民营企业信用缺失的原因和对策

当前,大力发展民营经济已成为一种共识,但我国民营企业的信用状况却不容乐观,信用缺失不但已经成为民营企业发展的瓶颈,而且影响到整个市场经济的运行效率和秩序。民营企业的信用缺失既有外部环境的问题,也有内部管理的问题。为了更好地促进民营企业的信用建设,迫切需要从社会     

关于管理的断想

当今企业的竞争不是几个人才的竞争 ,而是企业整体人员素质的竞争。企业合理的人才结构包括 :一致的品格结构 ;梯形的年龄结构 ;叠加的知识结构 ;互补的能力结构 ;协调的气质结构。     

会计委派制并非解决会计信息失真问题的有效良策

任何新生事物都离不开利弊分析 ,电子商务也不例外 ,正是从这个逻辑出发 ,本文提出了一种电子商务分析模型 ,它是很多经验的总结 ,运用它可便于从整体上把握电子商务的利弊。并且很多现实中的问题和看法可由本模型来解释。     

DSS在企业中的开发与应用构想

本文运用系统工程原理与方法 ,通过分析企业现实系统 ,阐述了建立 DSS的必要性 ,针对我国的实际情况 ,提出了企业 DSS设计的目标 ,构造出一个具有实用价值的企业 DSS结构框架     

入世后我国纺织品出口的制约因素分析

近几年来 ,社会上的一些单位和个人冒用、盗用高校名义从事商业活动 ,使高校名称权受到侵害。无形资产蒙受损失。而现阶段高校名称权保护的法律规范过于零散、粗疏 ,可操作性不强。为此 ,必须加强对高校名称权的立法保护 ,加大对高校名称权保护的执法力度 ,在高校内部建立健全     

农业产业化博弈中的政府:引导抑或误导

农业产业结构的调整,以及相应的农业产业化,主要靠政府“引导”或“主导”,还是靠农民自发进行,是经济转轨时期的重要问题。不少学者认为,为帮助农民,政府必须加以“引导”甚至“主导”(实际上这种思路在基层的政策实践中也非常流行)。但实践证明,政府“引导”往往不仅难以发     

企业竞争力的要素和原因研究

本文从前提、基础、核心和保障四个方面阐述了企业竞争力的构成要素,认为企业竞争力涵盖敏锐洞悉环境的能力,有效设计制度的能力,快速、持续学习的能力,优化企业形象的能力,并由这四者融合为一体,表现为厚积薄发。     

运用投资拉动 促进产业结构升级

本文揭示了我国当前地方税规模并非过小而且不宜扩大 ;同时进一步分析了造成当前地方收入入不敷出的原因 ,论证了当前不宜将地方税收立法权下放 ,并提出了政府精简机构、规范开支的对策。     

网络银行的动因分析

网络银行受到多方面需求的拉动,诸如出于降低经营成本、实施差异化营销、应付多元化竞争的需要,使网络银行应运而生。在我国加入WTO后,网络银行会成为外资银行进入中国金融市场的突破口。对我们来说,加速发展网络银行,意义重大。     

财务管理在电子商务时代的变化与发展

电子商务的普及使现有财务管理的对象、筹资管理、投资管理、资金分配、财务分析、财务目标等受到重大影响,发生了诸多变化,要求现有的财务管理理论和实践操作方法应有所改进和发展。     

Credit Access,the Costs of Credit and Credit Market Discrimination

Since the early 1990s, credit expanded relative to income, especially after 2001. It is hypothesized that traditionally uneven credit access and gaps in the costs of credit by demographic characteristics shrank during this period. Relying on data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance, this study looks at financial constraints, the costs of credit and a number of contributions to the costs of credit, including sources and types of loans. The results indicate that taste-based discrimination and structural discrimination may have persisted and possibly increased over time. Gaps in credit access and costs of credit have widened by race, remained high by income, but shrank by ethnicity. Part of the overall differences in credit access was a varying reliance on professional information when making decisions on debt.

Can the HOSS framework help shed light on the simultaneous growth of inequality and informalization in developing countries?

Using simple, modified versions of the factor proportions framework, and focusing on structural features within developing economies, this paper attempts to reconcile puzzling developments observed in many post-reform, post-liberalization countries whereby increasing income inequality has emerged side-by-side with informalization of the economy. Measures undertaken to enhance public sector efficiency and attract investment in an import-intensive export sector may increase rental–wage and skilled–unskilled wage gaps, contra the predictions of the simple Heckscher–Ohlin–Stolper–Samuelson (HOSS) framework regarding skill- and capital-scarce countries. The common thread generating our interesting results is the presence of sectors that are even more labor-intensive than those producing traded goods.

Trade Costs,Trade Balances and Current Accounts: An Application of Gravity to Multilateral Trade

In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 7777:339–390, 2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Our approach has a number of novel features. First, we focus on the interrelationship between trade costs, the trade account and the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Second, we use the gravity model to estimate the effect of trade costs on bilateral trade and, third, we show how bilateral trade can be used to draw inferences about desired trade balances and desired intertemporal trade. Our econometric results provide strong support for the Obstfeld and Rogoff hypothesis and we are also able to reconcile our results with the so-called home bias puzzle.

Assessing the Competitiveness of International Financial Services in Particular Locations: A Survey of Methods and Perspectives

The International Financial Services (IFS) industry is restructuring internally and by location. This paper outlines the economic forces and analytical methods that may be applied to examine the economic drivers of these processes as ever more cities, particularly in East Asia, are vying to attract IFS providers and their clients. The ICT revolution has made those IFS that can be commoditized footloose in search of cost efficiency. High value-added financial services, however, will continue to be developed and coordinated in a few major IFS centers that have invested in, or capitalized on, regional or global advantages for themselves and their clients. The resulting pattern of functional fragmentation and geographic dispersal may facilitate analyses of the competitiveness of different lines of the financial services business in a particular location by methods such as Data Envelopment and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. These forms of comparative efficiency analysis have recently been questioned and their results reinterpreted.

The takeover and selection effects of foreign-owned establishments: an analysis using linked employer–employee data

We provide the first estimates of the effect of foreign ownership on wages in Germany, controlling for the observed and unobserved characteristics of workers and plants. We also test whether the wage gains from joining a foreign-owned firm are subsequently lost when leaving that firm, and we examine whether wage gains vary across the sample. We find large selection effects in terms of worker and plant components of wages. Once the selection effect is taken into account, the takeover effect is small and in some cases insignificantly different from zero.

Are Environmental Social Movements Socially Exclusive? An Historical Study from Thailand

Environmental social movements in developing countries are often portrayed as democratizing but may contain important social divisions. This paper presents a new methodology to analyze the social composition and underlying political messages of movements. Nearly 5 000 newspaper reports during 1968–2000 in Thailand are analyzed to indicate the participation of middle and lower classes, and their association with “green” (conservationist) and “red-green” (livelihoods-oriented) environmental values. Results show middle-class “green” activism has dominated forests activism, but lower-class “red-green” activism has grown for forests and pollution. Newspapers, however, portray all environmentalism as “democratization,” suggesting that the possible exclusiveness of some environmental norms is unacknowledged.     

The Negligence Rule in the Presence of Judicial Corruption and Social Norms

This paper investigates the phenomenon of judicial corruption and incorporates it into Polinsky, A. M. (1980). Strict liability vs. negligence in a market setting. American Economic Review, 70, 363–367 framework so as to analyze the efficiency of the negligence rule. By shedding light on the role of social norms in regard to the phenomenon of judicial corruption, this analysis provides implications for policy. First, more prevalent corruption at the status quo tends to intensify the extent of the corruption itself and, as a result, the effectiveness of the government’s corruption enforcement is greatly lessened. This implies that an excessively lenient policy of corruption may result in an uncontrollable consequence; once corruption becomes rampant, it is costly to bring it down. Of great importance, in the presence of such a corruption effect, the social optimum cannot be achieved based on the negligence rule and the equivalence between the strict liability and negligence rule fails. Secondly, the attitude of the society toward a corrupt judge plays a crucial role in governing the effectiveness of an efficient wage arrangement. If the society can fully accept a corrupt judge, corruption will never be controlled even with the incentive wage scheme.

On the bilateral trade effects of free trade agreements between the EU-15 and the CEEC-4 countries

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC-4, i.e. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania) and model their effects on trade flows by treating the agreement variable as endogenous. Our theoretical framework is the gravity model, and the econometric method used to isolate and eliminate the potential endogeneity bias of the agreement variable is the fixed effect vector decomposition (FEVD) technique. Our estimation results indicate a positive and significant impact of FTAs on trade flows. This finding is robust to the inclusion in the sample of a group of control countries (specifically Belarus, the Russian Federation and the Ukraine) that did not sign an FTA. Besides, we show that trade growth after the FTA agreement with the EU was signed exceeded trade growth of the control group of countries, which did not become members.

A search for leading sectors over the business cycle: The case of Korea

This paper studies the sectoral mechanism of shock propagation in business cycles by performing a case study. After we transform business survey indices of different industries into comparable metrics, we trace and compare them before and after reference dates. From these observations, we show that manufacturing industry leads the peak and the trough of the most recent business cycle in Korea; and six sectors are major players in manufacturing industry, i.e. ‘food products and beverages,’ ‘chemicals,’ ‘machinery,’ ‘motor vehicles, etc.,’ and ‘basic metals,’ and ‘fabricated metals.’ In conclusion, the heavy and chemical sectors may be the key to understanding recent business cycles in Korea.     

Foreign Direct Investment in the Enlarged EU: Do Taxes Matter and to What Extent?

Foreign direct investment is of increasing importance in the European Union. This paper estimates the effect of taxes on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows and on three sub-components of these flows for the countries of the enlarged European Union. The model in the spirit of gravity equations robustly explains FDI flows between the 25 member states. Sample selection needs to be addressed in the estimation. We show that the different subcomponents of FDI should and indeed do react differently to taxes. After controlling for unobserved country characteristics and common time effects, the top statutory corporate tax rate of both, source and host country, turn insignificant for total FDI and investment into equity. However, high source country taxes clearly increase the probability of firms to re-invest profits abroad and lower the percentage of debt financed FDI. This might reflect profit re-allocation to avoid taxes. Market size factors have the expected signs.