Beliefs and Pareto Efficient Sets: A Remark

We show that, in a two-period economy with uncertainty in the second period, if an allocation is Pareto optimal for a given set of beliefs and remains optimal when these beliefs are changed, then the set of optimal allocations of the two economies must actually coincide. We identify equivalence classes of beliefs, giving rise to the same set of Pareto optimal allocations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D51, D61.     

团队生产的纳什均衡及合作博弈空间

本文在霍姆斯特姆所做贡献的基础上认为团队生产问题在本质上等同于囚徒困境问题,并指出霍姆斯特姆的实施强制契约的解决方法存在逻辑漏洞,在现实社会中一般是无效的.本文依据社会经济人个人效用最大化的条件定义了团队生产的合作战略博弈空间,合作战略博弈空间的均衡极点(即个人效用最大化点)就是团队生产收益分配博弈的纳什均衡解.如果个人收益的总和等于集体收益的最优值,那么个人理性与集体理性之间就达到统一,处于帕累托最优状态,即不存在道德风险;反之,则说明存在道德风险.并给出了在团队生产中通过改变合作战略博弈空间达到帕累托最优的一个特例,指出了科学合理地改变合作战略博弈空间在社会经济发展中的重要作用     

International knowledge spillovers and wage inequality in developing countries

In this paper, international knowledge spillovers are incorporated in a horizontal innovation model, designed to explain the observed uncertain effects that openness of trade can have on wage inequality in small developing countries. Openness of trade can produce two different effects: an increase in the relative price of less-skilled labor-intensive products and a wider skill discrepancy due to knowledge spillovers from the more to less developed country. The former triggers a fall in the wage premium, while the latter widens the wage premium gap in a developing country. These two opposing forces explain the observed uncertain effects of openness to trade on wage inequality in developing countries.     

国际促销策略的本土化研究及启示

在经济全球化的今天,国际营销的成功有赖于全球观念的营销思维和本土化的营销操作.国际促销策略是国际市场营销策略组合中的重要一环,本土化促销策略的运用已成为跨国公司成功开拓国际市场的共识,因而基于对跨国公司在中国市场实施的“本土化”促销策略的研究,对我国企业的国际市场营销工作提供了很好的借鉴和启示.我国企业要适应国际竞争,就要不断学习和借鉴跨国公司的先进营销管理思想,实施跨国经营时,需要慎重考虑树立与市场环境要求相适应的营销观念、注重有效地跨文化沟通、强化顾客导向的市场营销调研以及持续的营销创新这几方面问题,通过学习跨国公司的本土化营销策略,不断增强自身的竞争力,结果会一步步发展壮大起来,更好地参与国际竞争并且走向世界.     

Economists,social reformers,and prophets: a feminist critique of economic efficiency

This article examines the concept of Pareto optimality, bringing to light some of its implicit assumptions about the nature of human agency, work, and gender. It explores the androcentric character of the economic agent and the gendered nature of neoclassical models in relation to the historical development of the concept of economic efficiency during the late 1930s. The thrust toward the development of Pareto optimality as a scientific criterion of economic welfare was a response to the methodological tensions between the clearly political nature of economics and the scientific aspirations of economists. An examination of the debates from this period illuminates some of the values that became embedded in neoclassical economics, and which are now hidden by the masks of mathematics and abstraction.     

International support of climate change policies in developing countries: Strategic, moral and fairness aspects

International transfers in climate policy channeled from the industrialized to the developing world either support the mitigation of climate change or the adaptation to global warming. From a purely allocative point of view, transfers supporting mitigation tend to be Pareto-improving whereas this is not very likely in the case of adaptation support. We illustrate this by regarding transfer schemes currently applied under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto framework.However, if we enrich the analysis by integrating distributional aspects, we find that international adaptation funding may help both the developing and developed world. Interestingly this is not due to altruistic incentives, but due to follow-up effects on international negotiations on climate change mitigation. We argue that the lack of fairness perceived by developing countries in the international climate policy arena can be reduced by the support of adaptation in these countries. As we show - taking into account different fairness concepts - this might raise the prospects of success in international negotiations on climate change. Yet, we find that the influence of transfers may induce different fairness effects on climate change mitigation negotiations to run counter.We discuss whether current transfer schemes under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto framework adequately serve the distributive and allocative objectives pursued in international climate policy.     

Privatization and capital formation in developing countries: an empirical analysis

The spur for privatization and its impact on economic performance have been analysed from many perspectives, including microeconomics, macroeconomics, and institutional economics. Previous research has focused on efficiency reasons for privatization at the level of the firm, and the relative performance of state‐owned enterprises and privately owned firms. This article investigates the macroeconomic facet of privatization with particular attention paid to the relation between privatization and capital formation in developing countries. Our study uses recent World Bank data on privatization for 105 countries over the time period 1988–2003. We explore the impact of privatization on capital formation by conducting two‐stage least squares and ordinary least squares estimations within three time frames. Our findings indicate that the effect of privatization on capital formation varies across regions and time frames. In general, privatization is neutral with regard to investment.     

Growth,inequality, and poverty reduction in developing countries: Recent global evidence

The study presents comparative global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early-mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively strong, surpassing that of the advanced economies. Both regional and country-specific data are analyzed for the $1.25 and $2.50-level poverty headcount ratios using World Bank Povcalnet data. The study finds that on average income growth has been the major driving force behind both the declines and increases in poverty. The study, however, documents substantial regional and country differences that are masked by this ‘average’ dominant-growth story. While in the majority of countries, growth was the major factor behind falling or increasing poverty, inequality, nevertheless, played the crucial role in poverty behavior in a large number of countries. And, even in those countries where growth has been the main driver of poverty-reduction, further progress could have occurred under relatively favorable income distribution. For more efficient policymaking, therefore, idiosyncratic attributes of countries should be emphasized. In general, high initial levels of inequality limit the effectiveness of growth in reducing poverty while growing inequality increases poverty directly for a given level of growth. It would seem judicious, therefore, to accord special attention to reducing inequality in certain countries where income distribution is especially unfavorable. Unfortunately, the present study also points to the limited effects of growth and inequality-reducing policies in low-income countries.     

Industrial Policies: International Restructuring and Transnationals

We investigate the way structural change (measured in terms of the composition of production) affects the female employment to population ratios in thirty-nine least developed countries. We use random and fixed effects estimation techniques on a panel data from 1991 to 2010. Our findings highlight the importance of structural change on female access to employment. Specifically, we find that, while positive changes in the agriculture sector output tend to significantly favor female absolute and relative employment, those in the services as well as the manufacturing and non-manufacturing industry sectors tend to have negative effects where significant. In addition to sectoral effects, the increased access to education, industrialization, and the decreased reproduction responsibilities are important in enhancing female production responsibilities. Nonetheless, the role of infrastructure development in lessening the unpaid care burden of women, and consequently increasing their employment opportunities in both absolute and relative terms, cannot be underestimated.     

国际技术扩散的度量、途径及阻碍:一个文献综述

全球大部分技术来源于少数发达国家,在经济全球化背景下,技术通过各种渠道在世界范围内的扩散,对各国的技术水平和经济发展产生了重要影响,国际技术扩散日益成为经济增长理论关注的核心问题之一。本文从三个方面对国际技术扩散的文献进行了梳理和总结,包括技术扩散度量的方式、技术扩散的途径及影响技术扩散的因素。相关研究文献表明,在数量上更精准地度量国际技术扩散已经取得了重要进展;通过国际贸易实现的技术扩散能够提高几乎所有国家的生产效率,但是与FD I流入相联系的技术扩散溢出效应却在发达国家和发展中国家之间呈现出显著的差异;一国的地理距离、技术差距、要素禀赋以及政治制度等若干因素为理解这一现象提供了解释。     

Globalisation, capital mobility and tax competition: theory and evidence for OECD countries

Are the predictions of tax competition theory wrong? While the tax competition literature predicts that taxes on income from capital decrease with increasing globalisation, past empirical studies on various data find contradicting evidence. By using different data and additional elements of economic theory, this paper aims to challenge the empirical contributions. For a panel of 14 OECD countries and for the period 1967–1996, we find that globalisation has indeed a negative and significant impact on corporate taxes. Furthermore, globalisation tends to raise labour taxes and social expenditures. As a consequence, the so-called “efficiency” and “compensation” hypotheses of globalisation are not competing, but rather, both appear to apply at the same time. Efficiency has an impact on the tax-mix, whereas compensation is provided through increased social expenditures.     

The fruits of intellectual production: economic and scientific specialisation among OECD countries

This paper brings together data from 17 OECD countries on scientificpublications, patents and production, to explore the relationshipbetween scientific and economic specialisation for 17 manufacturingindustries. Since Marx, there has been a fundamental debatein economics about the link between science and the economicsystem. Marx argued that the needs of production shape scientificdevelopments and that science has become a factor of production,whereas Polanyi argued that developments in science are largelyindependent of the economic sphere. Using a panel data modeland econometric estimations at the industry level, the paperderives some hypotheses from the two positions and finds that,while the overall evidence on the link between national productionand scientific specialisation is mixed, it is important to havehigh levels of relevant to-the-industry scientific strengthper capita in order to be specialised in science-based industries.     

Valuing cultural heritage in developing countries: comparing and pooling contingent valuation and choice modelling estimates

A substantial part of the United Nation’s World Heritage Sites (WHSs) can be found in developing countries, but many of them are in a bad state. Thus, there is a need to document the social benefits of these global goods in order to justify the costs of restoration and preservation programmes (RPPs). This study adds to the scarce literature on economic benefits of WHSs in developing countries, and reduces the need to perform very uncertain benefit transfers from European or US valuation studies. We apply Contingent Valuation (CV) and Choice Modelling (CM) to estimate the social benefits of RPPs for the My Son world cultural heritage site in Vietnam; both to foreign visitors and the local residents. We then compare the estimates from the CV and CM methods, and pool the results from the two methods. The results show that both CV and CM are suited to estimating the economic benefits of preserving cultural heritage of My Son. The two methods produce very similar results, which can be interpreted as a test of convergence validity. The pooling results give evidence to show that the CV and CM models have the same underlying preference structures. Thus, these valuation models can be successfully used in cost-benefit analyses to assess the benefits to cultural heritage of measures to reduce air pollution, soil erosion, climate change and other causes to deterioration of cultural heritage sites.

Natural gas prices and stock prices: Evidence from EU-15 countries

This study investigates the long-run relationship between natural gas prices and stock prices by using the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test and error–correction based Granger causality models for the EU-15 countries. We employ quarterly data covering the period from 1990:1 to 2008:1. Empirical findings suggest that there is a unique long-term equilibrium relationship between natural gas prices, industrial production and stock prices in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Luxembourg. However, no relationship is found between these variables in the other ten EU-15 countries. Although we detect a significant long-run relationship between stock prices and natural gas prices, Granger causality test results imply an indirect Granger causal relationship between these two variables. In addition, we investigate the Granger causal relationship between stock returns, industrial production growth and natural gas price increase for Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Luxembourg. As a result, increase in natural gas prices seem to impact industrial production growth at the first place. In turn, industrial production growth appears to affect stock returns.     

On the estimation and forecasting of international migration: how relevant is heterogeneity across countries?

This paper performs a comparative analysis of estimation as well as of out-of-sample forecasting results of more than 20 estimators common in the panel data literature using the data on migration to Germany from 18 source countries in the period 1967–2001. Our results suggest that the choice of an estimation procedure has a substantial impact on the parameter estimates of the migration function. Out-of-sample forecasting results indicate the following: (1) the standard fixed effects estimators clearly outperforms the pooled OLS estimator, (2) both the fixed effects estimators and the hierarchical Bayes estimator exhibit the superior forecast performance, (3) the fixed effects estimators outperform GMM and other instrumental variables estimators, (4) forecasting performance of heterogenous estimators is mediocre in our data set.     

International merger activity and the national regulation of mergers: A UK perspective

This paper traces out recent changes in the globalisation of merger activity and considers its implications for national and international regulation of mergers and joint ventures. It argues that a large proportion of mergers involve small firms which may have an important effect on the competitive process and that regulation of large mergers should be complemented by industrial and financial policies to encourage the growth of smaller independent firms.     

Exports and growth: Granger causality analysis on OECD countries with a panel data approach

This paper investigates the possibility of Granger causality between the logarithms of real exports and real GDP in twenty-four OECD countries from 1960 to 1997. A new panel data approach is applied which is based on SUR systems and Wald tests with country specific bootstrap critical values. Two different models are used. A bivariate (GDP–exports) model and a trivariate (GDP–exports–openness) model, both without and with a linear time trend. In each case the analysis focusses on direct, one-period-ahead causality between exports and GDP. The results indicate one-way causality from exports to GDP in Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden, one-way causality from GDP to exports in Austria, France, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Norway and Portugal, two-way causality between exports and growth in Canada, Finland and the Netherlands, while in the case of Australia, Korea, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK and the USA there is no evidence of causality in either direction.     

International diffusion of embodied and disembodied technology: A network analysis approach

This study proposes a quantitative method for investigating the structure of international technology diffusion. By using network analysis, this study defines the structural configuration of each country within the international diffusion network by measuring its degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities. In addition, this study distinguishes between embodied technology diffusion, measured by multilateral trade, and disembodied technology diffusion, measured by patent citations, in individual countries. This study empirically tests a sample data set of international technology diffusion taken from 48 countries. The empirical results show that the structural configuration of countries exhibits similar patterns in both embodied and disembodied diffusion networks. Significant global stratification patterns exist in the capability of national international technology exportation and brokerage advantages. Moreover, this study distinguishes four blocks of countries that play different roles in international technology diffusion: the leading countries provide a source of technological knowledge; an intermediate group diffuses the knowledge acquired from the source; a third group is in the process of initiating the export of technological knowledge; and a final group of countries absorbs technological knowledge without reciprocal exportation. Finally, this study identifies two types of catch-up strategies that newly industrialized or developing countries can use to move up the international technology stratification.     

International Integration and Growth: A Further Investigation on Developing Countries

The paper examines empirically the linkages between international integration and economic growth in a panel of 47 developing countries and 18 trade blocs over the period 1970–1989. Specifically, it attempts to identify through which channel(s) – notably, specialization according to comparative advantage and increased efficiency, exploitation of increasing returns from larger market, and technology spillovers through investment and trade–trade blocs can affect the economic growth of their member countries. The results suggest that (1) intra-bloc trade does not affect growth significantly; (2) income diversion among member countries contributes positively and significantly to growth; and (3) the size of the trade bloc does matter in the sense that the bigger is not always the better for the welfare of the member countries.     

How do income and education affect health inequality: evidence from four developing countries

Using household survey data from four countries ? Albania, Nepal, Tajikistan and Tanzania ? this article calculates income-related inequality in health care utilization. We measure health disparity separately for generally and chronically ill individuals by constructing two models: one for the probability of a visit to a physician and another for the number of visits. Following model-based measurements, we decompose inequality into two major parts: one accounted for by identity-related factors and another by socioeconomic and other factors such as education, geography and distance to a clinic. We propose a new method to quantify the effect of changes in income and education on health disparity. One of our important findings suggests that health disparity is pro-rich in all our sample countries. The pro-rich disparity is prevalent among generally ill as well as chronically ill patients, in both visit probability and visit frequency models. Health inequality seems primarily driven by income differences followed by nonidentity factors. Further, the principle of equal treatment for equal need is not fulfilled in any of our countries. Among policy implications, increasing average income and education in a way that also reduces disparity in income and education, respectively, will substantially shrink inequality in health care utilization.