Investing in private higher education in developing countries: recent experiences of the International Finance Corporation

Higher education, which provides mainly 'private goods,' is being opened to private investment in many parts of the world. The paper describes the pioneering efforts of the International Finance Corporation in this field. The IFC has approved investments in nine universities, two specialised training centres and two student loan programmes. It is too early to draw firm conclusions about the case for this form of investment, but the paper deals with some of the issues which have arisen and provides some 'guideposts' for evaluating future investments.     

Slums in developing countries: New evidence for Indonesia

This paper uses Indonesian data to provide new evidence on the links between household and dwelling characteristics in a developing country. The results show that higher income and education lead to occupancy of dwellings with better structural characteristics, an effect that is reinforced if the household is large and contains few children. Religion also matters, with non-Buddhist households occupying dwellings with worse structural characteristics. The directions of these effects are mostly consistent with separate estimates of household bid-rent functions, which show that willingness-to-pay for better housing attributes rises with income and education.     

The impact of Universal Service Obligations and International Cross-subsidies on the dispersion of telephone services in developing countries

This paper re-evaluates the telecommunication policies often applied to create regional dispersion of services in developing countries. We observe that failure to consider the complexities of the regional telecommunication systems in creating policies and investment strategies has increased the telecom gap between urban and rural regions worldwide. In particular, the teledensities of rural telecommunications in developing countries have remained very low in spite of support through universal service obligation fees and cross-subsidization from international services. As traditional methods for economic analysis and modeling have failed to identify mechanisms that improve telephone dispersion in these countries, we use a system dynamics modeling approach to deal with complexities of the situation in order to evaluate how Universal Service Obligations (USOs) and International Cross-Subsidy (ICS) policies affect telephone densities. We demonstrate that these policies may be counterproductive due to the structure of the telecom system itself. We also show that, when market-clearing pricing is combined with USOs once the urban telephone density reaches a minimum threshold, the dispersion of rural telecommunications can be considerably improved.     

Economics of residential crowding in developing countries

In an attempt to eliminate residential crowding, most countries pursue the policy objective of providing one dwelling unit per household. However, we know little about the demand for various dimensions of housing space which affects the levels of crowding. This paper analyzes the nature of demand for residential space and multiple occupancy in order to identify the major determinants of crowding. The result indicates that to a great extent crowding is explained by economic factors and that the current policy approach to elimination of crowding, which emphasizes one dwelling per household, is not likely to be effective.     

浅析我国的公司债与企业融资

首只公司债的顺利发行和上市标志着公司债正式走进我国资本市场。公司债的推出,不仅为企业开辟了从资本市场融资的新渠道,而且能起到优化融资结构、扩充投资渠道、完善资本市场结构的作用。因此,公司债的健康快速发展将直接影响中国资本市场的发展。     

The dynamics of indebtedness in developing countries: The case of the Philippines

The relationships between foreign capital inflows, the build-up of debt, and economic growth in a developing country are analyzed using a system dynamics model of the pertinent processes. The Philippines serves as an empirical case to apply the model. The model incorporates the macro-structure of economic growth, the micro-structure of market-clearing mechanisms, and an accounting of the money flows. The study shows that economic policies enhancing debt-servicing ability create better economic performance than those limiting acquisition of loans. Increasing capital-intensity is the most important part of such policies. They are further facilitated by encouraging investment through decreasing taxes and enhancing demand through increasing government spending and promoting exports. Thus, augmentation of domestic resources by foreign capital inflows appears to be a viable economic strategy.     

Simulating mining policies in developing countries: The case of Colombia

Mining represents an important economic sector in almost all countries, especially the developing ones. The planning in this area is complex due to the interaction between different aspects like economic factors, environmental and social issues, and government regulation. A tool for policy analysis is needed to understand and test the effects of new and existing policies and avoid unanticipated side effects. The article develops a generic model for analyzing the mining sector of a country and demonstrates how it can be calibrated to test a set of alternative scenarios for the future of mining in Colombia.     

非公经济发展政策执行的阻滞因素分析及对策

国务院关于《鼓励支持和引导个体私营等非公有制经济发展的若干意见》(以下简称《非公经济发展意见》)的出台,犹如一股强劲的春风,吹暖了民营企业家的心。但民营经济政策从出台到落实还有很长的路要走,很多障碍要克服,《非公经济发展意见》很难在短期内解决多年来积累的问题。一项政策出台,重要的是如何在日趋复杂的环境中有效地执行。政策执行这一被长期忽视的环     

股权融资依赖与企业投资行为——基于行为公司财务视角

本文基于行为公司财务视角,首先阐释了股票误定价通过股权融资渠道影响企业投资行为的理论机制.然后在度量股权融资依赖程度的基础上,对不同股权融资结果和融资依赖程度下的企业投资行为进行了实证研究.研究结果表明:在再融资政策的作用下,我国证券市场的股票价格通过股权融资渠道对企业投资行为产生了不同程度的影响.对于未取得股权融资的公司而言,股票市价与企业投资水平不相关;对于取得了股权融资的公司而言,股票市价与企业投资水平显著正相关.股权融资的依赖程度越大,企业投资水平对股票市价的敏感性越高.股权融资的依赖程度小,则内部人控制下的企业投资行为倾向于大规模的扩张.     

Public action and the quality of life in developing countries

An attempt is made to identify the developing countries that have performed better than others in terms of the indicators of the so called "quality of life," relating this progress to the nature of these economies and to the public policies followed in these countries. A table presents data on life expectation at birth and adult literacy rates for 100 countries that had a gross national product per head of less than $3000 in 1977. The data have some comparability, and it is reasonable to use them for a rough international comparison of performance. 38 countries have shown distinction in 1 or both of the fields. There are 10 communist countries in the total list of 100, and 9 of them show some distinction. 8 of the 9 do this despite not having literacy figures reported. The entry is longevity, which is arguably a more basic indicator of success than poverty. Many of the communist countries are wealthier than the mean or median developing country. Although the indices are relative ones, the richer countries have typically done better, on the whole. The longevity performance of the communist countries is typically superior. This applies to the poorer group also. Some of the high growth early capitalist countries also have very good performance in terms of the chosen indicators (e.g., Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore). Taiwan and Hong Kong have the best overall performance record in terms of the 2 criteria for those 61 countries for which both sets of data are available. The countries that appear to have done relatively worse in terms of the indicators are those in the "middle," i.e., neither communist nor successfully capitalist. There are some exceptions. Tanzania appears to have been relatively successful in terms of the removal of illiteracy, and Sri Lanka has been successful in raising life expectancy. In examining the excellent performance of the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, the lesson to be learned from their experience is the great importance of employment expansion in poverty removal. The experiences of Sri Lanka and Tanzania are recounted to illustrate the positive role of state action. Like Sri Lanka's program of social welfare, Tanzania's literacy program shows how much can be achieved by a determined effort, sensibly directed toward specific goals. Poverty removal and related features, including longevity enhancement, is ultimately dependent on a wide distribution of effective entitlements. This, for any given level of per capita income--would tend to be reflected in the low level of inequality in the distribution of income.     

发达国家发展"绿色包装"的亮点

介绍了美国、德国、法国、英国、日本、瑞典等发达国家发展“绿色包装”的成功经验，以供我国发展绿色包装而借鉴。     

西方城市社区建设历程及其启示

社区建设最先出现于欧美。工业化和城市化改变了传统社会中那种亲密和谐及相互认同的人际关系 ,取而代之的是冷漠、孤独和无助以及部分贫困人口的出现。最早的社区建设针对于此提出了复兴社区 ,以解决工业化和城市化带来的一系列城市社会中的问题。早期的社区建设以“扶贫济困”为其要 ,及至 2 0世纪 80年代 ,随着发达国家居民生活水平的提高 ,社区建设才以培育区内居民自治自立自强之精神为其重。基于此 ,我国的社区建设亦应区分不同地区发展水平之差异 ,于发达地区侧重居民自治自立自强精神之培育 ,于落后地区“扶贫济困”则应位列社区工作之首位。     

The demand for housing in developing countries: The case of Korea

This paper presents the results of an analysis of urban housing demand for Korea taking into account the most recent findings of housing demand analysis concerning specification and aggregation biases. In order to obtain correctly specified demand functions, a procedure based on a model of the housing market originally proposed by Muth is used. Drawing on the detailed land information available in Korea, this procedure permits the calculation of an individual price per unit of housing services for each household. The results show conclusively that both the income and price elasticity of the demand for housing services in Korea are comparable to those found in the United States: the income elasticity is smaller than one and the price elasticity is negative and smaller than one in absolute value. Given the number of countries found within the per capita income range between Korea ($700) and the United States ($7800), the finding that these two countries have comparable demand elasticities is of major significance: in the absence of good national estimates, the order of magnitudes found here would be used for other country analyses.     

Corruption and distribution of public spending in developing countries

This paper empirically examines the impact of corruption on the structure of government spending by sector. Using the three-stage least squares method on 64 countries between 1996 and 2001, we show that public corruption distorts the structure of public spending by reducing the portion of social expenditure (education, health and social protection) and increasing the part dedicated to public services and order, fuel and energy, culture, and defense. However, civil and political rights seem to be a stronger determinant of expense on defense than corruption. Our results are robust to instrumentation by the latitude of the country.     

中国企业国际市场营销的战略选择

国际市场扩张已经成为中国企业发展的一个突出现象,在这个过程中,企业通常都会面临一些共性的战略问题,这些问题包括何时进入国际市场、进入哪些国际市场以及以何种方式进入国际市场,本文从消费者需求出发对这些问题进行了探讨。     

民营银行的市场定位和发展路径探析

文章认为,发展民营银行是中国银行业改革和市场经济发展的必然选择,民营银行的健康发展,首先必须端正民营银行的发展目的,其次要从我国金融业发展的实际出发准确地对转轨经济条件下民营银行进行市场定位,最后选择正确的发展路径。     

关于长江三峡总公司发展金融产业的战略思考

制定发展金融产业战略、实现战略管理 ,是长江三峡总公司的即定方针。文章基于对企业集团产融结合理论和对我国金融控股公司的认识和分析 ,对三峡总公司发展金融产业形成几点认识 :1 产业资本和金融资本有效结合 ,是大型企业集团发展的必然选择 ;2 发展多种形式的金融产业有利于总公司各种优势资源的综合利用 ;3 三峡工程建设和总公司的自身改革、改制工作是大力发展金融产业的前提条件