SHORT‐RUN POLICY COMMITMENT WHEN INVESTMENT TIMING IS ENDOGENOUS: ‘MORE HARM THAN GOOD?’

In our model, firms choose when to set cost‐reducing investment and the government, which only has short‐run commitment power, sets an output subsidy. We show that firms that delay investment without government intervention have an incentive to invest early under policy activism, strategically underinvesting or overinvesting to obtain larger subsidies. The policy scheme thus creates a new, potentially more harmful, distortion. Under oligopoly, a firm has a weaker incentive to manipulate policy than under monopoly, which makes policy intervention less harmful. We investigate when the government may do better by adhering to laissez‐faire than by engaging in active policy intervention.     

The Race to Connect East Asia: An Unending Steeplechase

East Asia has become more integrated as a region over the past quarter century. In looking ahead, this article identifies five central obstacles to further regionalism. Three address the composition of any future East Asian region: the arenas in which cooperation is sought, the geographic scope of any future region, and the extent to which regional ties are formalized. The other two variables will influence the future regardless of how the first three are resolved: the structure and balance of domestic political forces, and leadership. The complex interactions of these five are then examined in the recent moves toward preferential trade pacts, increased regional monetary and financial cooperation, and security.     

贸易保护主义的制度经济学分析

随着国际贸易经济的发展,资产在国际间的流动逐渐成为国际贸易中不可忽略的一个重要组成部分,其是否发生沉淀成本有可能对国际商品贸易和投资产生重要影响,不仅会影响国际贸易的总量和产品构成,而且还会影响一国贸易政策的选择。如果一国进行了沉淀成本投资,就会使其在贸易谈判中陷入进退两难困境,失去了讨价还价的力量,并影响其在贸易利益上的分配格局。因而为了摆脱这种被要挟和被控制的风险,政府实行一定的保护主义政策是十分必要的。     

中国反垄断的政治经济学解读

大企业通常会利用市场支配力获得转移收益，这会扭曲合理的财富分配进而抑制整个社会的价值创造，因而应该受到反垄断行为审查。同时，经济全球化使得大企业依仗其市场支配力获得的转移收益不再局限于国内，利益受损者可能是他国民众，因而世界各国的反垄断行为呈现出明显的倾向性。事实上，尽管那些知名外资大企业凭借其规模经济为中国社会提供了物美价廉的产品和服务，提高了国人的消费剩余和经济福利，但也因独占市场而挤压了国内相关企业和产业的发展空间，造成长远的国家福利损失，因而当前中国政府的反垄断调查集中在具有市场支配力的大型外资企业上。     

Intergroup Economic Inequality Across Countries: An lntroductory Essay

The article identifies, neutrally, several factors together making for world governance, by whatever name. These are a desire by people to participate in the making of decisions that affect them in important ways and the growth of international political externalities. The analysis is conducted with consideration given to the nature and scope of governance, vis-à-vis government, the role and significance of international organizations, and the logic of representative democracy. The result amounts to a political equivalent to the merger solution for externalities.     

Trade Theory and Factor Intensities: An Interpretive Essay

Since Heckscher's 1919 pioneering contribution to international trade theory, the concept of "factor intensity" has played a key role in explanations of trade patterns and the consequences of international trade for local income distribution. This essay discusses the uses that have been made of the concept and its applicability to problems that are couched in higher dimensions. The author suggests that it has an important role to play in "new" trade theory in which the strong link between commodity prices and costs of production may be removed by the existence of imperfectly competitive markets.     

Financial Liberalization and Inflationary Dynamics: An Open Economy Analysis

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of financial liberalization on inflation. We develop an open economy monetary endogenous growth general equilibrium model, with financial intermediaries subjected to obligatory ‘high’ reserve ratio, serving as the source of financial repression. When calibrated to four Southern European semi-industrialized countries, namely Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, which typically had high reserve requirements, the model indicates a positive inflation–financial repression relationship irrespective of the specification of preferences. But the strength of the relationship obtained from the model is found to be much smaller in size than the corresponding empirical estimates.     

Impact of openness, economic policy reform and regional shocks on trade and growth of Thailand： An econometric study

Thailand has currently enhanced and promoted intensive trade and investment liberalization and implemented long-term growth policy according with current regional economic integration, WTO obligations and globalization. Nevertheless, several recent internal and external factors e.g. the massive SARS and avian flu outbreaks, the Indian Ocean tsunami devastation, the Asia financial crisis and domestic policy reforms （ICSEAD, 2006） have also impeded this policy. While the issues are important for Thailand and developing countries in Asia, only limited research has been undertaken to investigate them. The paper conducts a substantive quantitative study to contribute to these trade and development policy issues. A new econometric modelling policy method, namely the generalized gravity theory （Tran Van Hoa, 2004） is used to develop a simple flexible simultaneous-equation econometric model of Thailand＇s openness model with its seven major trade partners （ASEAN-4, Australia, the USA, the EU, China, Japan and India）. Using data from the ICSEAD, the World Development Indicators and the Bank of Thailand databases, the paper reveals efficient and reliable empirical findings on trade-growth causality, trade determination including the impact of shocks and policy reform on trade and growth between Thailand and its major trade partners over the past two decades. The paper also provides evidence on the linkages between trade in goods, FDI and services and regional economic integration for more credible policy implications.     

Inequality and Trade Policy: The Pro‐Poor Bias of Contemporary Trade Restrictions

This paper studies the pro‐poor bias of trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of removing the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro‐poor trade policy is expected to have a negative differential welfare effect at the low end of the distribution. The paper first constructs trade restrictiveness indexes for household consumption items and industries using both tariffs and non‐tariff barriers. The results indicate that Indian trade policy is regressive through the expenditure channel as it disproportionately raises the cost of consumption for poorer households, while it is progressive through the earnings channel. Based on the net welfare effects, the elimination of the current trade protection structure is estimated to reduce inequality. These results indicate that a trade policy that is progressive through the earnings channel may induce a price effect that is regressive through the expenditure channel.     

中哈区域经济合作争端解决机制的分阶段设计

成熟的争端解决机制是区域经济合作得以健康发展的有力保障。鉴于中哈两国现行的争端解决机制存在纠纷解决方式少、纠纷解决条款覆盖面窄、解决机制设计简单等缺陷,本文提出两国应根据区域经济合作发展的不同阶段,分别针对中哈霍尔果斯国际边境合作中心、边境自由贸易区直至中哈自由贸易区设置相应的争端解决机制,以促进中哈区域经济合作的发展。     

Post-Lange Market Socialism: An Evaluation of Profit-Oriented Proposals

In recent years we have observed significant growth in the private sector in many higher education systems around the globe. This growth of private higher education is associated with high political expectations, notably concerning greater choice of programs and greater responsiveness of institutions to students' and labor markets' demands. Looking at the experience of several European and Latin American countries, this study analyzes the patterns of program diversification of public and private higher education and discusses the impact of the private sector for the diversification of higher education's supply. The results show a contrasting picture between political beliefs about privatization in higher education and its actual results, suggesting that private institutions tend to be far more specialized than their public counterparts.     

Manias,Panics and Crashes in Emerging Markets: An Empirical Investigation of the Post-2008 Crisis Period

ABSTRACT

Because of their economic importance, international bond markets are thought to be the likely location for the operation of financial market pressures on emerging market (EM) government policy. An important but unresolved debate that runs through the literature is the relative importance of domestic factors specific to the country receiving the capital flows (pull factors), versus push factors exogenous to the receiving country, in driving portfolio flows to EMs. Through extensive interviews with financial market participants, and analysis of the financial press between January 2008 and 2013, this paper argues that not only were market participants fully aware of the importance of push factors over the cycle, but that their perceptions of the domestic fundamentals themselves were influenced by these push factors. The paper provides evidence on the micro-foundations of investment decision making that make investors susceptible to influence by the push factors, and adds to a growing body of evidence that financial market borrowing costs are even less in the control of emerging market governments than previously assumed, because even when investors pay attention to domestic fundamentals, their assessments can be divorced from reality. This means that government efforts to attract foreign capital through implementing investors' preferred policies may be ultimately futile.     

中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易发展的思考

服务贸易是中国—东盟自由贸易区发展的一项重要内容,中国和东盟各国应在加快服务贸易合作的基础上,通过保障服务贸易良好发展的一系列协议,采取不同策略逐步发展服务贸易,消除服务贸易中产生的摩擦,以实现中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易的快速发展。     

Globalization and electoral outcomes: Evidence from Italy

We study whether and to what extent the electoral dynamics in Italy over the 1994–2008 period can be explained by the development of economic factors associated with globalization. To measure the level of exposure to globalization for local labor markets, our main unit of analysis, we use the intensity of import competition from China and the presence of immigrants. Looking at parties’ political positions and employing an estimation strategy that accounts for endogeneity and time‐invariant unobserved effects across local labor markets, we find that both immigration intensity and exposure to import competition from China have contributed positively to the electoral outcomes of far‐right parties, whereas only immigration intensity has increased the vote shares of right‐wing and traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist parties. Some evidence, albeit not robust, shows that immigration may have also had a positive impact on far‐left parties, thus possibly further contributing toward political polarization. Moreover, electoral turnout has responded negatively to an increased presence of migrants. While the above effects seem to work through the mediation of labor markets, our results, especially those related to immigration, suggest that other mechanisms at the level of local communities are also at play.     

Financial development and growth: An empirical analysis

Over the last two decades several countries experienced currency crises. These were characterized both by a huge disruption of economic activity and an extreme speed of diffusion within countries. The financial turmoil happened in a period of very high degree of international financial integration. As a result financial liberalization was associated with greater incidence of crises and this brought an intense debate in both academic and policy circles about the consequences of free capital movements.     

Trust versus illusion: What is driving demonetization in the former Soviet Union?

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behaviour of industrial sectors in Ukraine in 1997. Based on the pricing data of 165 barter deals we find no systematic difference in the pricing behaviour in non-cash transactions across sectors. What appears to matter for the pricing behaviour is whether the firm is on the selling or buying end of the barter transaction. We offer a model that sees this pricing behaviour as a mechanism to deal with the absence of trust and liquidity in the economy.
JEL classification: D20, G30, O10, P30.     

“Fair marriages”: An impossibility

For marriage markets [Gale, D. and Shapley, L.S., 1962, College admissions and the stability of marriage, American Mathematical Monthly 69, 9–15.] so-called fair matchings do not always exist. We show that restoring fairness by using monetary transfers is not always possible: there are marriage markets where no amount of money can guarantee the existence of a fair allocation.     

中日韩自由贸易协定对区域内贸易影响的实证研究

根据中日韩三国贸易的实际情况,把影响中日韩三国的贸易主要因素确定为经济规模、人口、运输距离、制度安排等变量,并且进行回归分析,结果显示,制度安排对各国贸易的影响是均显著的。因此,中日韩三国自由贸易协定的缔结将促进区域内贸易的增长。     

Raced Markets: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm.