Middle Class in Africa: Determinants and Consequences

This study complements the inclusive growth literature by examining the determinants and consequences of the middle class in a continent where economic growth has been relatively high. The empirical evidence is based on a sample of 33 African countries for a 2010 cross-sectional study. Ordinary least squares, two-stage-least squares, three-stage-least squares and seemingly unrelated regressions estimation techniques are employed to regress a plethora of middle class indicators, notably, the: floating, middle-class with floating, middle-class without floating, lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income categories. Results can be classified into two main strands. First, results on determinants broadly show that GDP per capita and education positively affect all middle class dependent variables. However, we establish a negative nexus for the effect of ethnic fragmentation, political stability in general and partially for economic vulnerability. Simple positive correlations have been observed for: the size of the informal sector, openness and democracy. Second, on the consequences, the middle class enables the accumulation of human and infrastructural capital, while its effect is null on political stability and democracy in the short run but positive for governance and modernisation. Policy implications are discussed.     

服务外包示范城市政府作用的有效性:一项经验研究

笔者通过对2009年19个服务外包示范城市相关数据的收集与整理,研究了服务外包示范城市政府支持作用的有效性.研究结果表明:政府对服务外包的支持行为是有效的,其中上海、深圳、苏州、无锡、南京5个城市有效性非常显著,其他14个城市的显著性相对较弱.对显著性较弱的城市,文章进一步采用了“投影”变换分析方法对其进行了分析.分析结果揭示了政府作用显著性较差的原因及其可进行调整的方向.     

Gender and Poverty Risk in Europe

This study advances research on the structural dimension in the predominantly individual-oriented field of poverty studies by evaluating to what extent cross-national differences in population and structural characteristics can explain the differences in poverty outcomes by gender. To facilitate an approach that integrates individual and structural context dimensions, the paper takes advantage of multilevel techniques to test gender differences in the risk of being poor, entering into poverty, and exiting from poverty among seventeen European countries. The analysis covers single-adult households, drawing on data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the years 2007–8. The study concludes that structural effects, such as welfare state policies, labor market characteristics, level of inequality, and the level of women's empowerment in the country, seem to be more relevant than individual effects in explaining differences in the gender poverty gap among countries.     

政府干预风险投资的有效性:经验证据及启示

政府干预风险投资市场是国际上的一种普遍做法,然而就干预的有效性而言目前仍缺乏理论和实证上的明确回答。文章是对该问题的整体性实证研究,即考虑了常见的干预方式并以市场整体有效性为检验标准。基于经合组织国家数据的实证检验表明资金供给型政策没有显著效果,收益改善型政策有显著积极效果,这对调整我国倚重资金供给的政策格局有重要启示。     

对扩大我国中间阶层的思考

构建和谐社会,离不开社会结构的和谐,而中间阶层占社会主体的"橄榄型"社会结构是最为合理的.当前我国社会结构存在许多弊端,贫富差距和两极分化问题凸显.为扩大中间阶层,建议国家和政府可从四大方面入手选择合适路径解决.     

The Gendered Nature of Poverty in the EU: Individualized versus Collective Poverty Measures

Due to the adoption of the household as a unit of analysis, researchers have failed to identify accurate measures of women's income poverty. This study proposes an individualized measure of European poverty to highlight gender differences in the economic crisis. Employing data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the period 2007–12, it compares the household-based at-risk-of-poverty rate (ARPR) and the individualized financial dependency rate (FDR). The study shows that the gender gap in poverty in Europe is considerably higher when computed through FDR. Indeed, since the ARPR constitutes a proxy of the household's average conditions, it levels down gender inequalities within the household and also variations in individuals’ incomes over time. Only more detailed data collection on intrahousehold resource sharing will possibly allow the development of more precise and realistic indicators of women's and men's risks of poverty and financial dependency.     

浅析课堂游戏在英语教学上的效用

通过形式多样、生动有趣的英语课堂游戏,有利于提高学生的学习能力,有利于提高学生的个人能力,有利于减轻师生教学负担,使枯燥的语言教学变为学生乐于接受的游戏形式。从启发性、适时性和激励性三个方面,对发挥课堂游戏的最大效用进行了积极探讨与研究。     

Government success,failure of the market: a case study of rural India

Contrary to current thinking, in this paper we argue that a careful examination of government intervention suggests that governments did not fail in all their interventions. For example, in terms of achieving self‐sufficiency in food requirements, Indian government intervention was highly successful. However, in terms of solving rural poverty, the government left it to the market, and the market failed to resolve the poverty problem. Rural poverty, instead of falling, increased and subsequently, the government had to intervene to address the poverty.     

Poor Kids: A Report on Children in Poverty

Media coverage of income inequality and the economic plight of the middle class fails to analyze the long-term effects of growing inequality and to consider possible solutions. The article examines the literature on media coverage of income inequality and the middle class, and then examines how three competing models, the neoclassical economic model, the propaganda model, and the institutionalist model, explain the inadequate coverage of the effects and solutions.     

中国农村扶贫的政策效应分析——基于能力贫困理论的考察

中国农村制度化扶贫是一种开发式扶贫战略,其政策效应日益削弱:农村绝对贫困人口更为分散;相当数量的真正贫困人口没有能力从扶贫项目中受益;现行的扶贫策略也难以有效针对疾病、教育等致贫风险。现阶段中国扶贫政策在收入救助的同时,更应该注重提高贫困风险人群应对贫困风险的能力。     

低碳经济下政企的动态博弈分析

根据低碳发展对经济的要求建立了一个关于政府部门激励与不激励、企业实施(节能减排措施)与不实施、政府部门惩罚与不惩罚的两方三阶段动态博弈模型,并求出模型的均衡解.然后根据对均衡解的分析得出企业实现低碳发展模式的必要条件,由此提出政府对企业的节能减排进行激励的重要性.最后提出了我国实现低碳发展模式的政策建议.     

Poverty Dynamics,Violent Conflict,and Convergence in Rwanda

This paper analyzes the poverty impact of the violent events that affected Rwanda in the 1990s. The main objective of the paper is to identify systematically potential mechanisms linking violent conflict with changes in poverty across provinces and households in Rwanda before and after a decade of violence. In accordance with emerging literature on the long‐term economic effects of violent conflict, we find empirical evidence for economic convergence between richer and poorer Rwandan provinces and households following the conflict shocks. Using a small but unique panel of households surveyed before and after the conflict period, we find that households whose house was destroyed or who lost land ran a higher risk of falling into poverty. We do not find much evidence for an economic effect of violent deaths at the household level due to substitution effects of labor within the household. Non‐violent deaths however seem to increase income per adult equivalent for the survivors. Results are shown to be robust to sample selection and IV models.     

Measuring Efficiency: A Comparison of Multilevel Modelling and Data Envelopment Analysis in the Context of Higher Education

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multilevel modelling (MLM) are applied to a data set of 54,564 graduates from UK universities in 1993 to assess whether the choice of technique affects the measurement of universities’ performance. A methodology developed by Thanassoulis and Portela (2002; Education Economics, 10(2), pp. 183–207) allows each individual's DEA efficiency score to be decomposed into two components: one attributable to the university at which the student studied and the other attributable to the individual student. From the former component, a measure of each institution's teaching efficiency is derived and compared to the university effects from various multilevel models. The comparisons are made within four broad subjects: pure science, applied science, social science and arts. The results show that the rankings of universities derived from the DEA efficiencies which measure the universities’ own performance (i.e., having excluded the efforts of the individuals) are not strongly correlated with the university rankings derived from the university effects of the multilevel models. The data were also used to perform a university‐level DEA. The university efficiency scores derived from these DEAs are largely unrelated to the scores from the individual‐level DEAs, confirming a result from a smaller data set (Johnes, 2006a; European Journal of Operational Research, forthcoming). However, the university‐level DEAs provide efficiency scores which are generally strongly related to the university effects of the multilevel models.     

我国区域旅游合作中的政府间博弈

区域旅游合作过程的实质是不同开发主体之间反复博弈的过程。政府作为旅游开发的主导力量,其跨区域旅游合作目的在于实现地区利益的最大化。因此,区域旅游开发在政府之问的合作机制实质上就是区域之间行政利益的博弈过程,“博弈均衡”的最终结果将促成区域旅游合作制度框架的建立。     

论我国农村贫困的决定因素——基于村民行为选择视角的实证分析

从现实状况看,政府主导的自上而下的反贫困模式的成效呈递减趋势.因此,为探究村民的行为选择对农村贫困的影响,文章在合理界定我国农村贫困程度的基础上,从微观层面利用相关统计数据,通过建立有序多项选择Probit模型来分析村民的行为选择在"农村脱贫"中的作用.该模型的Gibbs抽样估计结果显示:农村的企业数量、村务管理效率、村民就业结构、村民受教育程度、村内公共投资力度及村民的农业技术推广情况均构成我国农村贫困的决定因素.     

A New Approach to Unidimensional Poverty Analysis: Application to the Tunisian Case

Fuzzy conceptualization of privation has been a step closer to more realistic handling of poverty. However, fuzzy approaches to poverty are still grounded on parametric axioms. Moreover, construction of poverty lines within these approaches still relies on ad‐hoc methods. In this paper, we advance instead a fuzzy procedure based on the non‐parametric bootstrap method, allowing us to depict fuzzy unidimensional privation states with boundaries drawn spontaneously from data. Fuzzy non‐parametric measures of privation within each state as well as a collective fuzzy non‐parametric index of poverty are derived, along with their corresponding confidence intervals. The new approach is applied to the analysis of poverty in Tunisia in 2005.     

Challenges and Changes in Gendered Poverty: The Feminization,De-Feminization,and Re-Feminization of Poverty in Latin America

Despite reductions in poverty generally, recent trends in Latin American countries show processes of both de-feminization and re-feminization of poverty. A rise in the numbers of women to men living in income-poor households has occurred despite feminized anti-poverty programs, most notably conditional cash transfers (CCTs), which target resources to women. This paper shows that methodological differences in what, how, and who is the focus of measurement may influence patterns of poverty “feminization.” It also suggests that feminized policy interventions might in themselves be playing a role in the re-feminization of poverty, not least because of data and definitional limitations in the way female-headed households and, relatedly, women’s poverty are understood. The somewhat paradoxical interactions between the feminization of household headship, the feminization of poverty, and the feminization of anti-poverty programs present interesting challenges for redressing gender gaps in poverty within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.     

Decomposing the changes in poverty: Poverty line and distributional effects

When measuring poverty in developed countries, the poverty line used to identify the poor is usually relative and set as a percentage of the median (or of the mean) of the total income. In consequence, when poverty is analyzed over a period of time, changes in the poverty level depend on the impact of evolving standards. To eliminate this effect, sometimes, an anchored poverty line is used. Furthermore, changes in the mean of the distribution and in the inequality among the poor may also affect the poverty levels. This note proposes a decomposition of the changes in poverty as the sum of four terms. The first two reflect the impact in poverty of changes in living standards and the other two measure the effect of the distributional growth and redistribution. This decomposition will help policymakers in the implementation of a more specific antipoverty agenda. An application with data from the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions shows the potential of the decomposition proposed.     

中国资本管制有效性动态研究:1982-2008

文章综合利用储蓄一投资相关性检验法、Edwayds-Kahn模型法、资本管制强度测度以及抵补利率平价4种方法分别从实体经济、货币经济、法律框架以及短期资本套利动机等角度对1982-2008年期间我国资本管制的有效性进行了评估,并侧重讨论了现阶段我国资本管制是否失效的问题.研究结论显示:自1982年以来,我国的资本管制政策短期内基本有效,但随着国内经济的进一步开放和管制政策的逐步放开,资本流动性逐渐提高,资本管制的有效性呈下降趋势;2007年以来虽然存在大量短期资本流入流出的现象,但我国的资本管制仍然对国际资本流动具有明显的抑制作用.     

Poverty,competition, democracy,and ownership: A general equilibrium model with vertical preferences

We consider a general equilibrium model where individuals are simultaneously workers, consumers, and shareholders, with two possible market structures: Monopoly and Duopoly, and two extreme ownership structures: egalitarian and concentrated. Considering three standard poverty indicators, the questions are, whether more competition generates more or less poverty for a given ownership structure; and whether a democratic choice between Monopoly and Duopoly leads to the alternative with less poverty. When the ownership is concentrated, we show that Duopoly generates less poverty than Monopoly and the majority votes for the alternative with less poverty. When the ownership is egalitarian, Duopoly may generate more or less poverty and democratic choice alleviates poverty regarding at least one poverty indicator and worsens poverty regarding at least another one, the three poverty indicators never converging. An empirical study on the effect of competition on poverty supports to some extent our theoretical findings.