Estimating Water Demand under Increasing-Block Tariffs Using Aggregate Data and Proportions of Users per Block

The price specification suggested by Nordin (1976) for theanalysis of demand under block tariffs is applied to estimatewater demand functions using aggregate data from the Northwest ofSpain. The traditional way of using Nordin's specification whenonly aggregate data are available (using values of marginal priceand difference faced by the average user) is compared with thetheoretically correct one. The latter uses the average marginalprice and the average difference, these averages being weighted bythe proportion of users per block. The availability of data on theproportion of users per block permits also the explicit modellingof the choice of block. The results show that, in the sampleanalyzed, the values of price elasticity under the traditionalspecification and the more innovative one are not significantlydifferent.     

What STIRPAT tells about effects of population and affluence on the environment?

In the literature on the application of STIRPAT to environmental impacts of population and affluence, the parameter estimates differ from study to study. One example is the effect of population size on CO₂ emissions, which is concluded to be very close to 1 in some studies (e.g., York et al., 2003) while far from 1 in others (e.g., Shi, 2003). What can explain these differences in results? In the present paper, I offer an alternative model equivalent to STIRPAT, which explicitly specifies the different role of technology (T) in STIRPAT from IPAT. By the alternative model, I conclude that different functional forms of STIRPAT can be one explanation for the difference among estimates in the studies on environmental impacts of population and affluence. The alternative model can also help to determine which factors to be added in STIRPAT.     

The rich, the poor, and the middle class: Thresholds and intensity indices

This paper contributes to the literature on the measurement of social classes by providing a wealth threshold for distinguishing the rich from the middle class and an intensity index for measuring the extent of affluence within a country. The empirical applicability of this approach is then illustrated with household-level survey data from the Bank of Italy; the results show an unambiguous decline in poverty and an increase in affluence in Italy between 2002 and 2004. Moreover, the findings indicate that social class is statistically linked to age, gender, marital status, household size, education, employment, and geography.     

A measurement of affluence and poverty interdependence across countries: Evidence from the application of tail copula

This paper examines affluence and poverty interdependence across 185 countries and its evolution over 1969–2014. To estimate affluence and poverty interdependence and derive tail interdependences the tail copulae are applied to multivariate density function. The tail coefficients are estimated in the non-parametric way as in Schmidt and Stadtmüller (2006). The estimates show, that poverty is less interdependent and continue to decrease, while affluence has asymptotically high global dependence, meaning a higher global dependence on and sensitivity to the well-being of the affluent countries. The received results derive the pattern of the extreme interdependence and can help to identify poverty and affluence spill-over across countries and regions and calculate the average sensitivity of a country to these phenomena on the global level and can potentially help in poverty reduction strategies within the Sustainable Development Goal by the United Nations.     

SPATIAL PANELS: RANDOM COMPONENTS VERSUS FIXED EFFECTS*

This article investigates spatial panel data models with a space–time filter in disturbances. We consider their estimation by both fixed effects and random effects specifications. With a between equation properly defined, the difference of the random versus fixed effects models can be highlighted. We show that the random effects estimate is a pooling of the within and between estimates. A Hausman‐type specification test and an Lagrangian multiplier test are proposed for the testing of the random components specification versus the fixed effects specification.     

A new cross-country tabulation of the quality index of consumption

Cross-country data are used to tabulate a quality index of consumption for each of 30 countries ranging in affluence from the U.S. to India as well as the real-income, relative-price and residual components of the quality index.     

中国特色社会主义区域发展与和谐理论探析

中国特色社会主义区域发展理论创新内容十分丰富,概括起来就是:以马克思主义为指导,立足于中国实际,运用"两只手"统筹协调区域发展中的特殊关系,构建和优化社会主义市场经济的空间结构,形成全国整体综合优势,通过全面发展实现区域间共同富裕与和谐.     

The feminization of poverty: the demographic factor and the composition of economic growth

The concept of the feminization of poverty in the United States is examined from a demographic perspective, in particular by a comparative analysis of poverty among female-headed and other-headed households. The author concludes that the growth of female-headed households has been an important factor in the feminization of poverty and that the gap in relative affluence between female-headed and other households is increasing. She also notes that female-headed households suffer most from economic downturns because of sex segregation in the work force.     

Economic Fundamentals and Exchange Rate Movements

This paper provides a non-parametric test of modern exchange rate models that is an alternative to econometric methods. The economic fundamentals from three well-known exchange rate theories are used to devise quarterly net predictions for the movement of sterling against four major currencies over the period 1973-98. Each model is examined under six expectations mechanisms. Although the test can lead to very diverse predictions from different models, it is shown that there is very little difference in the predictive success of rival exchange rate theories. The paper shows that the role assigned to market expectations is more crucial to the success of the models than the particular specification of the fundamental variables.We find some weak evidence to suggest that extrapolative and adaptive expectations mechanisms seem to offer a better specification of exchange rate expectations as compared to regressive and rational expectation mechanisms. One significant advantage of the test is that it can readily deal with hybrid models and heterogeneous expectations; however, neither route seems to improve exchange rate forecasts.     

The big problem of forecasting small change

The United States Mint recently reviewed approaches to forecasting the demand for new coin. This paper reports on methods used to determine fundamental attributes of the data, and uses these to help better determine appropriate model specification in order to better plan coin production. In particular, the debate regarding trend versus difference stationarity in macroeconomic trending data is considered. The interest in the present paper is limited to applying a well known unit root test procedure to an untested macrodata set – changes in US Coin demand – to see whether the test is useful in guiding the specification to improved forecast performance. It is found that the forecast results are somewhat sensitive to the way in which the data are seasonally adjusted, and lessons learned from this ‘case study’ indicate that unit root tests are useful in guiding model specification.     

Saving and inflation: Some international evidence

This note contains empirical results for the ‘disequilibrium’ saving function specification, in which uncertainty about relative prices in a cross-section sense plays a major role. Quarterly time series evidence from several OECD countries over the period 1967(II)–1980(III) lies in striking conformity with the view - suggested particularly by Deaton - that there is a positive relationship between unanticipated inflation and the saving ratio.     

CONCENTRATION-PROFITS MONOPOLY VS. EFFICIENCY DEBATE: SOUTH AFRICAN EVIDENCE

Using the new official measures of concentration, this study finds a strong and highly significant correlation between concentration and industry profitability for South African manufacturing industries. This correlation is consistent with both the monopoly hypothesis of the traditional structure-conduct-performance paradigm and Demsetz's efficiency hypothesis that concentration of industry reflects the dominance of superior low-cost firms. Using the four-firm concentration ratio, this study applies Chappell and Cottle's extension of the Demsetz test to distinguish between the monopoly explanation of this correlation and the efficiency explanation. Using a conventional regression specification of the concentration-profits relationship with no control for efficiency, this study finds a statistically significant coefficient only for the industry and large size class regressions. Because small firms should do at least as well as large firms, under the price umbrella provided by large firms, this result is inconsistent with the monopoly hypothesis but consistent with the efficiency hypothesis. Specifying a variable that measures the efficiency of large plants relative to smaller plants—the cost advantage ratio—yields striking results. Similar to the results obtained by Chappell and Cottle for the United States, this study finds the efficiency variable to be highly significant in the industry and large size class regressions, while concentration becomes insignificant. Moreover, the efficiency variable is insignificant in the smaller size classes Both the statistical insignificance of concentration and the pattern of the efficiency variable coefficients suggest that including concentration in the regression specification without the efficiency variable simply highlights the effect of the efficiency variable. Coming as they do from an environment as different from the United States as the South Africa of the 1980s, these results strongly support the Demsetz efficiency hypothesis.     

Extremal Economic (Inter)Dependence Studies: A Case of the Eastern European Countries

This paper considers the application of copula models to study the shifts in extremal economic dependence of the Eastern European countries, i.e., Ukraine and its neighbouring countries, from 1969 to 2014. Extremal economic dependence is analysed in terms of poverty and affluence and with regard to growth rate. This paper contributes to the previous literature by applying the copula approaches to derive the measurements of the economic interdependence in terms of poverty and affluence. The received results depict the pattern of the (inter)dependence and its evolution across the analysed countries. Dependence on other countries in the extreme values can potentially be useful in adjustments of the economic policy of a country to minimize poverty and prevent high inequality.

     

我国贸易顺差的根源及外需的可替代性——基于贸易品—非贸易品的分析框架

本文在开放宏观经济的平衡关系中引入产品的可贸易性差异,探讨我国贸易顺差的根源以及外需的可替代性。研究结果表明,(1)我国国内总供给结构偏向于贸易品,国内总需求结构偏向于非贸易品,两者之间不断扩大的差距是贸易顺差不断增长的根本原因;(2)非贸易品供给不足所导致的"强制储蓄"现象,制约了我国居民消费需求的增长,使其无法有效替代外需;(3)给定国内供给和需求的结构性特征,外需增加是国内投资增加的必要条件,投资需求无法替代外需;(4)为了实现总需求构成的重新平衡,特别是提升国内消费需求在总需求中的比重,不能简单地依赖总需求管理政策或收入分配政策,必须配合以促进供给结构调整的政策措施。     

How to curb poverty-related deforestation?

Drawing upon recent data from the Southeast Asian Mekong region, I study poverty-related drivers of deforestation (logging) activities by rural households. I do not find an environmental Kuznets curve-type relation between income and deforestation. Albeit I find a negative relation between income and the deforestation probability, this relation turns insignificant once I take into account specific socio-economic household characteristics: better education, higher relative affluence, younger age, self-employment, a higher value of nonproductive assets owned by the household as well as affiliation to an ethnic majority significantly reduce the deforestation probability. Received credits, remittances or (public) transfers do not significantly affect the deforestation probability. This implies for development policy that pure income-increasing financial support does not suffice for curbing poverty-related deforestation. Fostering education, social status, doing business and private ownership of assets are more promising options.     

The time-dependent characteristics of relative mobility

Mobility is a significant supplementary piece of information when discussing the inequality of a society based on income distribution. To date, most of its characteristics require disambiguation and specification. In this paper, we will investigate the dependence of relative mobility on sampling time interval both empirically and theoretically. Using the Chinese household income data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we find that the relative mobility will initially increase with the sampling time interval and then approach a constant value. To examine this time-dependent characteristic of mobility quantitatively, we employ a money exchange model with uniform saving rate to investigate the relation between the mobility and the sampling time interval. The relation obtained from the model is similar to that of the empirical data. The convergence rate of the mobility can be described in terms of a characteristic time interval found to be solely determined by the saving rate. The higher the saving rate is, the longer the characteristic time interval is. This work can help us better understand the time-dependence of mobility.     

A SIBLINGS ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION ONSET ON EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

This article examines the relationship between youthful drinking and educational attainment using data on same-sex siblings pairs from the 1979–90 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We consider different estimators that can be constructed using siblings data, including estimators that adopt key restrictions of the standard regression, family fixed effect, and instrumental variable approaches. We also consider the properties of these estimators under more general conditions and show that under very plausible assumptions the effect of drinking on schooling can be bounded. The study finds that estimates of the schooling consequences of youthful drinking are very sensitive to specification issues. The research concludes that the actual effects of youthful drinking on education are likely to be small.     

Expectations and intertemporal separability in an empirical model of consumption and investment under uncertainty

An intertemporal model of consumption and investment under uncertainty is formulated, and compared with the existing literature; it is argued that an assumption of myopia is necessary for its empirical applicability. It is estimated by maximum likelihood with quarterly British data. A specification search for a satisfactory form of expectations is made, and the estimated model is compared with a static demand system. Strong intertemporal separability is formulated as a nested hypothesis, and strongly rejected by a likelihood ratio test.     

数字经济对共同富裕的影响研究 ——基于产业结构升级的视角

将数字经济具象化,构建七部门动态随机一般均衡（DSGE）模型,通过冲击模拟研究数字经济对共同富裕的经济效应,并以209个地级市数据为样本,运用面板固定效应模型实证分析数字经济、产业结构升级对共同富裕的影响。结果显示：我国数字经济发展有助于推动产业结构升级,并从“共同度”“富裕度”两个维度推动共同富裕进程;产业结构升级是数字经济推动共同富裕的中介变量,数字经济发展越快的地区,产业结构升级对共同富裕的边际影响越强;从数字经济的二级指标看,数字技术、数字金融、互联网经济平台均有助于提升“富裕度”,但数字技术对“共同度”的影响不显著。对此,建议大力引导数字经济赋能产业结构升级的同时,更重视解决数字技术的负外部性问题,让数字经济红利更好为全体人民共享,从而加快实现共同富裕目标。     

论社会主义和谐社会的财产形式及其相互关系

国家财产、集体财产和个人财产,都是社会主义和谐社会的财富形式.社会财富中的国家公共财产,同社会团体集体财产、劳动者个人财产,是辩证统一、相辅相成的,是大河、小河相依的关系,我们在构建社会主义和谐社会中所追求的"共同富裕",不应是建立在只有单一、片面的国家财产和集体财产的共同富裕上面,应是融进个人财产,实现了国家、集体和个人利益兼顾和结合的共同富裕.