Insulating countries against fluctuations in domestic production and exports: An analysis of Compensatory Financing schemes

For several years the IMF has operated a Compensatory Financing Facility (CFF) whose aim is to smooth out the effects of a shortfall in export receipts in a particular country. In 1981, the Facility was extended to cover imports of foodstuffs, with the objective of reducing food insecurity. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical analysis of the CFF, interpreted as an international scheme whose object is to stabilise some domestic policy target, such as consumption, by providing loans based on the value or volume of a country's exports or imports. The paper shows that, under certain assumptions, the IMF's CFF for exports provides net gains to individual countries. The extension of the scheme to include food imports could provide further gains, but only if it is appropriately redesigned.     

Autoregressive modelling of consumption,income, inflation and interest rate data: A multicountry study

In this study the question whether income, inflation and interest rate help to predict (Granger-cause) consumption of nondurables was analysed for USA, UK, FRG and France. Thereby a slightly modified variant of the stepwise autoregressive modelling approach suggested by Hsiao was extended to the four variables framework and applied to quarterly time series. The data indicate that at least one of the variables considered has predictive power for consumption. Thus, the permanent income hypothesis under rational expectation as formulated by Hall is rejected for the countries considered here.     

中国生态经济学研究存在的问题及今后研究的建议

作者对中国生态经济学存在的问题进行了总结,并提出今后研究要点的建议。作者认为中国生态经济学多是对目标的描述,缺少方法和动力要素方面的深入研究。作者建议今后研究的要点放在消费偏好与的关系及约束高消耗生产体系的扩展方面。     

CONSUMPTION (IN)EFFICIENCY AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

Consumption may be inefficient when a household cannot choose the optimal bundle of goods at a minimum cost. After discussing alternative approaches, this paper proposes the use of money metric indirect utility function motivated by Feenstra and Varian in measuring consumption inefficiency. Then, Bamoul–Tobin transactions demand for money model is extended to show how household ability to manage its income, expenditure and financial accounts may affect consumption inefficiency. Results of the stochastic cost frontier approach, which is employed in estimation and the prediction of the European Union household consumption inefficiency, suggest that household expenditure performance is partly explained by the changes in the consumption efficiency and the efficiency is not independent of financial account management.     

Poverty Reducing Reforms and Subgroup Consumption Dominance Curves

One vexed question of anti-poverty strategies is that of setting a reasonable poverty line. To escape its specification, recent developments by Yitzhaki and Slemrod (1991 ) have introduced the correspondence between non-intersecting concentration curves and poverty reducing directions of reforms. Makdissi and Wodon (2002 ) have derived consumption dominance curves for any order of restricted stochastic dominance. In this paper, consumption dominance curves are extended to subgroups of population. Empirical evidence of the approach will be shown using the 1997 data from Belarus, considering public subsidies on rents and utilities, health care and public transport in six groups of population.     

On the marginal excess burden of taxation in an overlapping generations model

We extend marginal excess burden (MEB) analysis in public finance literature to a dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous households. This extension allows us to quantitatively assess efficiency ranking and incidence of taxes. Our results indicate a disparity in welfare cost and distributional consequence of different forms of taxation on capital, labor and consumption. According to our MEB ranking, capital income taxation appears to be least efficient as it results in larger marginal excess burdens, compared to labor income tax and consumption tax. The tax incidence analysis shows variation of tax burdens across households, depending on their age, income type and generation. In particular, older households with higher income bear the highest burden of company income tax; meanwhile, future born households bear the highest burden of personal income tax. Hence, our MEB analysis demonstrates a fruitful approach to better understanding efficiency and incidence of tax reforms in one unified framework.     

收入增长中城乡居民畜产品消费结构趋势实证研究——以浙江省为例

基于浙江省城乡居民固定观测点的调查数据,细分不同产品种类,采用扩展线形支出系统（ELES）模型,实证研究了收入增长过程中城乡居民畜产品消费结构的变动趋势。研究结果显示：随着人均收入的增加,浙江省城镇居民畜产品的消费变化主要表现为猪肉消费的减少及奶类消费的增加;农村居民对家禽类产品有较高的边际预算份额及较大的需求收入弹性。     

Incentive effects of paying demand response in wholesale electricity markets

Recently issued U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulations require comparable treatment of demand reduction and generation in the wholesale electric market so that they are compensated at the same market clearing price. The new regulations measure demand reduction as a reduction from a “customer baseline,” a historically based estimate of the expected consumption. In this paper, we study the incentive effects on the efficiency of the demand response regulation using a static equilibrium model and a dynamic extension of the model. Our analysis provides three main results. Firstly, our analysis shows that the demand reduction payment will induce consumers to (1) inflate the customer baseline by increasing consumption above the already excessive level during normal peak periods and (2) exaggerate demand reduction by decreasing consumption beyond the efficient level during a demand response event. This result persists when applied to alternative baseline designs in a dynamic model. Secondly, we study alternative policy remedies to restore the efficiency of demand response regulation and introduce a new approach to define the customer baseline as a fixed proportion of an aggregate baseline. In particular, the aggregate baseline approach can significantly weaken or eliminate the incentive to inflate the baseline. Finally, we illustrate that if the baseline inflation problem is solved and demand and supply functions are linear, the current policy can produce a net social welfare gain. However, the welfare improvement requires that demand reduction be paid only when the wholesale price is at least twice the fixed retail rate. This argues that the policy should include a sufficiently high threshold price below which demand response is not dispatched.     

International Adjustment With Habit-Forming Consumption: A Diagrammatic Exposition*

This paper presents a simple diagrammatic analysis of an open economy's external adjustment process under habit-forming individual preferences. the exposition focuses on the consumption side and alms to make transparent the linkage among wealth, past consumption experience, and current consumption. an extension of the standard representative-agent model to a growing economy of overlapping generations completes the paper. Under habit formation an agent's consumption exhibits a form of hysteresis, in that his current consumption depends on his past consumption experience as well as initial assets. In the overlapping-generations model aggregate hysteresis disappears in the long run.     

Alcohol consumption,censorship and misjudgement

In the study of the economic determinants of alcohol consumption, there is an under-appreciated issue of sample selectivity as consumption is often not fully observed. Sample selectivity involves ignoring consumption below a censorship cut-off level. This article estimates a demand system for beer, wine and spirits with and without allowance for selectivity. Then using a simulation approach, it examines the impact of misjudgement in the censorship level on the estimated demand parameters. A mean squared error (MSE) criterion is suggested for determining the appropriate censorship level.     

Theories of practice — New inspiration for ecological economic studies on consumption

The dynamics behind ever-increasing consumption have long been a core issue of ecological economics. Studies on this topic have traditionally drawn not only on insights from economics, but also from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology and psychology. In recent years, a practice theory approach has emerged in sociological consumption studies, as part of a general wave of renewed interest in practice theory emanating from a desire to move beyond such dominant dualisms as the structure-actor opposition in sociology. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the practice theory approach in relation to studies of everyday life, domestic practices and consumption, and to argue that this approach can be fruitful for ecological economics and other fields interested in the environmental aspects of consumption. The paper emphasizes the immense challenge involved in promoting sustainable consumption, and the need for collective efforts supported by research into the co-evolution of domestic practices, systems of provision, supply chains and production.     

THE TREATMENT OF “HOME OWNERSHIP” IN THE CPI*

This paper explores the imputed service price approach to the pricing of the services of consumer-owned-and-used durables in the construction of the consumer price index, using the services of owner-occupied housing as an illustration. A theoretical framework for analyzing this question is first developed. Certain practical problems are then discussed. The conceptual difficulty of constructing an appropriate rate of return on the basis of available data on interest rates and house prices, in the context of inflation, is explored. Two arguments are advanced that statistical agencies ought not to follow the imputed service price approach in pricing the services of owner-occupied dwellings and other consumer durables. On the one hand, nominal interest rates will, in any short period, reflect monetary policy and not any change in the money “rental” of owner-occupied houses. Second, movements in nominal interest rates will also reflect changes in the money price of pure consumption goods, as well as changes in the money price of houses. The argument is extended to other consumer durables and, in the limiting case, to monetary balances, and it is concluded that in all but trivial cases the application of the service price approach leads to price movements of little or no meaning.     

Exponential discounting bias

We address intertemporal utility maximization under a general discount function that nests the exponential discounting and the quasi-hyperbolic discounting cases as particular specifications. Under the suggested framework, the representative agent adopts, at some initial date, an optimal behavior that shapes her consumption trajectory over time. This agent desires to take a constant discount rate to approach the optimization problem, but bounded rationality, under the form of a present bias, deviates the individual from the intended goal. As a result, decreasing impatience will end up dominating the agent’s behavior. The individual will not be aware of her own time inconsistency and, therefore, she will not revise her plans as time elapses, what makes the problem relatively simple to address from a computational point of view. The general discounting framework is used to approach a standard optimal growth model in discrete time. Transitional dynamics and stability properties of the corresponding dynamic setup are studied. An extension of the standard utility maximization model to the case of habit persistence is also considered.     

我国城镇居民消费需求结构计量经济分析

本文利用扩展的线性支出系统对我国城镇居民消费需求结构进行分析和预测测定了恩格尔系数、边际消费倾向以及居民家庭基本生活线等,并针对我国现阶段城镇居民消费结构的特点,提出了应采取的对策和建议,其结果对政府部门制定消费政策和正确引导居民消费具有重要意义。     

Savings growth and the path of utility

Abstract.  We derive an expression relating the change in instantaneous utility to the growth of net (genuine) saving in an economy with multiple stocks and externalities that maximizes welfare in the utilitarian sense. This result is then shown to hold for decentralized competitive efficient economies as well, to yield an extension of the Hartwick rule: instantaneous utility is non-declining along a development path if genuine saving is decreasing. By way of example the rule is applied as a constant genuine saving rate rule in a simple Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz economy. The rule yields a path with unbounded consumption and higher wealth than on the standard Hartwick constant consumption path.     

基于FUZZY-AHP的高科技品牌延伸决策评价研究

通过对国内高科技品牌延伸实践和国内外品牌延伸评价理论的深入分析,指出高科技品牌延伸决策评价研究的不足。针对品牌延伸评价的复杂性特点,将模糊层次评价的方法应用到高科技品牌延伸决策评价研究中,采用层次分析法确定了评价指标体系中各指标的权重,并以海尔品牌延伸到药业为研究对象,采用模糊评价法对评价模型进行了实证分析。 ?     

Monte Carlo tests of autocorrelation

Barnard's Monte Carlo test procedure can be used to eliminate the problem of the inconclusive region of the Durbin-Watson statistic in an elegant way. In contrast to conventional tests, this procedure can be extended straightforwardly to systems of equations, which is illustrated here for a translog system. An extension to bootstraps, which avoids the normality assumption, is also discussed.     

Testing separability of public consumption in household decisions

In this paper we propose a sequential strategy, based on the microeconomic approach of the demand theory, in order to test for separability between private and public consumption. The aim of the present work is to verify, using a conditional almost ideal demand system, whether the different components of public consumption exert conditioning effects on the allocative structure of private spending. The empirical estimation of the model and the separability tests are developed for both a demand system in five functional categories of private spending, and for a demand system in six categories, where the private expenditures on those goods and services which can also be offered by the public sector are enclosed in a single functional category. The results of the separability tests, obtained using UK data for the 1974–2000 period, show that public individual consumption plays an important role in modifying consumer choices, while public collective consumption does not affect private consumption behaviours. The relationships between the different components of private spending and public individual consumption are both of substitutability and complementarity; in particular, we find that public individual consumption and the corresponding private expenditures on ‘Health, education, recreation and social protection’ are complements.     

Fixed-price equilibria in a two-country model of trade: Existence and comparative statics

The Barro-Grossman-Malinvaud model of fixed-price equilibrium is extended to a two-country model of trade with a fixed exchange rate. There are various possible types of fixed-price equilibria for the international economy, depending on the structure of rationing. The existence and uniqueness of one type of fixed-price equilibrium are proved. Indeed the extension of ‘the simple macroeconomic model’ to a two-country economy allows a new treatment of the problem of uniqueness of the type of fixed-price equilibrium. At last, some comparative statics results are derived. Among others the model allows to meet on new grounds (i.e., with some microfoundations) some well known results of the conventional Keynesian approach. But much more general results can be derived, applying to a class of market states not already dealt with in international-trade theory.     

弱势群体公共文化服务体系建设研究——基于残疾人公共文化消费状况的调查

满足广大弱势群体的公共文化需求是时下加强和创新社会管理的核心要义之一。文章在对东、中、西部三个城市的残疾人公共文化消费进行调查分析的基础之上,揭示了当前弱势群体在文化权利上面临的困境。研究表明,既有的公共文化服务体系还没有惠及广大弱势群体,当前弱势群体的公共文化消费水平十分低下。其中,个体地位结构因素、区域经济发展水平、社会政策倾斜性配置水平以及无障碍环境是制约残疾人这类弱势群体公共文化消费水平的显著因素。文章认为,要确保弱势群体的文化权利,政府必须加大公共文化服务资源向弱势群体倾斜性配置,构建专业化、社会化的服务供给模式,坚持服务为本的逻辑,构建弱势群体的参与机制,并试点向弱势群体发放文化消费补贴。