Producer price adjustment to commodity price shocks: An application of threshold cointegration

During the 1980s and 1990s, most developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America implemented structural adjustment reforms, which included the liberalization of export crop markets and the abolition of marketing boards. The emergence of new marketing systems may have altered price transmission mechanisms, especially if collusion behaviors have appeared among domestic stakeholders along the marketing chain. I use threshold cointegration tools to analyze the dynamics of world price transmission to coffee growers in three deregulated markets. The methods I use allow me to test the presence of a threshold in both the cointegrating relationship and its corresponding error correction model. Over the pre-reform period, I detect asymmetric price adjustments that appear favorable to producers - deviations from the long-run equilibrium resulting from largest increases in world prices being eliminated relatively quickly - and disappear in the post-reform period. On the contrary over the post-reform period, the results suggest that largest decreases in world prices may be transmitted relatively quickly to growers. These results can be seen as expressions of a favorable pricing policy over the pre-reform period and an unfavorable influence of new private agents over the post-reform period, meaning that in some cases reforms may have failed to create competitive market structures.     

Heterogeneous producers facing common shocks: An overlapping-generations example

An analytically tractable model of a competitive, full-information economy is provided in which, for some parameter values, entry and exit over the course of the business cycle is concentrated among small firms. This model is intended to make the logical point that the relatively high sensitivity of small firms to business-cycle fluctuations does not necessarily indicate the presence of informational or incentive constraints in financial markets.     

An introduction to the Millennium Project

The pace, complexity, and globalization of change requires attention to the future. The change of millennia — the coming of the year 2001 — provides an opportunity, a psychological focus, for a global review of past achievements and problems and a unique chance to assess and reflect on future issues and opportunities.Unfortunately, there is as yet no mechanism or information utility to support a worldwide effort to study past achievements and problems or future issues and opportunities. Although there are many individual, isolated, special purpose, and one-time study efforts underway, there is no international system that can provide coherence or continuity to these studies, including feedback and sharing of information, and, in particular, the systematic exploration of future possibilities and policy alternatives. With growing interest in the future, the spread of instantaneous and global communications, the advent of powerful new nondeterministic modeling techniques, the ability to evoke, capture, and share information and perceptions with systematic questioning techniques and software, the proliferation of data bases, and knowledge visualization, it is now possible for futurists, scholars and others around the world to interact globally and take a fresh look at the future possibilities and policies in ways not previously possible.As the World Bank provides an ongoing system for research and feedback to improve economic policy, so too the United Nations University could provide an ongoing system for the improvement of futures research and its application to the policy process. According to a series of interviews, questionnaires, and meetings with leading futurists and scholars around the world, the proposed “Millenium Project” has the potential to become such a system.This study had as its principal objective determining the design of an information system that could effectively tap contributors, worldwide, to focus on lessons of the past that bear on world issues and the potential of future developments for intensifying or mitigating these and future issues. The first phase of the feasibility study was both methodological and substantive. Worldwide panels of experts contributed their judgments about the method or process of organizing the project; and the system that emerged from this interaction was applied in a prototype study to the issues of growing world population and the environment.During the first phase of the feasibility study, we found that:

1. 1. The Millennium Project is feasible and likely to be helpful to many institutions in examining and resolving policy issues at several levels. An overview of the project design and objectives appears in Section 2 of this article.

2. 2. Organizations that have an issues scanning function, or have a mandate to keep abreast of a broad range of futures thinking, have a need for access to a non-political, scholarly, and international system of future studies. Such organizations have requested continued participation in the second and third phase of this feasibility study, as well as establishing formal relations with the full Millennium Project.

3. 3. While several questions remain, the design features of a system to collect judgments using the Delphi process that were suggested by the international panel (outlined elsewhere in this report) form a straight forward operational system. Among the remaining questions are the design and use of international information systems and data bases, integration with quantitative techniques such as system modeling, the requirements for special study teams, and institutionalization and financial support. The design of the operational system is described in detail in Section 3 of this report.

4. 4. Cost estimates have been made for establishing international panels and collecting and analyzing information they provide using the Delphi process. Several assumptions are required. If a maximum of four topics are addressed in a particular year, each of the four panels consists of 150–200 people, the staff is kept to a base of three people with an additional 1.5 per panel, and advisors are paid an honorarium of $1.500, then the cost of this element of the full scale Project is likely to be approximately $900,000 per year. While communications modes are important in terms of timing and information access, the costs of communications are the smallest of the Project's cost elements. Detail of our cost estimates appear in Section 7 of this report.

This is not the final feasibility study report, but only a report on part of Phase I. As such, it contains our initial findings about how the Project might be organized. We welcome comments from the reader. Please consider this as work in progress.     

An introduction to evolutionary theories in economics

This paper presents the basic ideas and methodologies of a set of contemporary contributions which are grouped under the general heading of evolutionary economics. Some achievements-especially with regard to the analysis of technological change and economic dynamics-are illustrated, some unresolved issues are discussed and a few promising topics of research are flagged.This article draws on a chapter prepared for the book Market and Organization: The Competitive Firm and its Environment, edited within an EEC/Tempus Programme by LATAPSES, Nice, France, and Iside, Rome.     

An introduction to the symposium on behavioral game theory

This article introduces the articles contained in the symposium on behavioral game theory. I break economic experiments studying game theory into three broad classes: (1) experiments studying and possibly modifying the assumptions that serve as foundations for game theory; (2) experiments that perform economic engineering, testing existing institutions with the aim of designing better ones; and (3) experiments designed to test theories which apply game theory to fields such as industrial organization.      

ECC合同中的风险分摊程序

国际工程承包是一项风险较大的事业,无论是工程项目的业主或是承包商均会面临一系列的风险,都必须正视风险并对风险作出决策。为了保证项目的顺利实施,为了达到项目的目标,工程项目业主和承包商均希望实施工程项目的合同条款中尽可能地合理分摊风险,以便业主或承包商采取相应的措施来防范风险或转移风险。英国土木工程学会1995年11月出版的工程施工合同（Engineer-ingandConstructionContract,简称ECC合同）对工程实施中的风险在业主与承包商之间进行了合理的分摊,使得合同双方明确了自身可能会面临的风险,以便采取措施规避风险…     

商业伙伴方案:联合国工发组织新模式

创新能力是参与全球市场竞争的企业能够获得成功的原因之一,竞争优势依赖于新产品和新工艺、优化组合相关业务以及开发新市场。跨国公司通常是创新的主导者。在全球化经济中,中小企业能否成为对大公司具有吸引力的合作伙伴是十分关键的问题。如果中小企业融入全球价值链,就可以     

Financial systems and the cost channel transmission of monetary policy shocks

We study the role of financial systems for the cost channel transmission of monetary policy in a calibrated business cycle model. We characterize financial systems by the share of bank-dependent firms and by the degree of the pass-through from policy to bank lending rates, for which we provide empirical estimates for the euro area and the US. For plausible calibrations of the dynamics of the lending rate we find that the cost effects directly related to interest rate movements have only a limited effect on the transmission mechanism.     

Disaggregated approach to government spending shocks: a theoretical analysis

We calibrate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model that features a transmission mechanism with different types of government spending, while the literature usually treats government spending as a homogenous compound. In this regard, we manage to distinguish between different types of government spending (namely: government investment, government wage component consumption and non-wage component consumption) where each type of spending has a varied role in the economy. The government wage increase has the largest positive effect both on private consumption and output by affecting the economy through the government production. This is a natural consequence of government production being complementary to private consumption in our model. Other two government spending types, namely government non-wage consumption and government investment, also have positive effects on output, whereas their responses on (private) consumption are mostly negative. These results provide an alternative explanation for the wide range of multipliers existing in the literature as our setup enables them to produce different effects on macroeconomic variables.     

Applying the Technology Acceptance Model to the introduction of healthcare information systems

With the rapid development of information systems and advances in healthcare technology paired with current concerns arise over patients' safety and how to cure them efficiently, the healthcare information systems are attracting the attention of more and more people. The purpose of this study is to propose a conceptual model, appropriate for the intention to use healthcare information systems, by adopting the system, service, and information qualities covered in the Information System Success Model proposed by DeLone and Mclean [1] as the external variables and integrating the three dimensions of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and intention to use — referred to in Venkatesh and Davis' updated Technology Acceptance Model, TAM [2]. This study first analyzes relevant researches on the intention to use such systems as the basis for the questionnaire design, then conducts questionnaire survey among district hospital nurses, head directors, and other related personnel. After the questionnaires are collected, SEM is used to analyze the data. The analysis shows that the proposed factors positively influence users' intention to use a healthcare system. Information, service and system quality influence user's intention through the mediating constructs, perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use. Managerial implications are provided accordingly. Suggestions for introducing healthcare information system are then provided as well.     

An introduction to nanotechnology policy: Opportunities and constraints for emerging and established economies

Nanotechnology has captured wide attention all over the world and excited the imagination of young and old alike. Interest in the subject has increased remarkably during the last few years because of potential technological applications, and commercial interest has skyrocketed. The promise of nanotechnology as an economic engine that can redefine the wellbeing of regions and nations is pervasive; yet the imprecise language, and overuse of the term nanotechnology, has made that term fuzzier, broader, and trendier than many imagined possible. This is especially evident in nanotechnology market projections, which rose dramatically over the past five years as more traditional “product families” were engulfed by the expanding use of the term. Government policy regarding nanotechnology has often resembled an embrace of imagination rather than a systematic use of what Sun Tzu and others have taught about strategic decision making. Further, if nanotechnology is truly the next wave of technology product paradigms, how will we provide an educated workforce to support it? Moreover, in company with these societal benefits come increased societal risks. This paper is intended to provide policy makers and strategists with observations that might limit actions such as those that led to the “over-hype” of nanotechnology and to the fear (or discounting) of societal risks. In the latter case we might learn from the experiences of policy makers connected with other emerging enabling-technology bases, such as nuclear energy and, to a lesser extent, the “dot-com” boom.     

Fundamentals versus external shocks: Brazil's growing exposure to currency crises

While financial globalization does not lack theoretical economic merit, the more far-reaching practical consequences of this phenomenon are often not fully appreciated from the vantage point of North America or the European Union. In particular, globalization can make it more difficult for emerging economies to achieve macroeconomic stabilization. This is especially true if the countries in question have chosen the vehicle of pegged exchange rates as an important element of domestic anti-inflation policy. The chief macroeconomic difficulties for emerging economies in a world of volatile capital flows can include a loss of monetary control, a real appreciation of the domestic currency, and a worsening of economic fundamentals leading to damaging currency crises. This paper concentrates on the recent experience of Brazil as illustrative of the abject plight faced by many developing countries attempting to secure economic stabilization against the background of the present globalized international economy.This paper has benefitted from discussion with participants of the Forty-Sixth International Atlantic Economic Conference, Boston, MA, October 8–11, 1998.     

几内亚的市场状况及前景

几内亚属热带海洋性气候,自然资源极其丰富,是一个很有发展潜力的西非沿海国家。目前政局稳定,国际金融组织和西方国家恢复对几内亚的经济援助,经济有所增长,承包工程市场发展很活跃,前景看好。政局尚稳风险犹存1996年2月几内亚发生未遂军事政变后,总统孔戴一直牢牢掌控     

中国新反倾销法介评

中国已经在2001年12月11日正式成为世贸组织的成员国。为了适应入世的需要,2001年10月31日国务院第46次会议通过了《中华人民共和国反倾销条例》,并于2002年1月1日起施行,取代了1997年3月25日国务院发布的《中华人民共和国反倾销和反补贴条例》（以下简称1997年《条例》）中关于反倾销的规定。《反倾销条例》一共有6章59条,它以1997年《条例》为基础,遵循国际惯例并结合我国国情,针对反倾销的实体及程序问题作了较为详细的规定,无疑是我国对外贸易立法上的又一重大成果。实体规定一、倾销的确定倾销是指在正常贸易过程中进口产品以低…