Households savings in the U.S.A.

In this paper we study the saving behaviour of U.S.A. households. We use micro data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey from 1982 to 1995. We employ synthetic cohort techniques to characterize the life cycle profile of saving rates and other variables of interest. In particular, we pay attention to the distinction between mandatory saving and discretionary saving. We then relate our evidence to the recent policy debate on saving incentives and their usefulness.     

Refinery mix in the U.S., Canada,and the E.E.C.

This paper examines the response of gasoline's share of a barrel of crude oil to changes in relative petroleum product prices. An inter-country comparison of the U.S., Canada, and the E.E.C. allows investigation of different parts of the production possibility frontier. In the U.S. and Canada, with relatively large amounts of cracking capacity, there is price responsiveness of the product mix to changes in relative product prices. In the U.S., both residual and distillates are substitutes in production for gasoline, but for Canada, only distillate is a substitute. Part of this difference is attributed to the U.S. oil quota. For the E.E.C. with relatively small amounts of cracking capacity there was no discernible effect of product prices on product mix.     

德国电信集团在T．I．M．E．S市场中

德国电信是欧洲最大的电信公司之一。公司在德国以内以及世界上另外若干个选定的国家里提供各种最现代化的产品与服务——从高速网络接入服务到移动因特网以及其他种种。德国电信认为信息社会正在形成一个需求深不可测的新的通信市场,并称之为T．I.M.E.S,即电信(T)、信息技术与因特网(I)、多媒体与移动商务(M)、娱乐与电子商务(E)、系统解决办法与安全服务(S)。     

C.E.S. production functions in the light of the Cambridge critique

The Cambridge debate of the 1960s showed conclusively that the aggregation of capital, so as to obtain a surrogate production function according to Samuelson, is not possible in general, with critical implications also for other variants of neoclassical theory. The framework for the demonstration is that of linear activity analysis.There is an individual wage curve in function of the rate of profit for each technique. If these individual wage curves were straight lines, their envelope would define a wage curve resulting from all techniques, from which a surrogate production function could be derived, but all wage curves are straight only, if there is only one industry. And if wage curves are not straight, phenomena such as reswitching show that essential neoclassical hypotheses need not hold. A recent empirical investigation by Han and Schefold has found one empirical example for reswitching and several for reverse capital deepening.A rigorous derivation of surrogate production functions thus is ruled out also on empirical grounds, but the paradoxes seem not to be as frequent as the critics once thought, so that the question arises whether approximate surrogate production functions could be derived, with individual wage curves which would be sufficiently linear to construct approximate surrogate production functions, indicating a relationship between the intensity of capital and output per head which would be sufficiently precise to work with.The paper is part of a wider investigation, in which conditions for the existence of quasi-linear wage curves and the possibility of the construction of approximate surrogate production functions are given. The emphasis here is on the special hypotheses needed to obtain C.E.S. production functions.     

美国的FTA战略与石油安全

在多边贸易体系不断受阻后,美国转向了FTA战略,并以FTA作为政策工具服务于国家整体战略.由于美国的石油储备有限,而且是世界第一大石油消费国,石油安全成为美国国家安全的重大问题.美国政府通过与主要石油供应国签署FTA或者BITs和TIFAs的形式,来达到或促进保障石油供应安全的目的.此外,美国通过与主要石油运输通道国家签署FTA,用其全球最大的消费市场作吸引,从而获得能源运输的安全.本文试图从美国石油安全和FTA战略实施的关系的角度进行分析,找出其内在的联系,为我国制定FTA战略和能源安全战略提供可以借鉴的经验.     

For the U.S.the Future Suddenly Feels Brighter

The battle to extend the Bush-era tax cuts was politically divisive, and the process agonizingly prolonged. Yet the decision to continue the cuts—and throw in a few others—is already producing     

Determinants of U.S. direct investment in the E.E.C.: Revisited

This paper expands upon an earlier work in this Review concerning the specification of a model to identify the determinants of U.S. direct foreign investment (DFI) in the E.E.C. Compared to earlier studies, a longer data series is used, an improved tariff discrimination proxy is employed, and ‘predicted sales’ are estimated and used as the output variable in the empirical work. A variable to capture the effect of the U.S. capital control programs is also included. The findings reaffirm the importance of market size, especially in the plant and equipment equations, as being an important determinant of DFI. Strong support was also found for the growth hypothesis. Consistent statistical support was found for the tariff discrimination hypothesis. In addition, the findings imply that a variable to capture the effects of fluctuating exchange rates should be included in future studies.     

Determinants of U.S. direct investment in the E.E.C.: Revisited again

This paper discusses the Scaperlanda-Balough comment on a previous study of mine that appeared in this Review. The Scaperlanda-Balough paper extends and improves upon my study by employing better variables to test the hypotheses. However, I offer a different interpretation of the empirical evidence they present concerning the efficacy of the U.S. controls on direct investment.     

Explaining the declining energy intensity of the U.S. economy

This paper reconciles conflicting explanations for the decline in U.S. energy intensity over the last 40 years of the 20th century. Decomposing changes in the energy–GDP ratio into shifts in the structure of sectoral composition and adjustments in the efficiency of energy use within individual industries reveals that while inter-industry structural change was the principal driver of the observed decline in aggregate energy intensity, intra-industry efficiency improvements played a more important role in the post-1980 period. Econometric results attribute this phenomenon to adjustments in quasi-fixed inputs—particularly vehicle stocks, and disembodied autonomous technological progress, and show that price-induced substitution of variable inputs generated transitory energy savings, while innovation induced by energy prices had only a minor impact.     

Understanding the U.S.-China Trade War

ABSTRACT

Three major concerns drove the U.S. into initiating the trade war, and they are (a) the concern that China’s chronically large trade surplus was depressing job creation in the U.S. (b) the concern that China was using illegal and unfair methods to acquire U.S. technology at an effectively discounted price; and (c) the concern that China seeks to weaken U.S. national security and its international standing. On the dispute over China’s exchange rate and trade imbalance, the first conclusion is that it was marked by analytical confusion over the meaning of the term ‘equilibrium exchange rate’. The second conclusion is that China’s trade imbalance reflects the economic conditions in both China and U.S., and that the efficient and fair solution of the problem requires policy changes in both countries. On the industrial policy dispute, the first conclusion is that the issue of forced technology transfer is largely a dispute about China using its market power to benefit itself at the expense of its trade partners. The second conclusion is that China’s use of market power can last only until the other large countries could unite and retaliate as a group. The inevitability of retaliation means that China should replace the joint-venture (JV) mechanism for technological diffusion with other ways to strengthen its technological capability. On the U.S. concern about whether China trade weakens its national security, the first conclusion is that the notion of national security that is commonly adopted in the U.S. trade policy debate is ignorant about the primary determinants of U.S. capability in innovation. By focusing instead mainly on how to hold down China technologically, the long-run outcome will be a technologically weaker U.S. and hence, a more vulnerable U.S. The second conclusion is that the U.S. must identify a clear, short list of critical technologies and critical infrastructure for the recently reformed Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to cover, and update this list constantly. Otherwise, the broad and changing nature of notions about national security would allow the bureaucratically driven phenomenon of mission-creep to steadily expand the coverage of the CFIUS process, thereby steadily rendering CFIUS to be operationally capricious. Our principal policy suggestion to China is that, because China’s economy in 2018 is very different from that in 1978 (e.g. many parts of China now look like Singapore and China is Africa’s biggest donor), there should be more reciprocity in China’s trade and investment relations with the advanced economies despite China’s status as a developing economy under WTO rules. Our principal policy suggestion to President Trump is to stop equating strategic competition with economic competition. Strategic competition is normally a zero-sum game. While fair economic competition is usually a zero-sum game in the short run, it generally creates a win-win outcome in the long run.