Reformulating US food aid policy for development

One of the most fundamental questions emerging from recent scrutiny of US foreign assistance efforts is whether the PL 480 food aid programme is making a significant, positive contribution to the economic and social development of poorer nations. Despite the validity of certain past criticisms of food aid as a development vehicle, it is the premise of this paper that US food assistance CAN have a positive developmental impact but that this will require reformulation of policy goals, redesign of programme components, and reorganization of administrative structures. Seven basic policy and programme design questions are addressed herein: What should be the goals of food aid? Who should receive food aid? How much aid should be given? Which kind of food should be given? Under what terms should food aid be given? What delivery systems should be used? How should the aid effort be organized? It is argued that the current (but temporary) respite from serious food deficits in many developing countries has provided an ideal opportunity for the US Government to reevaluate the current PL 480 programme and to incorporate the above concerns into a rational and comprehensive, developmental food aid policy.     

University licensing

Licensing of university inventions to industry has experiencedrapid, recent growth. This growth is cited as evidence of universitysuccess in technology transfer and it suggests an increasingimportance of universities to innovation systems. Concerns havebeen raised that universities are moving towards applied researchand away from fundamental research in efforts to capture licensingincome. However, figures on growth in licensing perhaps painta misleading picture, given the substantial variation in licensingsuccess across universities, scientific fields, and technologies.The paper is organized around the following questions. Whatis the rationale behind university patenting and licensing?How embryonic are university inventions and how often is furtherdevelopment necessary? What is the record on exclusive versusnon-exclusive licensing? What is the record on licensing revenue?What are university licensing goals? What is the role of facultyafter a licence is signed? Have faculty been diverted from theirtraditional role in research?     

Going, Going, Gone! A Swift Tour of Auction Theory and its Applications

This paper provides a swift tour of auction theory and its applications. Among the questions it considers are: How much do bidders bid in commonly studied single-object auctions? How efficient are these auctions? How much revenue do they generate? Which single-object auction maximizes the seller’s expected revenue? What is the best way to auction incentive contracts? And, how efficient and complex are multi-object auctions?     

Financial Systems, Industrial Structure, and Growth

How does the development of the financial sector affect industrialgrowth? What effect does it have on the composition of industry,and the size distribution of firms? What is the relative importanceof financial institutions and financial markets, and does itdepend on the stage of economic growth? How do financial systemsdiffer in their vulnerability to crisis? This paper attemptsto provide an answer to these questions based on the currentstate of empirical research.     

Structural change,industrial upgrading and China’s economic transformation*

Abstract

After more than three decades of opening up and reforms, China has moved from a low to an emerging middle-income country. The main challenge facing the country is how to sustain this momentum and develop into a high-income country and avoid the middle-income trap. In order to achieve this, industrial upgrading and structural change is crucial. This is not an easy process given that very few countries in the world achieved this in the past 50 years. What are the challenges for this transformation? How can the innovation and technological capabilities be developed to upgrade Chinese industries into one of the world’s innovation leaders? These are important questions to address for policy-makers and academics, and are the main theme of an International Conference on Transition and Economic Development (TED), held at Fudan University in 2015.     

激励效率追求公平——关于分配制度改革的回顾与展望

文章从理论、政策和实践三个层面回溯了我国改革前的分配状况,并用五个要点概括了传统"社会主义政治经济学"中分配理论;从匡正分配与生产之间的关系、变革分配的形态以及提出按要素贡献分配的基本原则等方面论述了在改革中对旧体制的冲决;还指出时下我国分配在价值言说、分配层次以及改革条件等方面所存在的问题;更从创新基础理论,区分市场分配、政府调节和道德调节三个层次,明确效率和公平两大目标以及迅速启动全面的改革等几个方面,对分配制度改革的未来前景进行了憧憬和预期。     

面对 WTO,中国建筑设计业的发展思考

中国即将进入WTO ,它对中国产业的各个方面都会带来很大的影响。针对中国建筑设计行业 ,WTO的主要原则是什么 ?中国建筑设计业面临的挑战和存在的问题是什么 ?我们如何去面对并迎接挑战 ,本文作了详尽的论述     

日本经验与东亚发展型国家

日本经济模式的显著特点就是政府主导,东亚其他国家和地区的发展模式又与日本发展模式极为相似,这就是通常所说的东亚"发展型国家"。那么,日本政府导向型经济的具体特征是什么?对其他东亚国家和地区有什么影响?发展型国家与比较优势是怎样结合的?日本主导的东亚经济格局正在发生那些变化?本文力图回答这些问题。     

Urban revival in sight: The end is where we start from?

This paper tries to set recent developments in the UK in a wider spatial and historic context relating them to their underlying economic processes. By a better understanding of the forces acting on cities and a recognition of the broad patterns of change, we can gain some insight into future developments. Is further decentralisation and ex-urbanisation inevitable? Is the decline of the manufacturing sector of the urban economy a catastrophe from which cities cannot recover? What are the implications of the growth of the service sector for future patterns of urban development? How can policy assist the revitalisation of Europe's cities? These are some of the questions with which this paper is concerned.     

美国第三轮量化宽松政策启动的背景及影响分析

2012年9月美联储公布QE3经济刺激措施,期望以此鼓励人们贷款和开支,减少失业率,促使经济走出低迷增长困局。与以往有限期的计划不同,本次计划不设时间,采取行动直到经济改善。美国已经债务累累,大量债券的购买是否会进一步推动通胀?美国经济状况究竟如何?再次推出量化宽松政策的背景是什么?QE3可能会给他国尤其是中国经济带来什么样的影响?本文对此进行了研究。     

Evaluating CPB’s Forecasts

This paper analyzes forecasts, for ten key annually observed economic variables for the Netherlands, created by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) for 1971–2007. These CPB forecasts are all manually modified model forecasts, where the model is a (very) large multi-equation macro model. The CPB forecasts are held against real-time forecasts obtained from simple autoregressive time series models, and for seven of the ten cases, CPB’s forecasts are significantly more accurate. Combining CPB’s forecasts with the real time autoregressive forecasts shows that four of the ten combined forecasts are significantly better than CPB’s forecasts, and seven of the ten are better than the time series forecasts. This suggests that CPB’s manual adjustment efforts could perhaps be directed to modifying simple model forecasts and not the forecasts from the own large macro model.     

Bilateral Trade Agreements*

Bilateral Trade Agreements (BTAs) have been proliferating. Why are they so popular? What are their impacts on multilateralism and the world trade system? The article identifies the general and specific factors driving the growth in BTAs, and examines how BTAs in general and different types of BTAs are affecting the world trade system. Although the sheer number of BTAs is fragmenting the world trade system, the impact of individual BTAs often depends on their underlying motivation. The article also portrays scenarios for the future landscape of world trade and possible responses. Is the consolidation of BTAs into region‐wide agreements a solution or simply a new problem? How can we multilateralise bilateralism and repair the world trade system? The article attempts to answer these questions, with or without Doha.     

China＇s Export-led Growth Strategy： An International Comparison

A pressing challenge for China is determining where to accommodate millions of migrant workers displaced by the closing of many export-oriented factories. The current global financial crisis＂ has exposed the fragility of the export-led growth strategy China has adopted over the past 30years. Is there a better alternative for providing non-agricultural jobs than the sweatshops of cheap export production？ In the present paper, international experience is reviewed to shed light on China＇s situation. Using pooled regression models, we analyze data from the World Bank for 209 economies. We investigate the experience of other economies to answer the following questions： What is the common process of expanding the nonagricultural economy？ How is that process affected by the level of the real exchange rate？ Is export production a common way of absorbing surplus rural labor？ Finally, what are the ways that domestic demand and service employment can be expanded？     

The rise of migration and the fall of self employment in rural China's labor market

When examining questions regarding the Lewis model, one of the most salient set of facts involves the shift of labor between agricultural and the off farm sectors. The goal of this paper is to answer several questions about the nature of this movement: How has the expansion of the economy after 2000 affected off farm labor market participation? Has off farm labor continued to rise? What is this rise being driven by—migrant wage earners or self employment opportunities? What is, in part, driving these trends? Using a national representative set of data that consists of two waves of surveys done in 2000 and 2008 in six provinces, the paper finds that off farm labor market participation has continued to rise steadily in the early 2000s. However, there has been a structural break in the trends of occupational choice before and after 2000. Unlike before 2000, after 2000 migration's growth accelerated; during this same period the self employed subsector stagnated. The number of wage earning migrants in 2008 was greater than the number of those in the self employed subsector. The data also show that the rise in wage-earning migration is mainly being driven by the younger cohorts. Our analysis also shows that the rise of migration is happening in conjunction with a rising unskilled wage.     

国有企业改革必须优化企业的外部环境

WTO加入在即 ,国企靠什么与别人竞争 ?国企的成功在于一把手 ,更在于企业的核心竞争力。核心竞争力是帮企业现有业务结合在一起的胶水 ,也是新业务的发动机 ,多样化的形式及市场进入由它们引导。核心竞争力更是一种竞争者难以模仿的能力。衡量国企改革成功与否的标志就是看企     

人类理性与制度选择——基于马克思经济学的分析视角

理性是经济学研究社会经济现象与制度变迁的一个关键词。什么是理性？人类理性包含什么内容？它是怎样形成的？它如何影响人的行为和制度选择？本文试图用马克思主义的观点来回答这些问题。论文上半部分讨论了人类理性的三对范畴：本能理性与认识理性、进化理性与建构理性、个人理性与社会理性,构建一个人类理性模型;下半部分讨论了制度变迁的需求、制度选择的基础与初始条件、制度选择的主体和方式,以及制度选择与国家政治制度、文化意识的关系,构建一个制度选择模型。     

Ambulance Economics: The Pros and Cons of Fiscal Stimuli

The world economy has had a heart attack and the Keynesian ambulance has come to the rescue. How are the present and the future affected by debt-financed fiscal stimuli policies? What are the practical problems? Seven arguments against fiscal stimuli are critically examined, including Ricardian equivalence.     

Mobilizing rural deposits: Discovering the forgotten half of financial intermediation*

Past agricultural credit programs and policies have generally ignored rural deposit mobilization. In recent years, however, there has been a greater recognition of the need for and benefits of mobilizing more rural deposits for use in agricultural lending.

This paper presents information on six questions: Why was rural deposit mobilization forgotten? Why is deposit mobilization important for rural financial institutions? What is the potential for mobilizing rural deposits? What factors contribute to rural deposit mobilization? What is the outcome of recent experimental projects to mobilize rural deposits? What are the key remaining issues to be addressed in rural deposit mobilization?     

Lifetime employment in Japan: Concepts and measurements

This paper addresses three questions: (1) How big is lifetime employment in Japan? (2) How unique is it? and (3) How is it changing? Through the use of multiple data sets and methods, I find that no more than 20% of workers in Japan are likely to be employed under informal lifetime employment contracts, a far smaller percentage than has been reported. Job mobility remains considerably lower in Japan than in other advanced economies (particularly the US). Evidence regarding changes in lifetime employment is mixed. The share of workers in the core is declining, but the probability of job separations has remained stable for those who are already in the system. There is also evidence that the economic stagnation of the 1990s disproportionately affected females and younger workers.     

Background variables of population mobility: An attempt at automatic interaction detector analysis

Abstract

Research in migration studies has concentrated on the underlying causes of population movements to such a degree that it sometimes seems necessary to draw attention to other aspects of population movements which might also repay study. What, for instance, happens to migrants during and after the move? How do different societies react to substantial losses or gains of population? How do the various types of movement interact?