电价改革的思考

价格改革是电力市场化改革的核心。伴随电力工业体制改革和电力市场的发展,现行电价政策、制定电价的方法等已越来越不适应新形势的要求,暴露出了诸多弊端,在一定程度上已阻碍了电力工业的健康发展。如何进行电价改革是大家关注的问题。     

我国国有商业银行改革的关键:产权制度改革

随着我国国有银行改革逐步深入,在很大程度上增强了进入市场参与竞争的能力和条件,市场化倾向的经营运行机制也开始逐步确立,但仍然与我国国有商业银行改革目标有较大的差距,国有商业银行不仅未能摆脱低效率,反而步入高风险的困境。本文从我国国有商业银行单一产权和产权不清等现状出发,借鉴国外商业银行产权制度的改造经验,指出中国国有商业银行改革的首要问题和核心问题是进行产权制度改革,进行股份制改造是当务之急。     

加快国有企业改革 急需在产权问题上解放思想

产权是所有制的核心和主要内容,只有触及产权的改革,才是真正意义上的改革。要加快国有企业改革,就必须在推进以产权制度改革为核心的国有企业改革上进一步解放思想。     

印度经济改革的核心：经济增长与社会公平

印度独立以后的历届政府在关于如何发展国民经济的问题上进行了长时间的艰苦探索,直到20世纪90年代的拉奥时期才终于找到了一条符合印度国情的道路。印度经济改革的核心就是处理经济增长与社会公平的问题。实践证明,以经济增长为中心,适当兼顾社会公平的经济改革才是符合印度现实国情的有效的改革。社会公平只能在经济稳步增长的基础上实现。     

国有银行上市的六大争议问题

随着金融改革的不断深化,国有商业银行所深藏的许多矛盾和问题却始终没有得到解决。究其原因就在于我国国有商业银行改革还未触及问题的实质——产权改革。而产权则是现代企业制度的核心,如果不能从产权入手对国有商业银行进行改革,真正意义上的商业银行就无法形成。因此,进行产权改革就成了今后我国国有商业银行进行改革的重点。对国有商业银行进行产权改革,就是解决国有商业     

多科性大学金融学专业《公司金融》课程探讨

中国高等学校改革与发展的指导思想主要体现在:体制改革是关键,教学改革是核心,教育思想和观念改革是先导.金融作为现代经济的核心,其相应的金融学科建设和课程改革日益为财经类大学和多科性院校所重视.本文就金融学科的核心课程"公司金融"建设问题进行一些有益的探讨.     

关于中国国有商业银行产权制度创新的思考

产权制度是现代企业制度的核心,也是现代商业银行制度的核心。改革开放以来,我国在国有银行的改革上虽然做了一些工作,但是这些改革没有触及银行制度的核心——产权制度。而西方商业银行的股份结构不断向产权主体多元化、股权分散化等趋势发展,使产权的运行更加有效。因此,国有商业银行产权制度的创新已成为我国迫切需要解决的问题。     

所有制:经济改革的困难与出路

<正> 所有制改革是经济改革中最困难的问题。只有在所有制改革上寻求突破,才是经济改革的唯一出路。一、所有制改革的必要性和迫切性我国经济改革从一开始就伴随着两条思路的激烈争论。一条思路认为,经济改革的核心是所有制。另一条思路则认为,经济改革可以绕开所有制问题。     

关于住房分配货币化的几点思考

中国正在进行一场深刻的，市场化的住房制度改革，这场改革将在很大程度上改变我国的政治，经济，社会乃至文化面貌，公民将在生存，就业以及社会人际关系诸多方面得到更大的选择自由。住房制度改革思路的核心是加快推进住房的商品和住房分配和货币化，而住房分配货币化是住房制度改革的重中之重。为此，必须克服改革中利益重新分配的不公问题。     

我国电信业从垄断到竞争的绩效分析及思考

改革开放以来,我国电信业进行了以打破垄断,引入竞争,政企分开为核心的改革,其改革措施表现在市场结构、政府管制、服务质量等方面,使电信市场充满了竞争活力。本文对电信业改革后有效竞争格局及存在的问题进行分析．对进一步改革的思路和完善竞争结构提出对策建议。     

The Washington consensus works: Causal effects of reform, 1970-2015

Traditional policy reforms of the type embodied in the Washington Consensus have been out of academic fashion for decades. However, we are not aware of a paper that convincingly rejects the efficacy of these reforms. In this paper, we define generalized reform as a discrete, sustained jump in an index of economic freedom, whose components map well onto the points of the old consensus. We identify 49 cases of generalized reform in our dataset that spans 141 countries from 1970 to 2015. The average treatment effect associated with these reforms is positive, sizeable, and significant over 5- and 10- year windows. The result is robust to different thresholds for defining reform and different estimation methods. We argue that the policy reform baby was prematurely thrown out with the neoliberal bathwater.     

Unemployment,institutions, and interdependencies: identifying successful reforms

Labor market reforms, which reduce institutional rigidities, are assumed to be a well-suited approach to lower unemployment. However, it is still not perfectly clear which reforms actually lead to a fall in unemployment. One crucial issue is that reforms do not work in isolation, but have labor market effects which depend on other institutional factors. Such institutional interactions have rarely been considered in empirical macroeconomic studies in a systematic way, mainly due to model uncertainty. As a solution to this problem, a Bayesian model averaging approach is adopted in this paper to identify robust and significant institutional interactions for unemployment. Using a panel data-set for 17 OECD countries from 1982 to 2005, five robust and significant interaction terms are identified, and country-specific reform effects for the institutional indicators are derived.     

Do the French pension reforms increase re-employment of older unemployed workers?

ABSTRACT

The sustainability of Social Security financing has pushed authorities to reform their policy to increase the labour market participation of older workers. While most of the studies have focused on the consequences of pension reform on retirement decisions, we analyse the effects of two French pension reforms, which increased the period of contribution and the minimum retirement age, on transitions out of unemployment and into employment with a difference-in-differences approach. We find that both retirement reforms have positive effects on the re-employment of older unemployed workers. The pension reforms are also accompanied by an increase of the transitions into inactivity. The results suggest that the reforms have delivered significant effects by reducing the unemployment of older workers.     

Intergenerational policy and the measurement of tax incidence

We evaluate the ability of generational accounting to assess the potential welfare implications of policy reforms. In an intergenerational context policy reforms usually have redistributive, efficiency, and general equilibrium implications. Our analysis shows that when the policy reform implies changes in economic efficiency, generational accounts can be misleading not only about the magnitude of welfare changes, but also about the identity of who wins and who losses. In contrast, the generational accounts correctly identify welfare changes when the policy reform has only a pure intergenerational redistribution component. We illustrate and quantify this issue in the context of widely considered policy reforms (substitution of consumption for labor taxation, and the increase of retirement age) and in a more general context of optimal policy.     

Do rapid political and trade liberalizations increase corruption?

Corruption scandals seem to abound in countries that have undergone reform. However, there has been no study of whether different combinations of reforms cause an increase in corruption. Theory provides some guidance as to the direction of causality—on the one hand, reforms make politicians accountable to voters as well as introducing more competition, which should decrease corruption. On the other hand, reforms may not be credible, which provides for an incentive for corruption. This paper uses the numerous cases of political and economic liberalizations that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s to examine this issue. The findings are that undertaking both types of reforms in rapid succession leads to a decrease in corruption, while countries that liberalized more than 5 years after democratizing experienced an increase in corruption.     

Is there a “reform fatigue” in the euro area?

The absence of monetary policy within a currency union increases the need for structural reforms that make the participating economies more flexible. However, the absence of exchange rate risk with respect to the other members of the union may reduce the urgency for such reforms. A number of other considerations also suggest that theory is ambiguous about the impact of participating in a currency union on progress in structural reforms. This paper addresses this issue empirically for the euro area. The results suggest that reforms in the euro area seem to have decelerated following the introduction of the euro, but from a fast pace. The paper discusses a number of possible explanations, including “reform fatigue,” the absence of “market punishment,” and “good-times” complacency. Estimates from an empirical growth model suggest that the slowing of reforms may slow down annual output growth by up to 0.2%. However, the results are preliminary and depend on the area of reform considered. Furthermore, the reform dynamics may change with the euro area starting slowing at the end of 2007.     

Reforms and confidence

We examine the choice of economic reforms when policymakers have present-biased preferences and can choose to discard information (maintain confidence) to mitigate distortions from excess discounting. The decisions of policymakers and firms are shown to be interdependent. Confident policymakers carry out welfare-improving reforms more often, which increases the probability that firms will invest in restructuring. While policymakers in different countries can be equally irrational, the consequences of bounded rationality are less severe in economies with beneficial initial conditions. We also examine how present-biased preferences influence the choice between big bang versus gradualist reform strategies. Our findings help explain differences in economic reform success in various countries.     

Blame-game politics in a coalition government

Delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics. This paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision-making process, nor politicians' preferences for a reform. We show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption (thus delaying it until after the next election) and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non-adoption. We refer to this strategy as blame-game politics. We then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame-game. One is to make an issue salient in the next election. A second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate, which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue. A third reason is to enhance ‘bargaining power’ during the formation of the next government.     

Steepest ascent tariff reform

The policy reform literature is primarily concerned with the construction of reforms that yield welfare gains. By contrast, this paper’s contribution is to develop a theoretical concept for which the focus is upon the sizes of welfare gains accruing from policy reforms rather than upon their signs. In undertaking this task, and by focusing on tariff reforms, we introduce the concept of a steepest ascent policy reform, which is a locally optimal reform in the sense that it achieves the highest marginal gain in utility of any feasible local reform. We argue that this reform presents itself as a natural benchmark for the evaluation of the welfare effectiveness of other popular tariff reforms such as the proportional tariff reduction and the concertina rules, since it provides the maximal welfare gain of all possible local reforms. We derive properties of the steepest ascent tariff reform, construct an index to measure the relative welfare effectiveness of any given tariff reform, determine conditions under which proportional and concertina reforms are locally optimal and provide illustrative examples.     

Labour-incentive reforms at preretirement age in Austria

Low participation rates of older workers in the labour market threaten the sustainability of the pension system in Austria. Given the current political debate on this issue, we try to shed light on employment and retirement behaviour of Austrian couples when income support is provided and pension benefits are reduced. Using a sample of married couples with both partners aged 50–65, we find that the proposed reform increases the labour supply of middle-income men whereas the effects on women are weaker. However, somehow surprisingly, we find that these reforms have an increasing effect on unemployment/inactivity probabilities which in turn is outweighed by a decreasing effect on the retirement probabilities in case of women. These findings emphasize the importance of a joint consideration of labour supply and retirement behaviour of married couples when introducing pension reforms and tax-benefit policies.