美国应对甲型H1N1流感的经验及防控建议

甲型H1N1（猪）流感这一新型流感病毒的突然爆发是对世界公共卫生系统防治流行病传播的一次考验。美国以及世界各国在应对此次甲型H1N1流感爆发中展示了应对流行疾病防控能力和经济实力,当然,也暴露了不少不足之处。倘若疫情的范围进一步扩大、严重性增加,美国公共卫生系统会无法承受。本文简要阐述美国智囊组织对美国应对甲型H1N1流感爆发的经验和防控建议,以及作者的几点启示。     

Vibert's vision: Constitutional theory in search of a constitution

Frank Vibert's book, Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium, draws on constitutional economics to describe how a European constitution should be developed to govern a European political union. Vibert's theoretical constitutional framework is solid, but his analysis has two shortcomings. First, he discusses constitutional theory but never presents any specific constitutional provisions that would be based on that theory. This makes the feasibility of drawing up an acceptable constitution appear more straightforward than it actually is. Second, he assumes that Europe will eventually be politically unified in much the same manner as the United States, and does not consider alternatives. Rather than having a single European government, as Vibert suggests, a better alternative would be to have European nations united through a variety of treaties, agreements, and multinational organizations.     

Tax incentives in fiscal federalism: an integrated perspective

Abstract Models of fiscal federalism rarely account for the efficiency implications of intergovernmental fiscal ties for federal tax policy. This paper shows that fiscal institutions such that federal tax deductibility, vertical revenue‐sharing, and fiscal equalization (being common features of existing federations) encourage local taxation, but may discourage federal taxation. Furthermore, the structure of public spending is skewed towards local spending. We also show that, when considering Leviathan governments, fiscal institutions reduce confiscatory taxation by the federal government. The result is contrary to the Cartelization Hypothesis ( Brennan and Buchanan 1980 ). Finally, we characterize the efficient design of intergovernmental fiscal ties.     

Tax competition and tax structure in open federal economies: Evidence from OECD countries with implications for the European Union

Tax competition arguments suggest that governments that operate in an open economy (such as local governments) should not and will not rely on non-benefit taxes, such as the income tax. Yet we observe reliance on income taxes by local governments in many countries, and such reliance changes over time. Evidence from a panel data set of 13 OECD countries over the period 1975-1984 suggests that competition between levels of government (resulting in a vertical fiscal externality) and between governments at the same level (resulting in a horizontal fiscal externality) provide some economic rationale for these changes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the vertical and horizontal fiscal externalities interact. These results have some interesting implications for fiscal policy in the European Union, particularly as the EU continues to evolve. One implication for the EU is that enlargement that increases tax base disparities within the EU (and is not accompanied by an EU-level income tax) will tend to lower national income tax rates, although this must be qualified because it also depends on the mobility of the population. A second implication is that fiscal expansion of the EU to include an EU-level income tax may tend to lower the reliance of national governments on income taxes through the vertical externality, but may also tend to equalize tax bases across countries, and so increase reliance on national income taxes through the horizontal externality.     

Tax competition, rent-seeking and fiscal decentralization

The present paper provides a basis for evaluating fiscal decentralization of expenditure and tax responsibilities, by encompassing the literature on tax competition and rent seeking. Both tax and rent seeking competitions are conceived of as being wasteful and self-defeating. We find that rent-seeking activities account for political distortions which may be mitigated in the process of fiscal decentralization, while tax competition results in economic distortions associated with decentralization. Welfare evaluation should be based on the balance of the political gain and the economic cost.     

Comparing the spread of capitalism and democracy

We apply Leeson and Dean’s (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.     

Less Government—More Wealth? On the Macroeconomics of a Smaller Public Sector in Europe

In this paper, we analyze the reactions of European economies to a fiscal policy strategy aiming at diminishing the public sector. Within the framework of the MSG3 model, a macroeconomic model of the world economy, we perform several simulation experiments to explore the effects of reducing government expenditures permanently in different phases of the business cycle. For this purpose, we combine the fiscal contraction with negative and positive, Euro Area-wide and global, supply and demand shocks. It turns out that adverse Keynesian effects on output and employment tend to be mostly weak and short-lived, whereas long-run effects on output and employment are favorable. Due to these long-run effects, the fiscal contraction policy raises welfare as measured by an asymmetric quadratic objective function. The size of these welfare effects depends on the initial situation in a non-trivial manner.     

On government centralization and fiscal referendums

Several authors have argued that a centralization of fiscal powers in a federation is less likely to occur if citizens have to approve a change in the assignments of responsibilities by a popular referendum. This outcome may be due to the fact that logrolling is more difficult under direct than under representative democracy. It may also be caused by citizens’ fear that a centralization of fiscal authority facilitates the extraction of rents by the government or the legislature. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that centralization is less likely under referendum decision-making in the unique institutional setting of Switzerland. Using a panel of Swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998, the empirical analysis provides evidence that referendums induce less centralization of fiscal activities.     

Strategic Interaction Among Local Governments in Japan: An Application to Cultural Expenditure

In the context of limited local government resources, cultural expenditures are often targeted for reduction. In Japan in particular, with its aging population, cultural expenditures have low priority. This paper examines whether or not local governments strategically influence each other with respect to cultural spending, using data from Japanese local governments. By estimating the reaction functions for local cultural expenditures, we find that there exists free‐rider behaviour between local cultural expenditures that produce beneficial spillover effects. We also find a larger free‐rider incentive the shorter the distance between neighbouring regions, the shorter the travel time between neighbouring regions, and the larger the neighbouring region's population. Furthermore, our results reveal that the provision of cultural services through intergovernmental strategic behaviours is more elastic with respect to the relative change of the distance or the travel time among neighbouring regions than to that of the population size among neighbouring regions.     

The constitutional future of the European Union

The formal distinction between a treaty and a constitution is much less important than the question of who is authorized to interpret and amend it. The judges of the European Court of Justice interpret the Treaty by simple majority, while unanimity of the member-states would be required to reverse these decisions. The European Union needs a Court whose judges are empanelled from, and selected by, the highest courts of the member-states. The Treaty on European Union violates three fundamental constitutional principles: (i) the principle of the separation of powers, (ii) the democratic principle, and (iii) the principle of subsidiarity.     

Constitutional safeguards against centralization in federal states: An international cross-section analysis

This paper contains an international cross-section analysis of the share of central government expenditure in total government expenditure for a sample of about 50 countries and a subsample of 23 industrial countries in 1989–91. The expenditure shares, their changes and the unexplained residuals for each country are reported in Table 1. As the analysis demonstrates, the share of central government is significantly lower, if income per capita and the country's area are large and if it is a federal state. The explanatory power of the equation rises considerably if the binary dummy for federalism is replaced by quantitative constitutional variables. The most powerful single explanatory variable is the age of the constitutional court in the complete sample or the constitutional court's independence of union institutions in the sample of industrial countries. The equation's explanatory power (adjusted for degrees of freedom) can be raised by allowing also for the degree of control which provincial institutions have over the constitution and over the second chamber and by taking into account whether an increase in federal tax rates requires a popular referendum. Other types of constitutional referenda and the relative age of the federal constitution do not seem to matter. Among the federal states, the share of central government is much larger than predicted in the United States and Mexico, and it is much smaller than predicted in Argentina and Canada. The constitutional variables are particularly helpful in explaining the relatively small share of central government in Switzerland, Malaysia, Germany and Austria. The last section draws conclusions for the design of constitutions with some special applications to the European Union.     

Estimating the private benefits of vaccination against cholera in Beira, Mozambique: A travel cost approach

This paper reports the results of the first study that estimates households' private demand for cholera vaccines using the travel cost method. We take advantage of an unusual natural experiment. In January 2004, more than 41,000 residents from various locations in Beira, Mozambique received two doses of oral cholera vaccine free of charge during the first vaccination trial to test its effectiveness in an endemic cholera zone of Africa. About 30,000 people participated from outside the target zone, resulting in long queues and an average waiting time of about 85 min per dose.We estimated travel cost models of the revealed demand for cholera vaccines among households informed of the trial using information collected in in-person interviews conducted during the summer of 2005. To explore households' participation in the trial, we used standard and zero-inflated household count models for all household members and dichotomous choice models for the head of the household. Our analysis shows that the quantity of vaccines obtained by households and the likelihood of participation decreased as travel cost—in time and transport expenses—rose. Our best estimates of per capita willingness to pay for the two required doses of cholera vaccine are about 0.85 USD. These estimates are sensitive to the assumed value of time spent acquiring vaccines.     

A directly democratic and Federal Europe

This paper endeavors to take up the neglected aspects of federalism and direct democracy. It emphasizes the mutual dependence of the two for reaching the goals of efficiency and trust. Direct democracy is seen to preserve federalism, but even more importantly, federalism is taken to enable and to preserve effective direct democracy. Empirical evidence is adduced showing in particular that direct democracy leads to higher efficiency in the sense of lowering transaction costs. A proposal for a novel combination of federalism and direct democracy—which is called FOCJ (the acronym for Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions)—is suggested for Europe.Financial Supported by the Swiss National Fund (Project No. 12-42480-9) is greatefully acknowledge.     

The Income Splitting Method: Is it Good for Both Marriage Partners?

Abstract. This paper analyzes how deviating from individual taxation affects married couples. The focus is on time allocation, on investment in family‐specific human capital and on distribution of income within the family. Two insights are discussed in detail. First, the distribution of tax‐reduction gains due to the income splitting system depends on whether the family has been started or not. After marriage, joint taxation increases redistribution among family members. Second, although joint taxation reduces the tax burden of the family, it might harm the marriage partner that is more productive in household production provided that potential marriage partners foresee the effects of joint filing on the time allocation within the family.     

Existence of equilibrium and stratification in local and hierarchical Tiebout economies with property taxes and voting

Summary. This paper present the first fully closed general equilibrium model of hierarchical and local public goods economies with the following features: (i) multiple agent types who are endowed with both some amount of private good (income) and a house, who are mobile between houses and jurisdictions, and who vote in local and national elections; (ii) multiple communities that finance a local public good through property taxes which are set in accordance with absolute majority rule; and (iii) a national government that produces a national public good financed through an income tax whose level is determined through majority rule voting. In contrast to previous models, no overly restrictive assumptions on preferences and technologies are required to prove the existence of an equilibrium in the presence of property taxation and voting. Thus, the existence of an equilibrium is proved without any of the major restrictions used in the past, and sufficient conditons for stratification of agents into communities based on their public good preferences and their wealth levels are found. This model lays the groundwork for a positive applied analysis of local public finance and intergovernmental relations. It furthermore builds the foundation for the first parameterized computable general equilibrium model of local public goods and fiscal federalism. Received: February 1, 1996; revised version August 9, 1996     

运动估计快速搜索算法的研究

H.264是ITU的VCEG(视频编码专家组)和ISO/IEC的MPEG(活动图象编码专家组)的联合视频组(JVT:joint video team)开发的一个新的数字视频编码标准,它既是ITU-T的H.264,又是ISO/IEC的MPEG-4的第10部分.新一代标准H.264可以得到更好的压缩图像效果、拥有更多的功能和更大的灵活性.本文主要从实时视频应用的角度,对H.264/AVC编码过程中运动估计模块快速搜索算法进行了研究.     

A new challenge to our brains: Finding the knowledge construct for world-level problems

If the ultimate resource is the human brain, the critical question is, “How well are we using it?” For the past 200 or so years we have concentrated on one capability—the power to reason, and in so doing have lost sight of the social and cultural components of knowledge. The new challenge is therefore to construct knowledge that is valid across the many societies and cultures in the world to enable world problems to be tackled in a world, rather than in a one- or two-culture, context.The purpose of this paper is to outline the limitations to knowledge constructed on a primarily rational basis and to propose how to go beyond them. These limitations encourage the reduction of the problems to a quantitative basis, and hence emphasize the measurable aspects of issues, usually the economic and the military. Unfortunately, as Stafford Beer pointed out many years ago, problems cannot be solved within their own context but only within a larger context. Present attempts to attain peace through measures of quantifiable destructiveness are therefore unlikely to prove effective. The way out, as Kenneth Boulding has noted, is to reformulate world problems in terms of peace, since the criteria for stable peace are not necessarily identical with those for the non-outbreak of war. One corollary is the need to reconstruct our knowledge using the whole brain, and in doing so, provide a knowledge basis valid across different societies and cultures. This is indeed a new, and very real, extension and challenge to the use of our brains.