中国与东欧及前苏联的经济改革比较——杰弗里·萨克斯对中国经济改革的论述

美国经济学家杰弗里·萨克斯对中国的经济改革进程做了大量的实证分析,并与东欧及前苏联的经济改革经验相比较,得出了许多有益的观点。文章主要是对中国与东欧及前苏联改革经验的比较进行综述与评价。     

Fairness in a tradeable-permit treaty for carbon emissions reductions in Europe and the former Soviet Union

This paper evaluates the distributional implications of alternative permit allocations in a tradeable permit regime for carbon emissions reductions (20% below baseline) in 2010 for a region consisting of Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union (FSU). Participation in such a regime is expected to hinge on the fairness of the distributional consequences. We find that initial permit allocations by populationand/or GDP are unlikely to induce participation by most countries of Eastern Europe and FSU because of the net costs involved. We identify a set of initial allocations that would at least compensate these countries. A fair treatment of the countries in Western Europe (WE) is here one which equalizes net costs perGDP. For a wide set of cost functions for carbon emission reductions, the cost gains that WE would reap from a tradeable permit system relative to unilateral reductions by WE as a group are found to be on the order of 85 percent. This would imply, among other things, a significant increase in WE'scapacity to make further emissions reductions.     

Economic determinants of Soviet foreign trade with Eastern Europe

Using a cross-sectionally correlated and time-wise autoregressive pooling procedure, we have obtained long-run estimates of export and import elasticities of Soviet-East European bilateral trade with respect to supply, demand and trade resistance factors. Our results indicate that Soviet exports to East Europe during 1963–1973 was, for most product groups, determined by demand conditions found in the East European partner countries while Soviet imports from Eastern Europe, for the same period, was for most product groups determined by East European supplies.     

The Development of Commodity Exchanges in the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China

The virtual collapse of the centrally planned economies of the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the more gradual transition from central planning to a market-oriented economy in China were both accompanied by the opening of hundreds of exchanges trading many agricultural, resource, and other physical commodities. Although many viewed them as harbingers of full-fledged market-based economies, most of the new exchanges in fact have since closed either for lack of activity or by government intervention, a history that this paper documents. New exchanges faced numerous obstacles in sustaining interest, from developing standardised contract terms to establishing effective self-regulation and state regulatory oversight. In several countries, the transparency of transactions on exchanges attracted governments interested in collecting taxes and customs duties which only drove trade away from the exchanges or turned them into little more than state agencies. In China, regulators struggled with duplicative exchanges and products, price volatility, large speculative interest, and several manipulations and have recently reduced the number of exchanges to just three and severely limited the commodities traded. There have been some successes too, including (at least prospectively) the three remaining exchanges in China, the Budapest Commodity Exchange in Hungary, and the Poznan Commodity Exchange in Poland. For all, identifying the terms to create standardised contracts has been (and continues to be) a major challenge.     

Economic reform and mortality in the former Soviet Union: A study of the suicide epidemic in the 1990s

Male suicide rates in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic countries increased substantially in the early 1990s and are now the highest in the world. To what extent is this suicide epidemic explained by the macroeconomic instability experienced by these countries in that period? Fixed effects regressions across 22 transition economies indicate that male suicide rates are highly sensitive to the state of the macroeconomy, suggesting that the steep and prolonged declines in GDP in the western countries of the former Soviet Union may have been partly to blame for the suicide epidemic. Evidence also indicates that the general adult male mortality crisis in the region had a ‘feedback’ effect on suicide rates, with the loss of a spouse or friend – or declining life expectancy itself – contributing to rising suicide rates. Female suicide rates, in contrast, are insensitive to the state of the macroeconomy and are more strongly related to alcohol consumption.     

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.     

Economic fluctuations in Central and Eastern Europe: the facts

This article provides a detailed empirical analysis of quarterly frequency dynamics in macroeconomic aggregates in 12 countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It shows that business fluctuations in CEE countries are, in general, more pronounced than in developed ones, and are of similar size as in other emerging market economies. Private consumption is particularly volatile. Relative to major developed economies government spending is dominantly procyclical, and net exports are strongly countercyclical. The most frequent country outliers are the high inflation countries of Bulgaria, Romania and Russia, especially in labour market, price and exchange rate variables. Excluding these countries from the sample makes many of the observed patterns in cyclical dynamics more homogenous, and broadly similar to ones established in developed economies.     

Immigration from the former Soviet Union to Israel: Who is coming when?

Average education of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel declined during the 1990s. We suggest that this is because the returns to investment in Israeli human capital increase in the amount of imported human capital. Thus, the more educated invest more, and therefore have an incentive to spend a longer share of their working life in Israel. This translates into early migration. Using data from the 1995 Israeli Census and the 1995-1998 samples of the Israeli Labor Force Survey, we test our hypothesis and find that being high skilled initiates early migration only for migrants participating in the labor market.     

Aid effectiveness and the soft budget constraint: EU development aid to the former Soviet Union

Aid effectiveness is defined as contractual completeness. EU development aid constitutes the new soft budget constraint in the former Soviet Union. Transnational sovereignty means that development policy is decided by the post-Soviet planner and financed by the European Commission.     

Employment discrimination in a former Soviet Union Republic: Evidence from a field experiment

We provide the first experimental evidence about ethnic and gender discrimination in the labor market of a former Soviet Union country, Georgia. We randomly assign Georgian and non-Georgian, male and female, names to similar resumes and apply for jobs as advertised on help-wanted websites in Georgia. We find that gender has no effect on the probability of callback, but a job applicant who is ethnically Georgian is more than twice as likely to be called for a job interview than an equally skilled ethnic non-Georgian (Azerbaijani or Armenian). The 113% ethnic gap in callbacks (167% among males and 79% among females), which is substantially larger than the gap typically documented in the existing literature for both developed and developing countries, is statistically significant and cannot be abridged by having more experience or education. There is no evidence of gender discrimination in callbacks, both within the Georgian group and the non-Georgian group.