Conceptualising and implementing two community gardening projects on the Cape Flats,Cape Town

Two community gardening projects in the Cape Town Metropole, South Africa, were studied in terms of how their intended outcomes were conceptualised by programme stakeholders, and how programme implementation was perceived by the intended beneficiaries. Following a broadly qualitative approach, data collection methods included individual and group interviews, participant observation, and reviews of programme records. A model of short-term, medium-term, and long-term outcomes, as perceived by programme management and staff, was elicited. Gardeners generally were positive about the service delivery of the programme, and identified the provision of food for their households as the major change that the programme introduced in their lives. They achieved some savings on household food purchases, and improved their nutrition somewhat. They also reported some income generation, but they perceived it as too little. Finally, respondents were very positive about a range of social benefits obtained from participating in the projects.     

Direct and Spillover Effects of Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies

This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country’s current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country’s current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The effects of purchases of foreign assets spill over to other countries in proportion to their degree of international financial integration. We also find that increases in US bond yields are associated with increases in foreign bond yields and in stock prices, as well as with depreciations of foreign currencies, but that all of these effects are smaller on days of US unconventional monetary policy announcements. We develop a theoretical model that is broadly consistent with our empirical results and that highlights the potential usefulness of domestic unconventional policies as responses to the effects of foreign policies of a similar type.     

The ‘Visible Hand’ of the ECB’s first quantitative easing

Quantitative easing à la ECB has produced significant impact on long-term nominal rates through ex ante channels, such as signalling channels, term duration channels, and risk premia channels, well before it materially started. Ex post difference-in-differences estimation suggests a significant impact on long-term government bond yields, while the impact of the ECB’s first QE on the key inflation rate is very weak. The term duration channel may also lead to a lengthening of the average maturity of government debts, with possible implications for fiscal policy. The ECB’s determination to buy government bonds in a fragmented market with a low net supply is also producing an ex post impact, i.e. during the actual asset purchases. High rates volatility suggests that this impact is less on nominal rates and more on financial plumbing. As the effects of scarce supply in collateral markets are felt, repo rates remain well below zero. Low supply and limited re-usability of high quality collateral, capped by regulatory requirements, is an additional constraint on market liquidity and compresses dealers’ balance sheets. By keeping a depressed yield curve and asset prices high, QE is also accelerating the consolidation of both traditional and capital-market based (dealer) bank business models, raising questions about implications for global collateral flows and deposit-like funding channels.     

A ‘blank cheque'? Portuguese Second World War sterling balances, 1940–73

The British effort in the Second World War required massive external financing which depended on Lend‐Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances. Indebtedness in sterling balances corresponded to almost 38 per cent of this total at the end of the war. Portuguese sterling balances, although a small share of the total, were important because of pre‐emptive purchases, especially of wolfram, and because of the ‘gold clause’ which was to be applied to outstanding balances. Portugal's willingness to finance British purchases contrasts with the requirement of German payments in goods or cash for their purchases in Portugal. The settlement of Portuguese sterling balances in August 1945 was singular as it preceded the Anglo‐American settlement of December 1945 which had important consequences for sterling balance holders, as the US insisted that the US$3.75 billion loan should not be used to settle British war debts. Postwar settlement of British debt through a long‐term loan from Portugal to Britain contrasts with settlements that involved the sale of British assets. Salazar's concerns about the postwar international position of Portugal, the Portuguese Empire, and the survival of the Portuguese regime are relevant in explaining his pro‐British stance during and after the war.     

夜·宴

“亲爱的，青岛没有夜色啊。” 文字一向妖娆性感的美女作家在拒绝我的约稿时，答了这句话。一时语塞，我没能即刻反驳。事后还是想争辩一下：青岛不缺夜色，也不缺欣赏夜色或者享受夜色的人，只是不够多罢了。     

白酒文化：请向时尚化看齐

从一定程度上讲，文化已经成为白酒市场竞争的一个重要因素，未来五年，白酒不仅要在内部竞争，还要和包括洋酒在内的其他酒类竞争。但是，随着消费者的年轻化以及消费需求的个性化，白酒文化将何去何从？[编者按]     

Government Purchases and the Real Exchange Rate

Recent empirical research documents that an exogenous rise in government purchases in a given country triggers a persistent depreciation of its real exchange rate—which raises an important puzzle, as standard macro models predict an appreciation of the real exchange rate. This paper presents a simple model with limited international risk sharing that can account for the empirical real exchange rate response. When faced with a country-specific rise in government purchases, local households experience a negative wealth effect; they thus work harder, and domestic output increases. Under balanced trade (financial autarky) this supply-side effect is so strong that the terms of trade worsen, and the real exchange rate depreciates. In a bonds-only economy, an increase in government purchases triggers a real exchange rate depreciation, if the rise in government purchases is sufficiently persistent and/or labor supply is highly elastic.     

文化青岛的中坚力量

这座城市里,有很多文化的奉献者。我们或许知道他的名字,或许不知道他的名字,但他们就在那里辛勤耕耘。他们态度谦和、彬彬有礼;他们学识渊博、富有智慧。他们用文字书写灵魂的世界,他们用画笔描绘美好的蓝图,他们用自己的方式表达艺术的心声。爱这座城,因此愿意做她的记录者、描述者。他们一直在理想的道路上跋涉旅行,哪怕风雨兼程。是他们,为青岛撑起了一片灿烂的文化星空……     

Currency intervention and the global portfolio balance effect: Japanese lessons

This paper extends the analysis of Bernanke et al. (2004) to show that the official Japanese purchases of foreign exchange in 2003–04 seem to have lowered long-term interest rates not only in the United States, but in a wide range of countries, including Japan. It seems that this decline was triggered by the investment of the intervention proceeds in US bonds and that global portfolio rebalancing spread the resulting decline in US dollar yields to bond markets in other currencies, thus easing global monetary conditions. We also show that the global portfolio balance effect is detectable in the response of yields to large Japanese intervention in data before and after 2003/04, though the effect is weaker. While our findings contribute to a growing body of work that points to common responses across bond markets to official portfolio shifts in the form of large-scale bond purchases (“quantitative easing”), our analysis has the advantage of focusing on a pure portfolio shock.     

An Empirical Analysis of Legal Insider Trading in The Netherlands

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by economically large abnormal returns. This result is strongest for purchases by top executives and for small market capitalization firms, which is consistent with the hypothesis that legal insider trading is an important channel through which information flows to the market. We analyze also the impact of the implementation of the Market Abuse Directive (European Union Directive 2003/6/EC), which strengthens the existing regulation in the Netherlands. We show that the new regulation reduced the information content of sales by top executives.     

购货方纳税筹划的选择——基于《增值税暂行条例》视角

一般纳税人购货方的纳税筹划方法有结算方式、进项税额抵扣时间、购货价格折让率基础上的议价、运费扣税平衡点等。而小规模纳税人购货方的纳税筹划仅为购货价格的选择。企业可以按照自身的纳税人身份科学地进行增值税的纳税筹划，以达到少缴税或递延纳税的目的，为企业利润最大化终极目标服务。     

Budgetary-Neutral Fiscal Policy Rules and External Adjustment

Large external imbalances and fragile fiscal positions have emerged as major policy challenges for the euro area in the financial crisis. The paper analyses whether shifting government purchases between tradable and non-tradable goods could help reduce external fluctuations without large swings in the overall fiscal stance. The policy rules considered are budgetary-neutral in the sense that the overall level of government expenditure is kept constant. We compare the policy rules to fiscal devaluation as a strategy to reduce external imbalances and find that state-dependent changes in the composition of government purchases between tradables and non-tradables can stabilise excessive fluctuations in the event of economy-wide supply and demand shocks. Contrary to fiscal devaluation, the expenditure-shifting rule faces a trade-off between stabilising domestic activity and enhancing household welfare, on the one hand, and reducing excessive fluctuations in external positions, on the other hand. The excess volatility of domestic variables associated less volatility in the external position implies welfare losses for standard specifications of household utility. The adverse welfare effect is absent in the case of fiscal devaluation.     

乡村旅游景区游客付费意愿的影响因素——以石家庄市井陉村群为例

乡村旅游产业振兴了农村经济,通过优化服务和产品,提升了游客满意度和经济效益,同时传承了乡村特色文化。通过问卷调查和付费意愿模型分析,探讨出游动机和感知价值对游客支付意愿的影响。研究发现,增长知识、社交体验和创作研究是游客主要动机,显著影响其支付意愿。自然资源、公共设施、餐饮住宿和购物娱乐等感知价值因素也对支付意愿产生正向影响,其中乡村自然景观、服务态度和餐饮口味尤为关键。     

企业家能力结构的社会学分析

面对全球企业兼并重组的热潮 ,我们既要抓住机遇 ,不失时机地进行经济结构的战略性调整和兼并、联合、股份制等资产重组 ,提高产业集中度和企业竞争力 ,抗衡国际跨国公司 ;又要深入探讨兼并重组的负面效应 ,以防范、化解和规避资本运作风险 ,通过现代市场竞争方式维护我国企业     

Executives' Legal Records and the Deterrent Effect of Corporate Governance

We study whether the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms varies depending on the characteristics of the executives subject to these mechanisms, namely their “psychological type,” as proxied by their history of legal infractions. In particular, we examine insider trading, where we can compare the trading behavior of different types of executives in the same firm. We find that “recordholder” executives, that is, those with prior legal infractions, earn significantly higher profits from purchases and sales than nonrecordholder executives. Furthermore, the profitability of both purchases and sales is significantly increasing in the severity of the infraction. Governance mechanisms, such as blackout policies, lower profits of executives with only traffic infractions; however, profits for executives with serious infractions appear insensitive to blackout policies. Insiders with serious infractions are also more likely to trade during blackout periods and before large information events and are more likely to report their trades to the SEC after the filing deadline. Collectively, our evidence suggests that while governance mechanisms can discipline executives with minor offenses, they appear largely ineffective for those with more serious infractions.     

台湾茶酒异军突起

中华造酒历史渊源流长数千年,而近百余年来,台湾地区的酿酒业也同样是该地区重要的经济产业。2010年起,台湾地区将茶酒首度量产,启动元代以来蒸馏制酒的新里程,势将从一个全新的领域冲击海峡两岸的酒文化。     

Renaissance attachment to things: material culture in last wills and testaments1

Over the past decade ‘material culture’ has become a sub‐discipline of Italian Renaissance studies. This literature, however, has focused on the rich and their objects preserved in museums or reflected in paintings. In addition, the period 1300 to 1600 has been treated without attention to changes in the relationship between people and possessions. The article turns to last wills and testaments, which survive in great numbers and sink deep roots through late medieval and Renaissance cities and their hinterlands. They reveal aspirations and anxieties about things from post‐mortem repairs to farm houses to pillows of monk's wool. These aspirations changed fundamentally after the Black Death. Earlier, during the ‘commercial revolution’, ordinary merchants, artisans, and peasants on their deathbeds practised what the mendicants preached: stripping themselves of their possessions, they converted their estates to coin to be scattered among pious and non‐pious beneficiaries. After the Black Death, testators began to reverse tack, devising ever more complex legal strategies to govern the future flow of their goods. This work of the dead had larger economic consequences. By encouraging the liquidation of estates, the earlier mendicant ideology quickened the velocity of exchange, while the early Renaissance attachment to things did the opposite.     

饮食文化的旅游资源价值与开发——以三峡地区为例

作为一种传统民俗文化现象,饮食文化是一种重要的旅游资源,它能够满足旅游者的多种需要,促进旅游地的经济发展,在旅游产业中具有重要的作用。三峡地区饮食文化资源类型齐全、知名度和文化品味高、富有地方特色,具有较高的旅游开发价值。在此基础上,文章提出了深入开发三峡饮食文化旅游资源的策略。     

The money supply mechanism and monetary policy in China

One of the main difficulties of analyzing the macroeconomic condition in The People's Republic of China is the lack of information of its money supply mechanism. The present paper tries to provide a systematical analysis of the Chinese money supply process from both the theoretical and empirical points of view. It shows that the economic reform in the 1980s caused profound changes in the structure of the banking system in the following ways, (a) The establishment of the central bank paved the foundation of the money creation process through the monetary base and a multiplier effect, (b) Consequently, the money supply and credit condition are controlled, at least partially, by economic instruments such as the monetary base, required reserve ratio, and interest rates, (c) The old money supply system is far from being phased out yet. As a matter of fact, it is the mixture of a central bank system and an administrative command driven centrally planned system that constitutes the money supply mechanism with the “Chinese characteristics”. The successes and failures of the monetary policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflect the central bank's ability to control the macroeconomic condition of the economy. They also indicate that at the beginning of the 1990s, after a decade of economic reforms, the money supply mechanism in China is still, by and large, controlled by the central government through administrative orders rather than economic leverages.     

Export-Oriented Industrialization, Female Employment and Demographic Trends: A Long-term Comparative Perspective of Japan and the Four NIEs- 1950 to 1988.

In the long run there is a virtuous circle of export-oriented industrialization which may be described in a few words: facing a demographic boom, the major challenge was to create employments in large numbers, to achieve productivity gains and to improve income and education levels, which in turn will allow these countries to raise their savings rate and reduce their demographic growth¹.
1. Priority was to be given to employment creations in the modern sector.
2. The Export-Promotion policy drives to develop light and low technology industries employing a large majority of young, low-paid women.
3. Growth in the export sector leads to general growth and in particular generates a dynamic demand for domestic as well as for imported heavy industrial products. A bridge between light and heavy industry was created through Backward-Integration policies.
4. In spite of large surplus in manpower supply, real wages rose from the beginning of Export-Promotion policy implementation. Then rise in real wages accelerated progressively. The productivity growth made wage increases sustainable in the long run. The wage gap was so high that there is still an important price advantage of manpower for East-Asian countries.
5. Improving standards of living and adequate family planning policies resulted in a declining demographic growth.
6. The high growth rate of income was accompanied by a very fast rising household's savings ratio.