居民消费环境:指数测度、区域差异与政策启示

本文从"安全、便利、放心、舒心、满意"五个维度构建中国消费环境评价指标体系,并基于四川省五大经济区的消费者满意度调查数据及宏观数据,测度消费环境指数并进行区域差异分析发现,四川消费环境指数存在明显的区域差异.从区域间差异看,消费环境指数存在一定程度的两极分化,领先区明显且大幅度高于其他地区;从区域内差异看,成都平原经济区区域内差异最为明显,占整个区域内差异的88.42％,成都的高首位度也在消费环境中有所体现.同时,消费环境发展一般的区域,也可能在单一指标中突出.进一步研究发现,区域差异会导致消费效应差异:消费环境指数对消费的影响也存在两极分化,只有在消费环境指数领先区,消费环境指数才能对消费产生显著影响;而消费环境的区域内差距拉大会影响到消费效应;仅有单项子系统领先的地区,其消费环境并不显著影响消费.因此,本文的政策启示在于:一要持续改善非领先区消费环境,缩小区域间消费环境的差距;二要重视缩小区域内消费环境的差距,降低区域内差异拉大对消费效应的抑制作用;三要全面发力消费环境各方位改善,只有各方位在较高水平才能有效促进消费;四要明确消费环境改善的侧重点,补齐各类型区消费环境短板.     

Pareto-improving Untied Aid with Environmental Externalities

This paper shows that even untied aid is Pareto-improving if and only if the marginal propensity to consume the polluting good in the donor country is sufficiently larger than in the recipient country.     

Dynamic Externalities and Policy Coordination

The paper introduces trade into dynamic models with externalities and capital accumulation, and evaluates the efficiency of the Cournot–Nash equilibrium. It considers mixed economies characterized by a blend of strategic and nonstrategic sectors. Also, there are two sources of interdependence: the existence of production externalities and the endogenous determination of market prices. It is shown that policy coordination is not needed when preferences are the same. In this case, the production externalities are internalized, so that an inefficient solution becomes the efficient integrated world equilibrium due to trade.     

International and Intergenerational Environmental Externalities

We examine a world in which policymakers' actions in a given country at a given time have long-lived effects on a common resource: the global environment. We consider the first best in which long-lived planners behave cooperatively, then examine the allocation of resources when there is non-cooperation across countries, across time, or both. Finally we analyze the dynamic behavior of the economy along balanced growth paths. It is found that while long-lived international institutions are necessary to internalize all externalities, cooperation at a point in time may be harmful to future generations.     

Consumer Information and Firm Pricing: Negative Externalities from Improved Information

We analyze the effect of consumer information on firm pricing in a model where consumers search for prices and matches with products. We consider two types of consumers. Uninformed consumers do not know in advance their match values with firms, whereas informed consumers do. Prices are lower the greater the proportion of uninformed consumers. Hence uninformed consumers exert a positive externality on the others, in contrast to standard results. This leads to socially excessive investment in gathering prior information when aggregate demand is price-sensitive.     

企业环境自我规制的动因及其政策启示

环境自我规制解决了传统规制中的信息不对称和激励问题,是对环境规制体系的有效补充。企业环境自我规制的动因主要来自于四方面:提高生产力、迎合绿色消费者的偏好、缓解外部压力,以及作为应对政府规制和市场竞争的一种策略性行为。此外,企业的规模、研发能力、过去的环境绩效等,也对自我规制产生影响。我国尚不具备全面实施企业环境自我规制的条件,但应加强信息披露和对投资者的引导,转变政府在环境规制体系中的作用,为企业提高环保标准服务。     

Urban Structure and Environmental Externalities

The objective of this paper is to analyze policy design for air pollution management in the spatial context of urban development. We base our analysis on the paper of Ogawa and Fujita (Reg Sci Urban Econ 12:161–196, 1982), which offers a proper theoretical framework of non-monocentric urban land use using static microeconomic theory where the city structure is endogenous. First, we show that when households internalize industrial pollution in their residential location choice, spatialization within the city is reinforced. This impacts directly the emissions of greenhouse gases from commuting. Then, we analyze policy instruments in order to achieve optimal land use pattern when the policy maker has to manage both industrial and commuting related polluting emissions, that interact through the land market.     

Price Competition and Consumer Externalities in a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly with Information Disparities

In this paper, we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to consider information disparities about quality differences and their effects on price competition. If uninformed consumers overestimate vertical differentiation, asymmetric information is a source of market power and informed consumers exert positive externalities on high quality product purchasers and negative externalities on low quality product purchasers. Such a result is consistent with the fact that information undermines brand. If uninformed consumers are skeptical, adverse selection issues arise and market demands may be perfectly inelastic to prices. With elastic demands equilibrium prices may be either distorted downwards or reflect real quality if the share of informed consumers is suffciently high. Therefore, with skeptical consumers firms may want either to signal quality or subsidize information provision.     

Optimal Management of Environmental Externalities with Time Lags and Uncertainty

Many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length, and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic. We develop a two-period, two-polluter model and obtain closed-form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes. These solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags. We find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on (a) the discount rate, (b) conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource, (c) persistence of the pollutant, and (d) initial conditions.     

Optimal Tax Policy, Market Imperfections, and Environmental Externalities in a Dynamic Optimizing Macro Model

This paper develops a dynamic real business cycle model that highlights pollution externalities (on welfare and production) and market imperfections and uses it to determine the socially optimal tax policy that encompasses labor income, capital income, and emission taxes. We show that the optimal tax on capital and labor income only addresses the production inefficiency (and is time-invariant), while the tax on the environmental externalities affects both the production inefficiency and the environmental spillovers (and is time-varying). More interestingly, the socially optimal emission tax will be characterized by a Keynesian-like stabilizer that is designed to mitigate business cycle fluctuations, i.e., that will stimulate the economy with a lower emission tax during recessions. In a positive analysis, we show that the beneficial effects arising from pollution taxation will become larger the greater is the degree of the firms' monopoly power. In addition, a triple dividend in terms of improving environmental quality and increasing employment and firms' profit can be simultaneously realized if the environmental production externality is more significant and if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is relatively small.     

Demand for Environmental Quality: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Behavior in Sweden

In this paper we estimate the income elasticity of demand for recreational services and other traditional groups of goods in Sweden and test for potential changes in such estimates over the twentieth century. Due to the difficulty of directly observing the demand for recreational services, we employ an indirect methodology by using the demand for some outdoor goods as a proxy for the demand for recreational services. In line with most prior research, our results confirm the expectation that recreational services, as a public good, is a luxury good in Sweden. Our results also show that the income elasticities for traditional goods are stable over time, indicating that consumer preferences for expenditure on these specific commodities do not change over time.      

环境风险规制政策选择及其对我国的启示

环境规制是控制全球环境问题的重要手段之一.文章从环境风险规制研究现状出发,通过对环境博弈主体的分析,探讨环境规制政策工具的选择,并在对我国环境规制现状分析的基础上,总结对我国环境风险规制的启示.     

社会资本外部性的经济分析——以信任关系为例

以往理论研究与经验研究均指出社会资本具有正面的效应,但对这种效应是怎样取得的并无共识.我们尝试建立一个不完全信息动态博弈模型,说明社会资本-信任如何产生正的外部性,亦即产生超出个体理性计算之外的利益.我们的分析得出这样的结论,在一个多人互动的环境中,能否达到彼此合作或彼此信任,虽然会受到欺骗者所遭到的惩罚与欺骗利益多少的影响,但主要受到所处环境中具有社会资本者人数比例的影响.因此,可以说社会资本具有正的网络外部性,信任者人数越多,信任者所享受到的利益越大.     

财政支出与广义货币关系的协整分析及其政策含义

文章利用协整分析讨论了财政支出与广义货币的相互关系,发现在1978～2002年间,中国的财政支出和广义货币具有二阶差分平稳的特征,二者之间存在显著的协整关系.财政支出的变动速度是广义货币变动速度的Granger因,但不能说广义货币变动速度是财政支出变动速度的Granger因.财政支出的短期变化对广义货币的短期变化影响较大,并且是同方向的.广义货币供给的增长速度具有一定惯性,且具有向长期值的自我恢复功能.财政支出的增长速度并不具有自我恢复功能,这意味着政府应对财政支出施加一定约束,以避免财政支出在经济过热或不景气时发生过度扩张或紧缩.     

Social Security: National Policies with International Implications

Social security policies within individual countries are determined independently by national governments, but the resulting outcome is inefficient compared with what would result from the international co-ordination of policies. This is because national social security policies produce international externalities via their effects on world interest rates. An illustrative example suggests that the gains from co-ordination are potentially significant.     

“交易外部性”:外部性的重新理解及系统整合

基于对外部性和交易本质的理解,当前生产外部性和消费外部性两分的观点有失偏颇。研究提出交易外部性概念,即产权交易过程中,交易一方或交易以外的行为主体的权利(束)或权利部分职能被交易另一方强制利用而未被定价或实现对等补偿的现象。据此,按照发生领域和作用主体的不同,外部性可以划分为生产外部性、消费外部性和交易外部性三类,其中,交易外部性进一步包含一类交易外部性、二类交易外部性和三类交易外部性。此处的二类交易外部性与史普博的内部性具有相同的本质内涵,即内部性实质是交易外部性范畴下的一个子分类。     

影响我国环境库兹涅茨曲线的外贸与环境政策分析

环境库兹涅茨曲线(EKC)体现了一国经济增长与环境污染的关系.本文以1990～2005年我国工业污染的数据为基础,描绘出我国EKC是"N"字型波浪式上升的,阐述了产生这一特点的贸易政策和环境政策的影响因素,肯定了政府的环保政策对于环境恶化的控制效果,但认为政府的直接干预只是协调经济增长与环境污染关系的外部手段,提高经济运行效率才是解决问题的根本途径.