户外广告，拍卖也疯狂

上期本刊策划的《广州“拍卖门”，权力滥用还是合法监管》专题，引起了业界的反响。有广告主特意来函说明他们对此事的看法．其中不乏见解深刻者．编者特将之刊登，以飨读者；同时对于业界人士的热心支持表示由衷的感谢！     

The economics of welfare

We need to tone down the emotional content of the discussion of welfare and deal with facts. The author points out that public assistance takes two principal forms: crude and subtle. The former includes aid to the needy; subtle aid is given regardless of need. In the minds of many, crude programs are welfare, but the subtle programs are not. Statistics reveal that of the 14 million who receive direct aid, only 1 percent are unemployed males. Therefore, no significant group can be identified as undeserving. The system, as it now stands, humiliates the recipients, offers inadequate benefits, lacks fairness and uniformity and perpetuates poverty. The author offers six corrective measures that should be taken.     

The economics of exhaustible resources

Are natural resources getting scarcer? How should the limited reservoir of non-replenishable raw materials such as metals and fossile fuels be utilized by successive generations? What possible solutions are proposed by economics in the face of diminishing reserves of raw materials? These are the questions which occupied German and foreign economists at the meeting of Gesellschaft für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften—Verein für Socialpolitik—in Mannheim on September 24–26, 1979. The following report on the crucial issues raised at the meeting is not claimed to cover the full range of the discussion.     

The economics of rules of origin

Rules of origin of free trade arrangements limit the use of inputs from outside the preferential trade zone. A government negotiating a future FTAcan manipulate these rules in order to achieve national welfare objectives. The correct definition of rules of origin may help to enhance demand for domestically produced goods, promote national technological development, and maximize labour income. This paper proves that a more stringent rule of origin implies an increase of demand for the domestic factor if the substitution effect prevails over the effects caused by the decrease of the scale of operation in the domestic plant, and the reallocation of output between domestic and foreign plants. We further show that policy decisions regarding rules of origin that intertemporally maximize welfare and foster domestic technological evolution should be made at the greatest level of disaggregation that is feasible.     

The economics of German Unification reconsidered

The task of vitalizing the east German economy was severely underestimated—by politicians as well as by both the academic and the business community. Despite all the encouraging signs in east Germany, which undeniably exist, the process will take more time, require more money, and need more east German commitment than had widely been expected. But will fiscal backing alone be enough to vitalize the east German economy? What are the tasks ahead? Are they being tackled in an adequate way?     

The economics of formal business networks

This paper analyzes the under-researched issue of formal business networks comprising voluntary groupings of entrepreneurs who share knowledge and experiences between themselves. Economic analysis is used to show how formal business networks which enable entrepreneurs to share good and bad practice can improve efficiency and social welfare. The paper also derives conditions for the existence and equilibrium size of formal business networks. Two principles of network design are proposed to promote their stability and to avoid their collapse.     

The economics of South African sanctions

The present debate on economic sanctions against South Africa reveals that, despite a long history of the threat and use of economic sanctions in international relations, there still prevails a wide array of misconceptions regarding the nature, mechanisms and consequences of such a policy. This article examines some of the economic aspects of the way in which sanctions can impact on a target country and assesses their implications for the South African case.     

The forward pricing function of the shipping freight futures market

This article investigates the unbiasedness hypothesis of futures prices in the freight futures market. Being the only market whose underlying asset is a service, it sets it apart from other markets investigated so far in the literature. Cointegration techniques, employed to examine this hypothesis, indicate that futures prices one and two months before maturity are unbiased forecasts of the realized spot prices, whereas a bias exists in the three-months futures prices. This mixed evidence is in agreement with studies in other markets and suggests that the acceptance or rejection of unbiasedness depends on the idiosyncrasies of the market under investigation and on the time to maturity of the contract. Despite the existence of a bias in the three-months prices, futures prices for all maturities are found to provide forecasts of the realized spot prices that are superior to forecasts generated from error correction, ARIMA, exponential smoothing, and random walk models. Hence it appears that users of the BIFFEX market receive accurate signals from the futures prices (regarding the future course of cash prices) and can use the information generated by these prices to guide their physical market decisions. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 353–376, 1999     

The economics of enforcement: The case of OSHA

A model of enforcement is developed that determines the impacts of OSHA actions on regulated parties. This model analyzes the effect of decision procedures developed by OSHA to enforce the law and their effect on resource allocation within the firm. It is concluded that the impacts from both the initial inspection and reinspection programs on the resource allocations of firms have likely been insignificantly different from zero. If OSHA is to increase the allocation of injury control resources of firms through its enforcement program, it must increase the costs of noncompliance that it imposes on firms.     

The economics of Third World arms imports

The international trade with weapons and its effects on the Third World are rarely mentioned in papers on international trade. This is not really surprising, given the fact that military affairs are kept very secret. Of all social science data it is probably that of the military sector which is the most scarce and unreliable. Despite these difficulties the author of the following article describes some recent trends in the international trade in major weapons and analyses their negative effects on Third World countries.