDI对经济政策确定性程度更加敏感,一致、透明和可预期的政策环境的营造不但有利于提升FDI稳定度,对吸引高水平FDI更加具有针对性和有效性。     

Development Policy Lending, Conditionality, and Ownership: A Dynamic Agency Model Perspective

Is the World Bank's Development Policy Lending likely to enhance ownership and have greater effectiveness than structural adjustment? We specify a dynamic common agency model in which a government considering economic reform faces domestic opposition from interest groups. The dynamic specification, which is original in the context of policy reforms supported by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), is essential to allow the strength of special interest groups to arise endogenously during the reform process. We show that conditionality may alter the country's political equilibrium and lead to higher social welfare. However, under certain circumstances which depend on country‐specific circumstances, conditional assistance could lead to lower social welfare. Thus, for conditionality not to be inconsistent with ownership, its design must be appropriate to the country circumstances and directly affect the domestic political constraint.     

Moore's Law and the Semiconductor Industry: A Vintage Model*

In this paper we develop a vintage model to gain a better understanding of the semiconductor industry and its role in recent U.S. productivity gains. Unlike previous work, in our model the observed price declines of individual chips are driven by the introduction of better vintages rather than by learning economies. Dominated chips, nonetheless, continue to be produced, for a time, due to sunk investments in chip‐specific production equipment. The model lends partial support to Jorgenson's hypothesis that an exogenous increase in Moore's Law could have generated the more rapid price declines, and faster productivity growth, seen after 1995.     

Women's Economic Participation on the Eve of Industrialization: Bizkaia,Spain, 1825

This contribution discusses, from the regional perspective of Bizkaia, Spain, adult women's labor force participation prior to industrialization, including the impact of economic, social, and demographic variables, such as family life cycle, marriage, and the presence of minor children in the household. Women's high level of participation – 68.6 percent for the entire province – varies considerably, depending on local economic conditions. Job opportunities for women and socioeconomic characteristics of households act as first-order explanatory factors. Women in proto-industrial economies, like Bizkaia's, which combined the extraction, transport, and marketing of iron with agriculture and fishing, show greater participation. Demand for women's labor was linked to jobs without recognized qualifications. The association of women's participation with demographic variables is not manifest in the historical data. The results show that supply factors do not explain the variance in women's activity.     

Asset-based Reserve Requirements: Some Reservations

Abstract

Thomas Palley's (2004) paper ‘Asset-based reserve requirements: reasserting domestic monetary control in an era of financial innovation and instability’ has radical implications for monetary policy and the operations of central banks in the money markets. This comment argues that Palley's proposal may be impractical today because it overlooks banks' holding of excessive reserves (or claims on such reserves), and because reserves allocated for particular kinds of business cannot be isolated in bank balance sheets or markets. In particular, once differential reserves are imposed on particular kinds of business, banks may respond to changes in reserve requirements by varying their assets in less predictable ways than the scheme suggests. A central bank's willingness to use differential reserve requirements will be inhibited by the current policy doctrine that emphasises control of a stable money market rate of interest. In any case, it is doubtful if interest rates or reserve requirements could have the specific targeted effects that Palley's model suggests.     

Socialism,Spillovers and Markets in Cuba

This article undertakes an empirical evaluation of Cuba's new development strategy placing tourism at the heart of the process of incorporating markets into a socialist system. The principal research question is whether the introduction of markets related to the Cuban tourism complex has been as successful in establishing viable backward linkages to industry as claimed. Drawing on a multitude of quantitative and qualitative sources, the article demonstrates that backward linkage building has been quite successful and even made possible a transformation of Cuba's formerly so dependent trade structures. However, there are signs that backward linkages are not as viable as could be desired. Other complementary reforms beside the introduction of markets are necessary, such as fighting soft budget constraints in user and producer firms. The article concludes that it will be difficult to fight the roots of the inherited incentive problem without initiating fundamental labour market reforms.     

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment,by Carrie N. Baker

This paper examines some of the effects of East and West German family policy on women's economic position by analyzing intrahousehold bargaining power, defined here as based on co-resident partners' relative fall-back positions, which in turn depend on the individuals' access to income in the event that the partnership ends. East German policy sought to integrate women into the labor force through programs such as free public child care and liberal maternity leave. West Germany based its family policy on the assumption of a stark gender division of labor, with one lifetime breadwinner per family and a second parent who temporarily leaves the labor force to raise children. On the basis of her findings and analysis, the author argues that while East German institutions increased women's bargaining power, gender-specific policies interfered with women's ability to use this power to bring about changes in the household division of labor. West German family policy did not assign gender roles, but it offered women less bargaining power with which to negotiate. The author maintains that society's refusal to address women's greater child-rearing costs is not based on an assessment of such costs and the costs of redistributive government programs, but on the assumption that women should absorb the risks and burdens of reproduction.     

Land Restitution in Post-Communist Bulgaria

While international scholarship has generally been laudatory of Bulgaria's land restitution efforts, painting them as part of an overall success story and yet another example of the country's sharp break with communism, a real analysis of Bulgaria's so-called 'success story', particularly by the legal community, has been sorely lacking. This author has found that in many ways the approbation Bulgaria has received from the international community for its restitution efforts is more a reflection of the Bulgarian government's willingness to confront the problem than its ability to effectively deal with it. Through the use of documents, court records, and interviews conducted by the author, this article endeavours to document the problems and shortcomings of a system that is considered such a courageous and worthy pursuit that few have been willing to criticize it. Essentially, this paper attempts to answer the question, not of whether Bulgaria's restitution effort was able to do some good, but whether it could have done--and could still do--much better.     

Making Visible the Hidden Economy: The Case for Gender-Impact Analysis of Economic Policy

This paper makes the case for analyzing the gender impact of economic policy, based on the existence of an unpaid as well as a paid economy and on structural differences between men's and women's positions across the two economies. Economic policy is targeted on the paid economy. However, unintended impacts on the unpaid care economy may limit how effective any policy can be. Gender-impact assessment will not only make the effects of economic policies on gender inequalities transparent; it will also enable policy makers to achieve all their goals more effectively, whether or not these goals relate explicitly to gender. The introduction in the UK of a new Working Families' Tax Credit (WFTC), designed to make employment pay and help reduce child poverty, provides an example of how gender-impact assessment could have been used to improve an initial policy design. The paper also suggests criteria for evaluating economic policy, so that its full gender impact and its effects on both paid and caring economies can be assessed.     

园游、郊游、山水游：三种时空尺度 北宋文人交游

中国古代文人的群体一致性与个体矛盾性并存，该 特征的直接表现形式是文人交游活动，园林因作为交游活动的 场所而具有历史传承意义。然而此类研究集中于文、史、哲、 艺等学科，风景园林对其关注度较低。北宋文人群体规模大、 雅集结社之风盛行，且交游唱和诗作遗存较多。因此，以北宋 文人群体为研究对象，以司马光的独乐园及其举办的真率会、 欧阳修春游嵩山，以及邵雍的一次长途秋游为例，对园记、交 游唱和诗等遗存进行文本分析，归纳总结了园游、郊游、山水 游3种不同时空尺度的文人交游活动，挖掘文人交游与山水园 林调和共生、精神反哺的关系，对风景园林历史理论体系的完 善具有积极意义，观古知今以实现古为今用。     

The United States Boom, 'Clintonomics' and the New Economy Doctrine: A Neo-Gramscian Contribution

The financial crisis that struck South Korea with such ferocity in mid 1997 appeared to take many by surprise. Throughout the 1990s and up until the onset of the crisis, foreign lenders demonstrated their confidence in the Korean economy by literally pouring capital into the country, swelling foreign debt to unprecedented levels. Such confidence was bolstered by the affirmations of international credit rating agencies that attached positive ratings to the Korean economy right up until mid 1997. No one, it seemed, at home or abroad, believed that the Korean star that had risen so quickly and shone so brilliantly could fall as far and as fast as it did. However, barely had the dust settled behind the ‘electronic herd's’ mass exodus when tales of the ‘inherent instabilities’ of the Korean economy began to emerge. The Korean government bore the brunt of heaviest international criticism, its ‘interventionist’ financial policies widely blamed for distorting the market mechanism, leading to the misallocation of economic resources and ultimately precipitating the crisis. Such interpretations of Korea's crisis have, however, since been called into question on numerous grounds.     

Country-Specific Characteristics of Patent Applications in France,Germany and the UK in the Biotechnology Sectors

Given that institutions are highly country-specific, the differences in the national systems of innovation in the different countries of Europe are likely to give rise to country-specific patterns in new technology investment. The objective of this paper is to identify such differences, in the biotechnology sectors, in France, Germany and the UK. The results, based on an analysis of patent applications, indicate that France is focused on the 'dominant' technology of genetic engineering and its public laboratories and collective patent applications play an important role. Germany is leading in the total number of patent applications but is focused on 'intermediate' and 'residual' technologies with a significant number of individual depositors. The UK is leading in the 'dominant' technology. Its public laboratories and firms are strongly involved in depositing patents with a marked strategy of international protection.     

Hayek,Friedman, and Buchanan: On Public Life,Chile, and the Relationship between Liberty and Democracy

This article places recent evidence of Hayek's public defense of the Pinochet regime in the context of the work of the other great twentieth-century classical liberal economists, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan. Hayek's view that liberty was only instrumentally valuable is contrasted with Buchanan's account of liberty situated in the notion of the inviolable individual. It is argued that Hayek's theory left him with no basis on which to demarcate the legitimate actions of the state, so that conceivably any government action could be justified on consequentialist grounds. Furthermore, Friedman's account of freedom and discretionary power undermines Hayek's proposal that a transitional dictatorship could pave the way for a genuinely free society. It is contended that Hayek's defense of Pinochet follows from pathologies of his theories of liberty and democracy.     

Nanobiomedical science in China: a research field on the rise

Medical and health care applications of nanotechnology have increasingly attracted research and innovation attention. Nano-biomedical science (NBMS) is a term we use to define this emerging domain. As China is one of the leading countries in nanotechnology, but lacks a long history as a biosciences leader, this paper explores the competitive positioning of China in the development of NBMS. Specifically, this paper profiles the research patterns of Chinese NBMS in comparison with the four other largest countries in NBMS, using bibliometric techniques. The results indicate that China is a leader in NBMS, leveraging its strengths in chemistry and physics in the broader nanotechnology domain. However, China's relative weakness in traditional biomedical disciplines, and its lack of presence in highly influential global journals, could prove to be limiting factors.     

Smartphone use,off-farm employment,and women's decision-making power: Evidence from rural China

Empowering women is an important goal of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and studies have proposed various strategies to achieve this goal. However, few have examined the role of smartphone use in empowering women in decision-making and its mechanism. Therefore, this study analyzes how smartphone use affects women's decision-making power and explores whether this influence is due to women's off-farm employment mechanisms. For this purpose, the study uses the survey data of 1110 households in rural China and the endogenous treatment regression model for analysis. The control function approach addresses the selection bias of off-farm employment. The results show that smartphone use significantly increases women's decision-making power, partially channeled through increasing women's off-farm employment. The mechanism effect is robust to using both binary and intensive measurements of off-farm employment. Therefore, a policy to improve access to internet facilities and smartphone use could improve women's decision-making power through employment in the off-farm sector.     

International Transmission of the People's Bank of China's Balance Sheet Expansion

The People's Bank of China's (PBoC) balance sheet expanded more dramatically than any of its major international counterparts during the past decade. The main contribution to this expansion was the rapid accumulation of the central bank's foreign assets, as a result of foreign exchange market intervention. In this paper, we examine the possible international transmission of this expansion by analyzing monthly data for China and 15 other countries over the period 2000–2012. Impulse response analysis based on vector autoregression modeling suggests that the PBoC's balance sheet expansion has greater impacts on developing than on developed countries. So far the influences appear to be dominated by “trade channels” instead of “financial channels,” possibly due to China's capital account controls. However, the impacts of the PBoC's balance sheet expansion on other countries' interest rates, exchange rates, and stock market prices could strengthen significantly in the coming years as China's economic scale grows and its capital account opens up.     

Regional Cooperation and Integration in the Mekong Region

Over the past two decades, several regional cooperation programs were initiated by multilateral and bilateral donors to address concerns about the development gap in the Mekong subregion. Programs such as the Greater Mekong Subregion program of the Asian Development Bank and the Mekong–Japan Cooperation program focused first on improving physical connectivity through transport corridors, regional power development and grid connection, and telecommunications linkages, and were successful. However, as transport and trade facilitation became a priority, the weak institutional capacity of Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Myanmar, and Vietnam resulted in a slow progress and is a major challenge to regional cooperation. Other challenges are the pressure on the use of Mekong water resources and the planned construction of mainstream dams, which could threaten the Mekong River Commission's role, the regional rivalry for energy sources, and the lack of attention to unskilled labor issues. The relations between Mekong regional cooperation programs and China are also a main issue to address if cooperation programs are not to become instruments of geopolitical rivalry.     

MODELLING THE TRANSITION TOWARDS THE RENMINBI'S FULL CONVERTIBILITY: IMPLICATIONS FOR CHINA'S GROWTH

There is a widespread consensus that China needs to rebalance its export‐driven growth paradigm towards a more consumption‐based one and that such process is to be accompanied by the transition towards the renminbi's full convertibility. However, the Chinese authorities have so far acted with great caution because this transition cannot but accelerate the slowdown of China's growth which will likely occur because of other structural factors. We address these issues by means of a two‐country two‐stage (before and after the renminbi's full convertibility) model, which reproduces some qualitative features of China's growth pattern and its relationship with the United States. We analyse the extent to which altering the Chinese exchange rate regime, as well as other policies affecting sensitive social and economic issues, may impact on the short‐, medium‐ and long‐term evolution of the Chinese economy. The paper shows that by lifting the controls on the capital account and letting the currency float, the Chinese authorities will renounce those policy instruments for controlling the allocation of the national resources and the dynamics of China's economy.