Trade in Environmental Goods: Evidences from an Analysis Using Elasticities of Trade Costs

Negotiations on the liberalization of environmental goods (EGs) and services within the WTO Doha Round (mandated in November 2001) are facing specific challenges. Conflicting interests and differing perceptions of the benefits of increased trade in EGs were reflected in different approaches proposed for determining EGs. Using import data of 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries and from a sample of 167 countries, from 1995 to 2012, we discuss the trade effect of reducing barriers on EGs. We analyze the lists of EGs proposed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and OECD using a Translog gravity model. We found that removing tariff barriers for EGs will have a modest impact because for the biggest importers and exporters, elasticities of trade costs are very low while for most trading relationships they are very high, making it difficult for exporters to maintain their markets. Overall, our results suggest that, because of their substantial effect on international trade, future negotiations on EGs should also address the issues of standards and nontariff barriers.     

中国地方官员的晋升锦标赛模式研究

本文研究了中国地方官员的治理模式——"晋升锦标赛治理模式"的性质与特征,并试图揭示这种特定模式与中国高速经济增长及其各种特有问题的内在关联。本文认为,晋升锦标赛作为中国政府官员的激励模式,它是中国经济奇迹的重要根源,但由于晋升锦标赛自身的一些缺陷,尤其是其激励官员的目标与政府职能的合理设计之间存在严重冲突,它目前正面临着重要的转型。     

Gift Exchange and the Business Cycle: The Fair Wage Strikes Back

We extend the benchmark real business cycle model amending technology for fair wage considerations. Effort depends on current, alternative, and past wages. Past wages are treated as the worker's past wages (personal norm) or as the past wages of the society (social norm). This last model reproduces the high variability of employment, the low variability of wages, and the low wage–employment correlation without requiring a second source of impulsions. Wages and employment dynamics are adequately captured when norms adjust slowly to the environment. Fair wages are thus useful to solve the business cycle puzzle when we allow for intertemporal wage comparisons. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: E24     

Wage Indexation: The Treatment of Public Sector Taxes and Goods*

This paper considers the problem of constructing an index, in the presence of a large public sector, which will tell us whether any adjustment to wages or other payments to households in one situation will leave the households better or worse off than in some previous situation with a different set of prices. This index is an extension of the true price index. The paper also proposes an index of the affordable wages with which the first index should be compared.     

Conformity and the Demand for Environmental Goods

The existing literature on eco-labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice. However, it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers. In fact, it is unclear that people’s consumption decisions are made independently of social context. For instance, under the desire to conform to certain social norms—or in the presence of status concerns—some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. We test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans, share of fair trade beans, and price. Three treatments were used, differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers. We find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women, although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have.     

An Australian Model: Nontraded Goods, Real Exchange Rates and Unemployment

A popular model for considering many international trade and macroeconomic questions is the 'Australian model' of Wilson, Swan and Salter. This paper develops a general equilibrium trade version of the 'Australian model' where unemployment comes from a specified factor market distortion, and considers the effects of immigration, transfers, changes in wage fixing arrangements, terms of trade shocks, tariffs and devaluations. Debates over policies for external and internal balance are revisited, with the advantage that the general equilibrium specification allows welfare consequences of various alternatives to be explicitly considered. In the model external balance is achieved through a flexible exchange rate and the most attractive policies for achieving internal balance are encouraging skilled immigration and skill augmenting technical change, training, and unskilled wage cuts (accompanied by redistribution to affected workers). Foreign borrowing, import tariffs and currency devaluation are problematic policies from a welfare point of view.     

An Environmental Macro-Economic Model for the Construction Sector

This article describes theeconomic-ecological model BASIS, which handles theconstruction sector, its consumption of materials,and the resultant environmental effects. The modelis a satellite model of the macro-economic modelADAM. The building materials examined are plastic,metal and concrete, each of which result in variousemissions that impact upon the environment andhealth. Materials consumption and energy consumptionare central environmental parameters, and can beconsidered both as indicators of environmentalpressure per se, and as explanatory variables forvarious types of emissions and waste generation. Thearticle documents BASIS and illustrates itscharacteristics through a number of scenarios. Thescenarios examine the effects of changes in variousmacro-economic variables and of environmentalpolicy-based levies.     

FDI、经济增长与环境污染——基于SVAR模型的实证分析

在建设美丽中国深化生态文明体制改革背景下,借助SVAR模型检验了FDI、经济增长与环境污染内在机制。实证表明:我国经济与环境延续了"先污染后治理"的国际道路,FDI短期刺激经济增长显著,同时也恶化了环境,长期不是经济增长的动力源泉,但FDI的溢出效应有利于改善环境污染。为了理论与实践上平衡FDI、经济增长与环境保护,提出了调整经济增长极、优化外资质量和结构等政策着力点。     

Computerisation and Wage Dispersion: An Analytical Reinterpretation

The rich countries have recently seen a dramatic rise in income inequality, all the more surprising because the long-term trend had been toward equality. This paper examines one of the leading explanations; computerisation in the workplace. I offer a theory of computers' impact on white-collar work which goes far toward explaining the timing, form, and locus of recent labour market changes. The theory looks at the bureaucratic and organisational applications of computers that have been first, largest, and most influential. They have two effects on firms' demand for labour at different skill levels.     

Recombinant Slave Equilibria and Their Cure: Living Wage Full Employment

Scapegoating and slavery are effects of ordinary necessitous interpersonal relations that are naturally selected, extant in all familial and societal hierarchal equilibria, and evolved from primordial parasitism through our primate cousins in order to manage uncertainty. As such, slavery predates and survives all legal strictures. Although social equilibria have progressed equitably in the developed world, it is suggested that slavery's modern cure will only be found by precluding the genetic proclivity to exclude with an actual living-wage, full-employment economy.     

Statistical Discrimination and Gender Wage Gap: A Model

In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker’s skill type and partly rely on the average skills level of his (her) peers for inference purpose, employers’ differential treatment of male and female workers can create different skill-investment incentives for them, which in turn justify employers’ discrimination in the first place. The second result of this paper which is not possible within the original CL framework is that I point to the possibility that there exist circumstances under which the gender wage gap can not be eliminated without the formerly advantaged sex being negatively affected.     

推进农业产业化实施的原则和措施

本文从可持续发展的角度分析了我国农业产业化进程中的问题,指出了实施农业产业化过程中贯彻可持续发展原则的意义,提出了可持续农业化战略的概念及其应遵循的几项基本原则,并对政府在可持续农业产业化中的作用作了简要论述。     

The Relation between Real Wage Rates and Employment: An Intertemporal General- Equilibrium Analysis

Abstract. The paper studies the relation between real wage rates and employment in an intertemporal model in which expectations of subsequent real wage rates affect equilibrium capital investments and equilibrium interest rates in previous periods. Whether the wage–employment tradeoff is more favourable or less favourable in this model than in the static model with given capital depends on whether there is relatively more substitution in consumption or in production, or, more precisely, whether the elasticity of substitution in production is less than or greater than the inverse of the elasticity of marginal utility in consumption.     

International Environmental Agreement and Trade in Environmental Goods: The Case of Kyoto Protocol

Environmental and Resource Economics - The Kyoto Protocol has received much criticism for its effectiveness as well as the spillover effect (i.e. carbon leakage and competitiveness loss). This...     

Outsourcing and Wage Inequality in a Dynamic Product Cycle Model

This paper constructs a dynamic North–South trade model with outsourcing and endogenous innovation. Production of high quality goods is first performed in the North (Northern phase), then split between the North and the South (Outsourcing phase), and finally shifted to the South (Southern phase). This cycle is reignited whenever a Northern firm innovates a higher quality product. We find that an increase in the fraction of outsourced production raises the Northern skill premium unambiguously, while raising the Southern skill premium if and only if the skill intensity of outsourced production is higher than that of local Southern production.     

An Analysis of Congestion Measures and Heterogeneous Angler Preferences in a Random Utility Model of Recreational Fishing

The potential importance ofcongestion effects on the management andrationing of recreational facilities andservices in the presence of heterogeneouspreferences were highlighted nearly twenty-fiveyears ago by Freeman and Haveman (1977). Whilethere have been a number of theoretical modelsextending and expanding upon this work(McConnell 1988; Anderson 1993), empiricalresearch evaluating such impacts is limited. Evidence of the potential impacts of congestionon resource usage is of obvious importance,especially for natural resource managers whounderstand that congestion can be an effectiverationing device and because users likelydiffer in both their preferences for use andaversion to congestion. It is the objective ofthis research to compare alternative measuresof congestion for explaining site choice withina random utility modeling framework. Thecongestion measures differ with respect to thetime horizon over which they are assumed to beformulated and the measure of central tendencyused to represent them. Furthermore, weinvestigate how the response to thesecongestion measures may differ across twodistinct angler types and the implications ofthose differences on the per trip willingnessto pay for stock enhancement.     

Modelling Winners and Losers in Contingent Valuation of Public Goods: Appropriate Welfare Measures and Econometric Analysis

Contingent valuation is now the most widely used method for valuing non-marketed goods in cost-benefit analysis. Yet, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non-negative. This can result in significant errors in policymaking. This paper examines the importance of this, explores appropriate welfare measures for assessing losses and gains, demonstrates how these can be elicited explicitly, highlights the sensitivity of the results of such studies to the econometric specification employed and suggests ways of dealing with it. Finally, the implications for policy are examined.     

不甘落后劳动者模型

文章开始介绍了实际中观察到的两份工资合同:A合同低底薪,然后按比例提成;B.合同高底薪,但要求达到一定的产出额度,超出按比例提成,不足按相同比例扣减.由于简单的参数模型不足以解释这两份合同的差别,作者运用委托代理的思想设计了不甘落后的劳动者模型,此模型的假设是,不甘落后的劳动者,依据薪酬周期的前半部分的努力水平,调整在后半部分中的努力水平.在这里作者引入了不甘落后系数,这样模型很好地解释了上述两份合同的差别.并且得出随着不甘落后系数的增大,代理人分享产出的比例逐步减小,总代理成本逐步减小.此模型随后还得出最优合同设置的必要条件.     

Wage Determination of a Child Worker: A Theoretical Analysis

A theory of wage determination of a child worker is presented using the consumption efficiency hypothesis and the Nash bargaining technique. The employer and the guardian of the child play the bargaining game. The model shows some interesting results regarding the split of the wage between the consumption of the child and the income of the guardian.