Increasing resourcefulness: the key to declining resources

Nurse executives face many daily issues related to balancing scarce resources with an ever-increasing demand for high quality services and programs. Never before have nursing organizations been faced with such relentless pressure to conserve resources and control costs in the process to meet organizational missions.     

Increasing Wealth and Increasing Instability: The Role of Collateral

In development economics, growth in credit is generally associated with faster long-run growth as financial intermediation improves the efficiency of channeling capital to productive investment. Yet, among developing countries high growth in credit almost always guarantees the outbreak of a financial crisis. The authors attempt to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory facts with an endogenous growth model in which entry to international borrowing entails some significant fixed cost. The poorest countries are excluded from international borrowing because of the fixed cost. The higher-income developing countries will find it optimal to sink the fixed cost to borrow internationally, growing faster as a result, but also become prone to fluctuations arising from shocks to the international financial market.     

Path modelling to bankruptcy: causes and symptoms of the banking crisis

This article studies the bankruptcy of US banks since 2009. It first analyses the financial symptoms that precede bankruptcy, such as low profitability, insufficient revenue or low solvency ratios. It also goes into the causes of these symptoms. It poses several hypotheses on causes of failure, such as loan growth (some of them risky), specialization (in this case concentration in real estate) and the pursuit of a turnover-driven strategy neglecting margin. It presents and tests a structural equation modelling based on partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) and logistic regression. Results show that, 5 years before the crisis, failed banks had, compared to solvent banks, the following: higher loan growth, higher concentration on real estate loans, higher risk ratios, higher turnover, but lower margins. A relationship is found between symptoms and causes. Failed banks present a significant relationship between the percentage of real estate loans and risk. This relationship is negative in excellent banks, confirming that they allocated less real estate loans with a high quality. Nonfailed banks compensated increases in risk by strengthening their core capital.     

VAR modelling and Haavelmo's probability approach to macroeconomic modelling

Some recent developments in the macroeconometric analysis of time series are discussed in the light of Haavelmo (1944). Experimental design in econometrics is discussed and related to the case of passive observation. The general ideas are illustrated with a analysis of the long-run and short-run structure in Danish monetary data.This paper has benefitted from useful comments from Søren Johansen, Claus Va strup and John Muellbauer, and in particular, from two unknown referees. Financial report from the joint committee of the Nordic Social Science Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.     

On the accessibility of core-extensions

Sengupta and Sengupta (1996) study the accessibility of the core of a TU game and show that the core, if non-empty, can be reached from any non-core allocation via a finite sequence of successive blocks. This paper complements the result by showing that when the core is empty, a number of non-empty core-extensions, including the least core and the weak least core (Maschler et al., 1979), the positive core (Orshan and Sudhölter, 2001) and the extended core (Bejan and Gómez, 2009), are accessible in a strong sense, namely each allocation in each of the foregoing core-extensions can be reached from any allocation through a finite sequence of successive blocks.     

Increasing returns to scale and the reverse flexible accelerator

We show that the flexible accelerator principle characterizes optimal investment behavior only when the firm's technology exhibits decreasing returns to scale throughout. When there are increasing returns we show that there is a range in which investment increases as the capital stock increases towards its long-run equilibrium level.     

Increasing returns to scale and productive systems

We consider an economy in which some producers may have nonconvex technologies, in particular they may operate under increasing returns to scale. These producers constitute the I-part of the economy. The prices of all goods and the target supply of the I-part are supposed to be given. Each producer in the I-part produces a certain output in a cost-minimizing way. There is a planning board which has to find decentralizing (gross) output levels for the producers in the I-part such that the net output equals target supply. The existence of such output levels is proven under a productivity assumption which includes the case of strongly increasing returns to scale as well as productive Leontief systems.     

Increasing returns to savings and wealth inequality

In this paper I present an explanation to the fact that in the data wealth is substantially more concentrated than income. Starting from the observation that the composition of households' portfolios changes towards a larger share of high-yield assets as the level of net worth increases, I first use data on historical asset returns and portfolio composition by wealth level to construct an empirical return function. I then augment an Overlapping Generation version of the standard neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic labor income risk and missing insurance markets to allow for returns on savings to be increasing in the level of accumulated assets. The quantitative properties of the model are examined and show that an empirically plausible difference between the return faced by poor and wealthy agents is able to generate a substantial increase in wealth inequality compared to the basic model, enough to match the Gini index and all but the top 1 percentile of the US distribution of wealth.     

转变增长方式实现可持续发展

本文分析了人类文明发展与自然环境演变的关系,探讨了经济增长方式对生态环境的影响,提出应转变增长方式,确立“以人为本”的新发展观,并给出了实现可持续发展的几点建议。     

Site accessibility and prioritization of nature reserves

Nature reserves not only protect habitat-stressed species but also provide recreation and welfare services to people. Therefore, site accessibility matters in reserve design. This study incorporates public accessibility, determined by urban populations and distances between urban areas and reserve sites, as an additional factor in conservation reserve design besides species representation and economic characteristics of individual sites. An optimization approach is introduced to determine a reserve network with maximum accessibility while satisfying specified representation targets under financial constraints. The paper also presents an empirical application of this approach to endangered/threatened birds in Illinois, USA, and analyzes the tradeoffs between ecological, economic, and social objectives of biological conservation. The results show that: i) the conventional minimal representation approach would result in a small reserve network, but this network would have poor accessibility; ii) public accessibility can be improved significantly by selecting alternative sites with the same amount of conservation budget; iii) further improvement in accessibility can be achieved by enlarging the network, but in this particular case the gains would be insignificant after the first few additional sites; and iv) a regionally integrated conservation plan, as opposed to decentralized conservation efforts, is beneficial for both species protection and social welfare.     

房价上涨的成因分析及保障居民住房之对策

文章对我国城市房价上涨的成因进行了分析,认为只有明确楼市价格上涨的成因,才能有针对地采取防止和挤出泡沫的科学对策。     

Trade,Growth, and Increasing Returns to Infrastructure: The Role of the Sophisticated Monopolist*

Equilibrium in international trade with increasing returns in infrastructure depends on whether the infrastructure provider is “naïve” or sophisticated. A monopolist produces infrastructure under decreasing cost using fixed equipment. Unlike similar work, we derive a unique closed‐economy equilibrium. In a small open economy, with “naïve” infrastructure provider(s), multiple equilibria obtain. The industrial export potential of the economy depends on unexhausted economies of scale, and equilibria are possible where manufactures are exported despite an autarky price higher than the world price. With a sophisticated infrastructure provider, even an open economy has a unique equilibrium, which, at least as long as economies of scale are unexhausted, also involves more industrialization than the “naïve” equilibria. Access to the unlimited world market is necessary for significant industrialization but is not sufficient: one may also require “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs, monopolists with a panoramic vision of the economy and of their catalytic role in it.     

Increasing Competition and the Winner's Curse: Evidence from Procurement

We assess empirically the effects of the winner's curse which, in common–value auctions, counsels more conservative bidding as the number of competitors increases. First, we construct an econometric model of an auction in which bidders' preferences have both common– and private–value components, and propose a new monotone quantile approach which facilitates estimation of this model. Second, we estimate the model using bids from procurement auctions held by the State of New Jersey. For a large subset of these auctions, we find that median procurement costs rise as competition intensifies. In this setting, then, asymmetric information overturns the common economic wisdom that more competition is always desirable.     

Evaluating the accessibility of essential medicines in China

Objective: To evaluate the accessibility of essential medicines in China through a new system which integrated the structure, process, and effect of the National Essential Medicine Policy (NEMP).

Methods: A structural equation model was built to verify the reliability of the evaluation system. This study utilized the Delphi method to obtain the structure and process index data, and used the WHO/HAI standard method for the effect index data to evaluate the NEMP. Six regions were selected for empirical analysis so that suggestions for optimization could be put forward.

Results: The structural equation model consisted of three parts: organization structure, executive process, and effect. The factor loading of the three indicators exceeded 0.5, indicating that this model complied with the preliminary fit criteria. In the organizational structure, rules and regulations and resource investment accounted for a large proportion, indicating that they had a great impact on the effect. As for the executive process, the weight of the seven indicators were similar, and they accounted for a large proportion, indicating that each indicator had a non-negligible impact on the effect. The “p” of all the three hypothesizes was less than .01, especially the “p” of hypothesis 3 was less than .001, indicating that the structure and process of NEMP affected the accessibility of the essential medicines, and three components of the model were positively correlated.

Limitations: Some errors may exist in achieving appropriate expert selection because of potential researcher bias in the Delphi approach. The results from only six provinces in China may not be generalized nationwide.

Conclusion: The structural indicators and process indicators have a significant impact on outcome indicators, and they also have correlations. That is, the formulation and implementation of the national drug policy and related supporting measures play an important role in improving the accessibility of essential medicines.     

难以阻挡的潮流--台湾信息产业在大陆的投资

台湾管理当局一直视信息技术产业为核心行业,尤其是晶圆制造业，因为具有尖端技术、高资本密集的特征，历来禁止向大陆进行投资。近年来，由于国际市场需求疲软和海峡两岸经济形势变化，台湾晶圆厂商面对严重的产能过剩,一方面强烈要求台湾管理当局取消禁令，一方面千方百计向大陆进行转移，从而引发了台湾岛内持续半年多的争论。2002年3月29日台湾“行政院”终于作出了决定，按“小规模适度开放”的原则，允许有条件开放8英寸晶圆生产厂商投资大陆。但对投资的总量作出控制：到2005年止，投资总量以3座为上限。且只允许利用旧设备投资设厂…     

The economic constitution of the European community: From Rome to Maastricht

The present paper analyzes the changes in the economic constitution of the European Community since its foundation in 1958. In order to identify the various changes, we start by developing a frame of reference. Our proposition is that theconstitutional charter of the European Economic Community (EEC)—the EEC Treaty—came closest to this frame of reference, being an economic constitution for a market system, whereas the subsequentprocess of European integration—including several modifications of the Treaty—was largely based on the introduction of non-market elements. Our argument is that as far as the economic constitution is concerned, the Treaty of Maastricht is dominated by traits which are characteristic of modern welfare states.     

Empirical tools to assess the sensitivity of directional distance functions to direction selection

Directional Distance Functions (DDFs) are becoming a popular way of measuring efficiency as they encompass the Shephard output and input distance functions as special cases. However, the most critical and still unsolved issue related to DDF remains the selection of the direction along which to measure the distance from the efficient frontier. In this article, we propose some empirical tools which allow to quantify the sensitivity of the efficiency measurement to the selection of the direction. The proposed tools are applied on a dataset on the Italian agricultural sector.