Output gaps

What is the output gap? I discuss three alternative definitions: the deviation of output from its long-run stochastic trend (i.e., the “Beveridge–Nelson cycle”); the deviation of output from the level consistent with current technologies and normal utilization of capital and labor input (i.e., the “production-function approach”); and the deviation of output from “flexible-price” output (i.e., its “natural rate”). Estimates of each concept are presented from a dynamic–stochastic–general-equilibrium (DSGE) model of the U.S. economy used at the Federal Reserve Board. Four points are emphasized: The DSGE model’s estimate of the gap (for each definition) is very similar to gaps from policy institutions, but the model’s estimate of potential growth has a higher variance and substantially different covariance with GDP growth; the change in the Beveridge–Nelson trend covaries negatively with the change in the gap in the DSGE model, providing a structural model estimate of a controversial parameter; in this model, estimates of the natural-rate concept are similar to those based on the Beveridge–Nelson and production function approaches; and the estimate of the output gap, irrespective of definition, is closely related to unemployment fluctuations.     

Plan-coordination: Who needs it?

In this paper I revisit the question of coordination - of plans by prices and other social institutions. Prices contain ambiguous information that requires interpretation. How are they, in spite of this, able to coordinate plans and actions? The answer given in this paper is that they are not - they do not. I suggest that a closer examination of plan-coordination indicates that some plans should not be coordinated, at least as regards their outcomes. Coordination applies to the ‘rules’, the institutions, and not to the outcomes that occur from following them. This follows from the obvious notion that there must be room for creativity. While this may seem like a trivial point, made many times, it is not clear, at least as concerns the role of prices, that it has been fully digested.     

The Post-Apartheid Development Debacle in South Africa: How Mainstream Economics and the Vested Interests Preserved Apartheid Economic Structures

Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were persuaded by mainstream economists and South African businesses to pursue neoliberal policies. The ANC implemented policies that made South Africa more open to international trade and financial flows along with privatization and austerity, other than a modest increase in social expenditures. After twenty-three years of such policies, we can judge their effectiveness. Unfortunately, neoliberalism worsened the inequality created under apartheid and failed to stimulate significant growth and development. This article documents the extent to which the maintenance of key apartheid-era institutions, under the guise of “market friendly policies,” undermined the prospects for long-term economic and human development in South Africa. This post-apartheid development debacle should go down in history as one of the great failures of mainstream economics and its neoliberal policy recommendations. Breaking the cycle of uneven development in South Africa will require fundamental changes in institutions, including changes in democracy, ownership structures, and the very nature of the economic system. This article offers some ideas for how an adjusted institutional structure might reconfigure the social provisioning process in South Africa to address racial divisions and lingering inequality.     

The Emergent Role of Social Intermediaries in the New Economy

This paper focuses on the role of social intermediaries in the evolution of the economy. By 'social intermediaries' I mean those institutions that mediate between the economy and other realms of social activity and maintain a balance between them. Among institutions of this kind are trade unions and governmental organizations but also cooperatives, household-based enterprises, religious institutions, and, increasingly, networks of professionals and business people based on race, sex, ethnicity and religion.     

国外非营利社会组织与我国事业单位改革

我国事业单位在整个国民经济和社会发展中具有相当重要的作用.由于历史和现实的原因,当前事业单位改革遇到了许多困难,相比政府机构改革和国有企业改革更复杂、也更困难一些.通过对国外非营利社会组织的属性、功能定位、行业分布和经费来源的研究,提出我国事业单位改革可借鉴的经验和做法.     

A coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy

This paper proposes a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy, based on the coevolution of ecosystems, technologies, institutions, business strategies and user practices, within a multi-level micro-meso-macro perspective. This builds on and develops previous coevolutionary analyses of long-term technological and industrial change, and recent renewed interest within ecological economics on coevolutionary approaches. Previous work has analysed how the coevolution of technologies and institutions has led to the lock-in of current high-carbon energy systems; and how the coevolution of physical and social technologies and business strategies has brought significant material and welfare benefits to the minority of the world's population living in industrialised countries. The coevolutionary framework proposed here may be used to undertake: (1) detailed empirical analyses at a micro-meso level of the challenges relating to the innovation and adoption of particularly low-carbon technologies; (2) as a framework for analysing the multi-level interaction of social and technological elements within potential transition pathways to a low carbon energy system; (3) to assess the implications for economic growth and prosperity of a transition to a low carbon economy; and (4) to assist in the development of more formal, multi-level evolutionary economic models.     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

农民工社会认同的形成——基于建筑业农民工的考察

农民工的社会认同关系到这个群体城市融入的问题。依据对建筑业农民工群体实地考察和问卷调查,探讨社会结构和制度安排如何建构了农民工群体的归属感问题。对社会认同的研究不仅要关注宏观制度结构因素对群体的身份地位的作用和影响,还应从微观的角度,分析制度设置是如何建构成员对群体的依附、归属并建构出群体边界的问题。只有改善农民工的劳动条件,提高他们的保障水平,这个群体才有可能融入城市。     

Quantity and Quality Concerns about Technology Impacts

Paleoanthropologists have taught us that, in the earliest Homo-human history, technology, human cognition, and social institutions influenced each other and evolved together. They remain integrated in our complex social institutions today. Robert Owen and Clarence Ayres emphasized the importance of the human-technology relationship. This article moves a step beyond Owen and Ayres by recognizing that humans are technology. Without the recognition of human technology, it is not possible to compare it with and evaluate how it should fit with other technologies. It is also not possible to adequately analyze and judge technological innovations, in general, without the use of social belief criteria. Furthermore, any technological comparisons and evaluations should recognize that decreases in production are needed in order to deal with climate change. Technological assessment has become more important given the vast and profound societal penetration of modern technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic editing.     

Shaping technologies and shaping markets: Creating demand for biotechnology

Technological innovation is the 'commercialization' of new products and processes by firms. When based on new technologies, product innovation by firms involves the creation of new demand as well as the creative technical development of the product itself. This article discuss innovation in this light, bringing together literature on the social shaping of technologies and on the economics of innovation. As an example of the simulataneous shaping of products and new institutions to form a new 'market space', the article explores the development and marketing of one kind of biotechnology in the 1980s, specifically the exploitation of monoclonal antobody technology for the manufacture of new health care diagnostics.     

Tax evasion in transition: Outcome of an institutional clash? Testing Feige's conjecture in Albania

A field survey of households was conducted in Tirana, Albania in 2000. A response rate of 89.3% yielded 1.340 valid questionnaires, allowing me to test Feige's (In: Nelson, J.M., Tilley, C., Walker, L. (Eds.), Transforming Post-communist Political Economics. National Academy Press, Washington, DC, p. 21) conjecture that more tax evasion will be observed, when formal and informal institutions clash. Respondents’ attitudes towards formal and informal institutions were obtained by applying factor analysis to their responses to a series of attitudinal questions. The theoretical importance of the interaction between formal and informal institutions in determining tax evasion finds empirical support in the data.     

颠覆性技术关注方向演化研究

关注颠覆性技术创新方向演变对于构建颠覆性技术“发现—遴选—培养”机制，挖掘重大颠覆性技术选题具有重要意义。利用三螺旋协同性测度模型量化政府、产业、学术界3类主体对颠覆性技术关注方向的协同程度，构建颠覆性技术行动者网络，利用社会网络分析法解析网络结构形式下政、产、学三方关注颠覆性技术创新的耦合方向，探究高度耦合技术方向的演化特点。最后，获得技术关注方向协同性、技术关注耦合方向特征、技术关注方向耦合时间时序特征、技术关注方向耦合机构特征、高度耦合技术方向演化特征5个方面的结论。     

Religious Identity,Informal Institutions,and the Nation-States of the Near East

This paper uses the Near East as a case study to describe how religious identity became a source of preference formation and a cause of social cleavage. It formulates the concepts of identity-sharing groups and resource-sharing groups to bridge between religious identity's social-psychological aspects and its socioeconomic effects. The paper then argues that social cleavages among religious identity-sharing groups generated informal institutions that are incompatible with the abstract formal institutions of the nation-states of Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. That incompatibility hobbles efforts of formal state institutions to promote economic development, and instead restrains economic growth by intensifying existing conflicts among groups. It suggests that a state that could promote economic development would be the one that recognizes and supports the informal, localized institutions and allows those of them with common features to evolve into abstract formal institutions.     

Procedural Rationality and Institutions: The Production of Norms by Means of Norms

This paper deals with a cognitivist approach to the problem of how social and economic institutions are formed. The economic framework I use is Simon's model of procedural rationality, integrating a cognitivist approach into a game structure. In game theory norms are seen as conventions, but not all institutions can be explained by game theory models. In cognition-based approaches, the creation and maintenance of institutions is the outcome of a search for satisficing norms. According to Simon and Newell (1972), agents faced with problems to solve visualise a problem as an area of potential situations to examine in order to establish analogical problem structures. In my approach, a norm can be defined within a system of norms that form in a historical-evolutionary dimension, suggesting a path in norm-forming processes.     

MARKET ECONOMIES WITH AN ENDOGENOUS SOCIAL DIVISION OF LABOR

I consider a general equilibrium model of a competitive market economy in which production is conducted through an endogenous social division of labor. I represent economic decision makers as “consumer–producers,” who consume as well as produce commodities. In this approach, the emergence of a nontrivial social division of labor is guided by Increasing Returns to Specialization (IRSpec) in production. Under IRSpec, I show existence of competitive equilibria, the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics, and characterize these equilibria. Markets equilibrate through the adjustment of the social division of labor; the production technologies completely determine the equilibrium prices.     

Do the Hamilton and Beveridge–Nelson filters provide the same information about output gaps? An empirical comparison for practitioners

I compare the empirical performances of the recently-developed Hamilton and Beveridge–Nelson filters of nonstationary time series, using quarterly data on real gross state product in U.S. states. There is meaningful overlap between the two filters, with average correlation coefficients ranging between 0.60 and 0.97. The Hamilton filter and its more recent modification produce cycles of greater volatility and amplitude than the Beveridge–Nelson filter and appear to outperform in pseudo-out-of-sample forecasting exercises of future GSP growth and inflation (though the outperformance is not generally statistically significant). The Beveridge–Nelson filter is, however, less sensitive to realizations of new data.     

Where are the big bills? Escaping the endogenizer’s dilemma

The continual expansion of rational choice theory to a greater range of social phenomena—from markets to politics and institutions—is a testament to its success. Each further application, however, simultaneously forecloses a potential source of inefficiency in economic systems. Abdicating efficiency considerations impairs economics’ explanatory power as much as its normative relevance. In this paper I explore the interconnected roles of subjectivism and knowledge problems in accounting for inefficiency. I conclude that the knowledge-generating properties of institutions allow for efficiency comparisons, but only in the embrace of a thoroughgoing subjectivism.     

An Entrepreneurial Perspective of Institutional Change

Utilizing Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurial discovery, Schumpeter's two types of economic responses and the Austrian theory of institutions as building blocks, this paper constructs an entrepreneurial theory of institutional change. Focusing on the coordinating role of human institutions, this paper argues that entrepreneurial extraordinary discovery destroys the stability of institutions and creates uncertainty in the market (creative response). As a result, institutions are incapable of coordinating economic activities because market participants' stocks of knowledge are no longer adequate to solve new problems. Hence, profit gaps or mismatches of market participants' plans occur. Given new technologies, new relative prices and tastes, imitative entrepreneurs soon identify and capitalize on the opportunities created by Schumpeterian extraordinary discoveries (adaptive response). Imitators improve production methods, modify rules and alter property rights in order to improve coordination. Through learning, experimentation, trial and error, the more rewarding methods are then selected. Successful actions are imitated and repeated in the market, and gradually crystallized into new institutions which once again serve as social coordinators.     

Spontaneously Evolved Social Order versus Positive Legislation in English Constitutional History

Medieval institutions contain an important strain of spontaneous order, especially from the pre-Christian period. A series of irregular successions after the Norman conquest made royal charters increasingly important in establishing the sovereign's legitimacy. Henry I's coronation charter (1100) formed the basis of Henry II's aggressive program of reform legislation, as well as for Magna Carta (1215). Henry II aimed at restoring the legal and political institutions of his grandfather Henry I after a period of civil strife and social degeneration. The fact that almost all later charters grew out of Henry I's charter, combined with the fact that later charters expanded and refined legal and political institutions, establishes the evolution of spontaneous order in the English charters. This evolution continued throughout the middle ages as subsequent kings confirmed Magna Carta.