Rent-seeking activities and the 'brain gain' effects of migration

Abstract .  This paper studies migration and rent-seeking activities in a framework of heterogeneous ability. It is shown that, despite the depletion of productive resources known as the 'brain drain,' the possibility of migration could sufficiently reduce participation in rent-seeking activities and increase participation in productive activities such that the net effect of migration is a 'brain gain.' Moreover, the possibility of migration that sufficiently enlarges the relative reward to ability in the productive sector could result in qualitative improvements in the allocation of talent.     

土地集合信托计划的法律问题研究——以PPP模式下的城中村改造为视角(上)

城中村改造在中国语境下的讨论既是一个老生常谈,又是一个非常有现实意义的问题。为了解决城中村改造过程中衍生的各类问题,在西方国家大受欢迎的PPP模式逐渐成长为中国城中村改造进程中的选择手段,而土地信托方式在PPP模式下的应用,则是为PPP模式的推广,尤其是城中村改造方面提供了崭新的融资路径。可是,一个崭新的模式究竟会在运作过程中遇到怎样的问题?是否可以为这些问题从法律方面找到解决的可能?怎样能够让信托制度为PPP模式进行城中村改造提供更大动力?这些都是本文讨论的焦点所在。文章分为五个部分进行论述,第一个部分是论文的基础,将介绍PPP模式和信托在城中村改造运用的概念、现状,并且指出在运用过程中所要面对的主要法律问题;第二部分将重点探讨PPP模式下信托将要面对的多轮融资反稀释的问题;第三部分将讨论信托计划在城中村改造中退出机制的问题;第四部分将从法律层面分析信托计划所面临的监管,以及风险控制问题;最后一个部分将对本文所涉及到的法律问题给出相应的建议。     

Monitoring Wage Developments in EMU

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief review of aggregatewage developments in the EU member states. We start with a short discussion of wage bargaining mechanisms, their impact on labour market outcomes, and take a look into the crystal ball to learn about possible future developments. Section III analyses nominal wage developments focussing, in particular, on the evolution of cross-country patterns as anindicator for the synchronisation of wage developments. Section IV discusses real wage growth in relation to productivity developments using a somewhat refined 'real wage gap indicator';and Section V simply concludes.     

Local authority fiscal stance and the pattern of residential migration in the north west of England

The degree of fiscal mobility present in household migration flows between local authority areas in northwestern England is assessed. Following an introduction, the paper is divided into three sections. "The first reviews the methodologies of previous attempts to assess the extent of fiscally induced migration, noting the dominance of American studies, and outlines a choice-theoretic structure within which it is possible to model human migration patterns. Section III considers the problems inherent in modelling migration flows, and Section IV presents results for a Compound Poisson analysis of migration between local authority areas within the four counties of the North West region of England, as well as an assessment of the prevalence of fiscal mobility."     

Perspectives from the Happiness Literature and the Role of New Instruments for Policy Analysis

After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happinessis becoming an object of serious research in 21st century economics.In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics.In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happinesseconomics, retaining the assumption of ordinal individual utilities.In Section 4 we introduce a cardinal utility concept, whichseems to us the natural consequence of the happiness economicsmethodology. In Section 5 we sketch how this approach can leadto a normative approach to policy problems that is admissiblefrom a positivist point of view. Section 6 concludes. (JEL codes:B21, B41, D63, I31, I38)     

A survey of the literature on the optimal peg

It is widely agreed that floating is not an appropriate exchange rate policy for most developing countries, but in a world of generalized floating the question of exchange rate policy is not resolved by deciding to peg rather than to float: it is also necessary to decide to what to peg. This is the question of the ‘optimal peg’, on which a significant literature has emerged since 1976. The present paper provides a survey of that literature. Section 2 summarizes the principal papers. Section 3 compares the objectives and rules advocated by different authors. Section 4 evaluates the alternative approaches, arguing that in general the peg should be chosen to stabilize the nominal trade-weighted effective exchange rate. Section 5 considers whether this criterion points to the SDR as a satisfactory peg.     

Some reflections on theories of unemployment in the North American context

This paper is an attempt to present a summary and perspective on some recent developments in the macroeconomic theories of unemployment. Sections II and III deal respectively with the existing explanations of long term unemployment and the fluctuations in the short term unemployment. Section IV examines how these theories help us in unraveling the United States-Canada unemployment rate divergence puzzle. Some directions for future research are suggested in Section V.     

Old age,risk, security and children: an empirical evidence from rural India

An investment model of the demand for children is developed to demonstrate that old-age security provided by children is an important consideration in the fertility decisions of parents. "The paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the importance of children as a source of old age support and risk mitigating mechanism. The investment approach for the demand for children is presented in Section III. Section IV...explores the implications in the context of a recent household survey conducted in rural India. Finally, the findings are summarised in Section V."     

Conditions For Successful Technology Policy In Developing Countries—Learning Rents,State Structures,And Institutions

The paper develops an analysis of the economic, political, and institutional conditions for successful design and implementation of technology policy in developing countries. After a brief introduction (Section I), we discuss contending economic theories of technological change and technology policy (Section 2). It is concluded that, despite many pro-market arguments, market imperfections inherent in the process of technological change make the creation of learning and innovation rents by the state potentially very beneficial, especially in developing countries. The next section (Section 3) analyses the political and institutional factors that determine how effectively such rents can be created and managed. After an assessment of technology policy record in developing countries (Section 4) we discuss how the scope of such policy is affected by the recent changes in domestic and international policy contexts such as domestic deregulation and the emergence of a ‘liberal’ world order represented by the WTO (Section 5). The paper ends with a brief conclusion (Section 6).     

ELECTRONIC DISSEMINATION EXPERIENCES OF THE U.S. BUREAU OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

This paper describes the experiences of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the electronic dissemination of its statistical products. Section I describes the institutional setting. Section 11, the heart of the paper, is based on a review BEA recently undertook with a view to improving its procedures and policies for disseminating its information to the public. Section III draws conclusions from the review and raises some questions as a basis for comparisons among agencies.     

Critique of zero population growth theory

This is a critique of widely held theories concerning the relationship between population growth and economic development. "The central purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the zero population growth movement. The hypotheses of Neo-Malthusian theory or Zero Population Growth and the concept of Population Bomb will be briefly stated in Section 1. Section 2 will discuss the theory of demographic transition. Section 3 will critically examine the validity of the Neo-Malthusian theory of population growth. Our conclusions and recommendations will be stated in Section 4." The author's main contention is that overconsumption in developed countries is the major cause of the deterioration of the environment rather than overpopulation in the developing countries.     

Beyond the principle of population: Malthus's Essay

Abstract

After an introductory section, this article reviews reasons and arguments establishing the invalidity of Malthus's construct of a ‘principle of population’. Section 3 propounds that Malthus's theory is located beyond the principle of population, with the oscillation figure as its centre. Section 4 takes note of the trajectory which the Essay describes between natural and moral science, assesses inequality and growth as the two focal points of Malthus's theory and eventually observes Malthus looking forward to a state beyond the dictates of growth.     

Patents,profitability, liquidity and firm size

Much has been written on the need for a more rapid rate of technical progress in the British economy but there is little in the way of hard facts on the characteristics of firms that innovate and those that do not, on the factors determining a firm's rate of innovation, and on the relationship between innovation and profitability. The present paper attempts to give some quantitative content to the discussion by examining the relationship between a firm's size, its profitability, its liquidity and the number of patents obtained in three United Kingdom industries - Chemicals, an Electrical Engineering and Electronics grouping, and Machine Tools. These three industries were chosen because they are technologically based and so place heavy emphasis on research and development.

The plan of the paper is as follows. Section 1 discusses the patents data and the use of patents as an indicator of innovative activity. The size characteristics of patenting and non-patenting firms are considered in Section 2. Section 3 presents the model relating patenting to firm size, liquidity and profitability. Sections 4 to 6 report in turn the results for the Chemical industry, the Electrical Engineering and Electronics grouping, and the Machine Tools industry. Section 7 investigates whether any short-ran profitability may be found to result from inno-vative activity. Section 8 compares our results with those obtained for the United States. Section 3 is a summary of our results.     

INCOME INEQUALITY IN URBAN COLOMBIA: A DECOMPOSITION ANALYSIS

The persistence of poverty and income inequality in less developed countries (LDCs) is a source of serious concern to development economists. To understand the structure of inequality, several researchers using a variety of methodologies have measured the importance of various contributory factors to overall income variability. The available literature—which now includes studies of Brazil, Mexico, Iran, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Pakistan, and Colombia-has been reviewed elsewhere (Fields, forthcoming). This paper presents additional evidence for urban Colombia, in the process raising some important methodological issues which bear on the design of future research studies.
The data set used in this paper is described in Section I. The decomposition of Colombian inequality by functional income source is presented in Section 11 for micro data. Section I11 examines the robustness of source decomposition procedures to data aggregation. Section IV presents inequality decompositions by city, and Section V by other income-determining characteristics. Conclusions appear in Section VI.     

CURRENT COST ACCOUNTING: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEFINITION AND MEASUREMENT OF CORPORATE INCOME

This paper is in 7 sections. Section 1 gives as background a chronological account of the steps taken in the United Kingdom, from 1974 to late 1977, towards the development of a new system of accounting in company reports which would allow for the effect of changing costs and prices on the measurement of profit and of capital employed in the business. Section 2 discusses the main features of the system, known as current cost accounting, as it is seen in the United Kingdom. Section 3 surveys the relationship between current cost accounting and the national income and expenditure statistics, and the likely implications of the introduction of current cost accounting upon the quality of macro-economic statistics, including estimates of national and sector balance sheets. Section 4 describes some of the problems of implementing current cost accounting, particularly in special situations, and outlines the solutions which were proposed in the "Exposure Draft" published in 1976 by the accountancy profession in the United Kingdom. Section 5 considers the definition of distributable profit in relation to the need to maintain capital, considering the concept of gain, the system of valuing assets and liabilities, and the enterprise's capacity to take on additional debt as a means of financing its assets. Section 6 briefly surveys the implications for taxation, price control and price setting. Section 7 concludes by surveying the scene at the end of 1977 and by looking at likely future developments.     

THE GINI-TYPE FUNCTIONS: AN ALTERNATIVE DERIVATION

The purpose of this note is to propose an alternative and intuitively simpler derivation of the Gini coefficient (in Section l), to show how it can be generalized and how then a number of coefficients (concentration coefficient, Kakwani's progressivity index) are obtained directly from this generalization (Section 2), and finally to use this approach to obtain some Gini relationships (Section 3).     

Measuring the cost of children

"The purpose of this paper is to present a survey and synthesis of those economic models that have been used to derive estimates of marginal child costs from cross-sectional data on household expenditure patterns [in Australia].... In the next section the argument that the 'costs of children' should not be a concern of social policy is considered (and rejected). Section III then summarises the models.... In Section IV an Engel curve system estimated from the 1988-89 Household Expenditure Survey is used to compare [the models].... In the concluding section some directions for further research and data collection strategies are discussed."     

Economic development, growth of human capital, and the dynamics of the wage structure

In this paper I elucidate the sources of growth of human capital in the course of economic development. On the supply side (Section 1) I include the growth of family income, urbanization, the demographic transition, and the rising cost of time.The supply side alone cannot explain the continuous growth of human capital as it implies a self limiting decline in rates of return below those in alternative investments. Such declines are offset by growing demands for human capital in the labor market. Growth of demand for labor skills is a function of capital accumulation and of technological changes. Evidence on this hypothesis is summarized in Section 2 and on supply responses to growing demand for human capital in Section 3. Changes in the skill and wage structures in the labor market are an important part of the evidence.The reciprocal relation between economic growth and the growth of human capital is likely to be an important key to sustained economic growth. A caveat applies to indirect effects of economic growth on family instability, which may lead to a deterioration of childhood human capital in some sectors of society.     

REGIONAL ACCOUNTS: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED IN THE RECENT EXPERIENCE OF ARGENTINA

This paper examines some problems in the recent experience with regional accounts in Argentina. In Section I a detailed exploration of the possibility of an adaptation of the UN System of National Accounts to any one regional division of a country is presented. The proposal is introduced in matrix form, compatible with the SNA. In Section II selected problems in the definition of the concept of residence and their implications, particularly in the production accounts, are discussed. The presentation is based upon examples for the construction sector, interregional transport, the services of public administration, and the branches of public enterprises resident outside the region. In Section III the principal conclusions of the usefulness, possibility and priorities of regional accounts in Argentina are noted.