Paradox of plenty: Norway’s macroeconomic policy dilemmas during the oil price crash, 2014-15

Norway, a country at the top of global rankings in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and human development was also in an enviable position with large current account and fiscal surpluses, as well as a massive stock of public assets. Then came a shock; between June 2014 and early 2016 oil prices tumbled by more than 70 percent. As a major oil exporter, Norway’s current account was severely impacted but could this actually draw Norway into a macroeconomic crisis? Couldn’t it just fund its way out of the contractionary pressures building up in the economy using its stock of foreign currency reserves being held in a sovereign wealth fund? This article explores the fiscal and monetary policy challenges that Norway faced in preempting falling GDP growth and rising unemployment while at the same time, warding off a housing bubble going bust.     

The impact from changes in stock market valuations on investment: new economy versus old economy

This paper investigates whether there is a different impact from changes in ‘new’ and ‘old’ economy stock valuations on private investment for seven OECD economies. A vector autoregressive model is estimated for each individual country, using quarterly data over the period 1990–2000. It is found that the impact from changes in valuations of new economy stocks to investment is roughly the same in North America and in the United Kingdom as in continental Europe. By contrast, the impact from changes in old economy stock valuations on investment is, in general, larger in North America and in the United Kingdom than in continental Europe. Finally, the results suggest that in continental Europe the impact on investment from changes in the valuation of new economy stocks is bigger than for old economy stocks, whereas for North America and the United Kingdom, the impact is more similar.     

Economic impact assessment of mega infrastructure pipeline projects

The economic development features for the decades after the Second World War provide evidence that investments to new infrastructures are a key driver in strengthening the national economy and enhancing nation’s productivity, as it creates economic benefits and additional income. However, the decision for fund allocation and investments in mega infrastructure pipeline projects often must be made in conditions that are much more fraught with uncertainty. The key question in such decisions is if the economic impact caused by the new project could be able to essentially boost the economy by creating new jobs and generating new income on one hand; and which are the business sectors expected to archive the benefits of this investment. This article deals with the estimation of the mega infrastructure pipeline project economic effects in economy. The methodological framework is based on input–output approach providing quantitative estimations about the economic impact of the project in terms of new income and jobs. The numerical application deals with the assessment of a cross-border crude oil pipeline project, connecting the ports of Burgas (Bulgaria) and Alexandroupolis (Greece), establishing a new transportation corridor for the crude oil from Black Sea to Southeast Mediterranean.     

The Elephant In The Ground: Managing Oil And Sovereign Wealth

One of the most important developments in international finance and resource economics in the past twenty years is the rapid and widespread emergence of the $6 trillion sovereign wealth fund industry. Oil exporters typically ignore below-ground assets when allocating these funds, and ignore above-ground assets when extracting oil. We present a unified stylized framework for considering both. Subsoil oil should alter a fund’s portfolio through additional leverage and hedging. First-best spending should be a share of total wealth, and any unhedgeable volatility must be managed by precautionary savings. If oil prices are pro-cyclical, oil should be extracted faster than the Hotelling rule to generate a risk premium on oil wealth. Finally, we discuss how our analysis could improve the management of Norway’s fund in practice.     

广东省潜在GDP增长率测算及预测

就广东省潜在GDP增长率进行了测算,使用HP滤波法和生产函数法得到的结果分别为9.1%和8.4%,从生产函数法的计算过程中,认为广东在1978—2012年的经济具有规模报酬不变的特征,并就当前情况作了分析。在对未来预测上,考虑到生产函数的各要素间可能存在相互关系而使用向量自回归进行。并以本轮金融危机的延续时间为变量,分别测算不同情况下未来五年和十年的平均增长率。     

Domestic Labor Markets and Foreign Direct Investment*

We study how the labor market and industry uncertainty affect the investment decisions of multinational enterprises (MNEs). In an uncertain business climate, MNEs must take account of the future in deciding where to locate a branch plant. When wages are endogenously determined, both the opportunity cost of labor and redundancy payments influence the MNE’s decision. When countries compete for foreign investment, different national characteristics determine the winners in different industries. Differences in risk may draw MNEs to different locations. Firm‐specific bargaining always offers an advantage, as the mix of current and future pay fully reflects the firm’s risk profile.     

基于竞争态模型的中国FDI引进格局分析与战略选择

将竞争态模型引入FDI研究,并以2000--2009年中国外资利用情况进行实证。结果显示：①竞争态是分析外资引进变化趋势和特征的有效方法,能深人把握外资引进目标地的时空结构特征,有利于政府决策;②长期以来,中国外资引进竞争态格局结构基本健全,类型分布虽不理想但日趋合理,外资引进重心稳定于亚太地区和美国等;③未来中国外资引进目标地分为三级,第一级定位于亚太地区的香港、韩国、日本、新加坡、台湾和俄罗斯等,应将收获性和开拓性战略并举;第二级定位于美国和加拿大等发达北美洲国家,应实施扩张性战略;第三级定位于英、法、德、意、瑞士、瑞典、丹麦和荷兰等欧洲发达国家,应实施选择性战略;关于非洲国家外资引入,除政治因素外应采取撤退性战略。     

自然灾害、巨灾保险与政府主导

近年来,中国各地频频发生地震、干旱、洪水等自然灾害,给人民群众的生命和财产造成了损失,影响了社会经济的运行。巨灾保险作为一种有效转移自然灾害风险的市场手段,对分担巨灾带来的经济损失、稳定社会经济发挥着重要的作用。而当前中国巨灾保险体系的建设还离不开政府的主导推动,只有政府和保险公司紧密合作,加大巨灾险种的引进创新,利用好再保险和巨灾保险基金等多样化风险转移工具,尽快构建巨灾保险体系,才能有效保障中国经济继续保持又好又快增长。     

全国社会保障基金股票投资组合绩效评价研究

股票投资作为社保投资中风险最大的投资产品,收益的高低直接影响社保基金整体的安全性。通过对社保基金股票投资组合总体绩效的研究发现,各投资组合在投资中均获得了超额收益。对社保基金股票投资组合的整体持续性检验结果表明,我国社保基金各投资组合的业绩并不具有持续性,反而具有反转型的特点;而分阶段持续性检验结果表明,在市场波动性较大的情况下,社保基金业绩没有表现出持续性,在市场相对稳定的情况下,社保基金业绩呈现出持续性的特点。     

The Behavior of Nontradable-Goods Prices In Europe: Evidence and Interpretation*

This paper examines the evolution of the relative price between tradable and nontradable goods in a group of European countries. A model of an open economy is used to analyze different factors that can account for an increase in the relative price of nontradable goods. These factors are (a) faster technological progress in the tradable goods sector, (b) demand shifts toward nontradable goods, and (c) real wage pressures. the relevance of these factors is analyzed empirically for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.     

Sovereign Wealth in Abu Dhabi

By the turn of the century, oil had already made the tiny emirate of Abu Dhabi rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. A sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), has invested extra oil revenues abroad for more than thirty years and amassed a still-growing portfolio worth approximately $750–900 billion. ADIA is widely believed to be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund – indeed the world's largest institutional investor. But Abu Dhabi is not yet a “developed” economy. So, in 2002, the Mubadala Development Company was established as a government-owned investment vehicle. Unlike ADIA's mandate to build and manage a financial portfolio, Mubadala's charge was to develop Abu Dhabi. According to some observers, ADIA was a “sovereign savings fund,” while Mubadala was a government-owned investment firm. Mubadala is supposed to invest the wealth of the emirate in activities that would diversify the economy away from energy and into industry and services. Although each Mubadala investment is supposed to earn large returns, the strategy balances financial against “strategic” returns. ADIA and Mubadala are the institutional architecture to manage the wealth of the Abu Dhabi sovereign.     

Security and the Subsurface: Natural Gas and the Visualisation of Possibility Spaces

ABSTRACT

Beneath the surface of the United Kingdom lies a sprawling natural gas infrastructure. Based on recent (2014/15) ‘follow the thing’ fieldwork conducted in the UK onshore gas industry, this paper explores the ways that dangers related to the subterranean circulation of natural gas come to be visualised, and how these visualisations make possible different security interventions. These practices are shown to be limited by the ground, which despite its enrolment as a security device conceals from view the shifting landscapes of risk that surround these gaseous movements. Drawing on Manuel DeLanda's concept of the possibility space, I provide a conceptual framework for attending to security’s visualisation practices, describing how attempts are made to overcome the subsurface obfuscation of natural gas. I argue that, rather than being understood as a process of circulatory ‘filtration’ or ‘maintenance’, security must instead be regarded as a series of transformative practices of ecological (re)organisation that are predicated upon the visualisation of entities’ spaces of possibility. In the process, I provide an account of how the three-dimensional geographies and materialities of gas circulations and their milieus are intimately tied up in their governance and politics.     

Oligopoly Power in British Industry

In this paper a model of industrial behaviour, encompassing factor demand and output supply decisions by industries, is developed and then estimated for ten industries in the United Kingdom over the period 1954–79. The derivation of the provides, within a consistent framework, insight into conjectural variation, Lerner's index of monopoly power, measures of industrial concentration and thereby makes explict the notion of oligopoly power. The estimates provide an empirical basis for evaluating the structure of industry in the United Kingdom and the estimated measures of oligopoly power are finally compared with more conventional measures of industrial concentration.     

The Economic Effects of North Sea Oil on the Manufacturing Sector

This paper analyses the economic effects of the oil and gas sector (energy booms) on manufacturing output in two energy producing countries: Norway and the UK. In particular, I investigate whether there is evidence of a 'Dutch disease', that is whether energy booms have had adverse effects on manufactures. In addition to energy booms, three other types of structural disturbances are identified; demand, supply and oil price shocks. The different disturbances are identified by imposing dynamic restrictions on a vector autoregressive model. Overall, there is only weak evidence of a Dutch disease in the UK, whereas manufacturing output in Norway has actually benefited from energy discoveries and higher oil prices     

PPP in the medium run: The case of Norway

Existing studies generally reject purchasing power parity (PPP) on data sets from countries that have been affected by large real shocks, including Norway. However, we offer strong evidence of PPP between Norway and its trading partners during the post-Bretton Woods period, in which the Norwegian economy has experienced numerous real shocks such as discoveries of large petroleum reserves and oil price shocks. In particular, the behavior of the Norwegian real and nominal exchange rates appears remarkably consistent with the PPP theory. Moreover, convergence towards PPP is relatively rapid; the half-life of a deviation from parity is just about 1.5 years. We show that such deviations are primarily eliminated by adjustments in the nominal exchange rate and we offer some explanations for the relatively rapid convergence towards PPP.     

中国个人养老金账户基金的资产负债管理研究——基于多阶段随机规划视角

我国现行的养老保障体制采用社会统筹与个人账户相结合的筹资模式,虽然两者都是养老金制度体系的支柱,但不同的收支平衡原则和实现目标,以及"混账"管理带来的种种弊端,使得统筹基金和个人账户基金分开进行独立管理势在必行。个人账户基金放开固定缴费率限制,支付体现指数化,以及作为重要的机构投资者参与分配资本市场运营成果,实现其未来支付目标、体现财富再分配功能、确保基金的保值增值,提高养老水平,是必然的发展趋势。分析我国基本养老金的运营现状,结合国际上先进的研究成果,为我国基本养老金的个人账户基金管理提出了全面、动态的分析框架。     

Heterogeneity effects on the management of retirement fund

This article studies the importance of plan members’ heterogeneity to the management of defined benefit (DB) pension fund. We propose a new multi-member model of DB pension fund that allows for heterogeneity in plan members’ retirement ages, salary growths and other characteristics. We first solve analytically for optimal management strategy and show that the sponsor’s supplementary contribution and the fund’s allocation in risky assets are determined by the cross-product between the fund’s expected retirement liabilities and some heterogeneity-adjusted discount factors. We then demonstrate that the presence of heterogeneity can have a significant influence on the optimal management strategy and that a management decision made while ignoring heterogeneity will be suboptimal. The knowledge of desirable and undesirable effects of heterogeneity that we uncover in this article also provides implications to the grouping of fund members. Introducing a presence of young member whose salary is positively correlated with the risky asset and avoid stacking members with negative correlations will all help the management.     

国际石油价格波动与我国经济发展影响分析

随着社会工业化的发展,石油在我们工业社会中的应用越来越广泛,石油价格也逐渐成为目前全球普遍关注的问题之一,随着我国对石油依赖程度的增强,国际油价的变化对我国经济的影响日益突出。石油行业作为国民经济的基础行业,我们很有必要研究国际石油价格的波动对我国经济的影响,并采取相应的措施来避免石油价格波动的风险。     

The migration decisions of young men in Great Britain

An analysis of migration in the United Kingdom of males aged 16 to 24 is presented using data from the 1979 European Commission Labour Force Survey. The author constructs a disaggregate choice model that incorporates spatial aspects of migration decision making. The results indicate that migration decisions of young men are significantly affected by family circumstances, housing tenure, educational attainment, labor force status, and occupation. Distinct differences are noted between migration patterns of economically active job changers, other economically active young men, and those out of work.     

浅谈科学决策与企业发展——以石油企业为例

石油工业在中国国民经济发展中占有举足轻重的地位,因此,石油企业如何落实科学发展观就显得尤为重要。回顾中国石油工业发展的曲折道路,引用正反两方面的实例,阐明了科学发展观对石油工业发展的重要性。指出石油企业落实科学发展观的核心是科学决策,只有科学决策才是企业发展的根本保证,而科学的决策必须要有先进的制度来保证。长期以来在计划经济条件下形成的＂党委包办一切＂,＂一把手拍板＂的决策弊端应彻底屏弃,建立一套行之有效的、适应市场经济规律的决策机制,从而为决策的民主化、科学化提供保证。