2019年上半年河南经济运行分析及全年走势展望

面对复杂多变的国内外形势,2019年上半年河南经济保持了"总体平稳、稳中有进、稳中向好"的良好势头,经济运行呈现出"‘稳’有根基、‘进’有动力、‘好’有底气、‘新’有潜力"的主要特点,但经济下行压力加大、投资增长后劲不足、工业转型任务艰巨、企业生产经营困难等问题依然比较突出。下半年,河南面临的宏观经济环境总体有利,积极因素和不利影响并存,预计经济运行将呈现"稳中有变、缓中有进、降中有升、危中有机"的主要特征,必须突出稳增长、强动能、促改革、扩开放、防风险、优环境、惠民生,加快推动"七大转换",确保全年经济发展目标的顺利实现。     

Eastern European Public Opinion on Economic Issues:

Abstract Survey data on Eastern Europe is investigated with respect to two major questions: How do people view the creation of a market economy and how do they assess the speed of economic transformation and privatization. These questions are analyzed by looking at the development over 1990 to 1992 and by performing regressions with a number of demographic variables as regressors. Some findings are that the opposition to the creation of a market economy is increasing over time, that in Hungary and Poland people are quite satisfied with the speed of transformation as compared to Czechs and Slovaks, that the Polish are divided over the speed of privatization, and that the relationship between the speed of transformation and privatization is not considered to be very tight by the respondents.     

City and Country: Lessons from European Economic Thought

The article concerns some European thought on the issue of city and country. We discuss the contributions of Henri von Storch, Gustav von Schmoller, Werner Sombart, Wilhelm Röpke, and Friedrich Hayek and attempt to translate these theories into practice in documenting the case of the city of Marl.     

Economic Implications of European Demographic Change

This article uses a model of the economy where people of different ages interact in financial markets and in the labour market and where governments set taxes to balance receipts against pension spending. The model suggests that demographic changes will have major macroeconomic impacts.     

History matters: lessons from twenty-five years of the European Accounting Association

Drawing on a number of primary sources (e.g. the minutes of the meetings of the governing bodies of the Association, EAA publications and congress proceedings), this study outlines the undertakings of the European Accounting Association (EAA) from its inception to the present. Examination of available evidence suggests that the activity of the EAA may be explained by the concomitant effect of institutional, organizational and individual factors. It was found that the EAA made considerable progress in: facilitating networking among European accounting scholars; increasing commitment towards high-quality research; incorporating into its structures and activities the notion of diversity; increasing reputation of its annual congress; and substituting its initial Anglo-Saxon-northern European dominance by a more comprehensive European focus. The EAA, though, faces some challenges in the near future: consolidation in southern Europe and other peripheral countries; penetration in eastern Europe; eventual re-definition of its aims and scope in a globalized world; eventual re-definition of the size and scope of its annual congress; and a more prominent role of women in executive posts.     

Eastern European Economic Integration and Foreign Direct Investment

Economic transition in Eastern Europe should generate market growth. In addition, current discussions on economic integration and the development of a free-trade area in Eastern Europe will improve market accessibility. These two forces will significantly affect the strategies by which external firms will choose to supply markets in Eastern Europe. This paper examines the ways in which supply strategy is likely to change. We show that both market growth and improved market accessibility will lead the external firms to switch from exporting to foreign direct investment. However, market growth is likely to lead to dispersed investment in the growing economies, whereas increased market accessibility, by establishing an integrated regional bloc in Eastern Europe, is more likely to lead to concentrated investment plus infra-regional exports to the remainder of the regional bloc. The switch from exporting to local production through foreign direct investment will favor consumers through lowered prices but will harm national producers by depressing profit margins.     

The first twenty-five years of the European Accounting Association: an American view

Since its emergence at the beginning of the 1990s, numerous companies have adopted the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). This paper tackles two research questions: (1) whether the BSC adds value to companies and (2) if so, how does it contribute to organisational performance. In contrast to previous literature that does not separate these two questions, we rely on an established methodology (Foster and Swenson, 1997) to separate and quantify both the BSC contribution to performance and the way that the contribution is achieved, by applying a unique cause-and-effect scheme to the BSC. Our empirical results are based on survey data collected from 76 business units. They indicate first that the Balanced Scorecard has a positive impact on organisational performance. More specifically, the BSC improves the integration of the management processes and empowers people. Using the Strategy-Focused-Organisation (SFO) model (Kaplan and Norton, 2001), we empirically find that the sources of performance derived from the BSC are primarily of three types: (1) a better translation of the strategy into operational terms, (2) the fact that strategising becomes a continuous process, and (3) the greater alignment of various processes, services, competencies and units of an organisation.     

Money and its Economic and Social Functions: Simmel and European Monetary Integration

A bstract This essay tries to put Georg Simmels The Philosophy of Money into the context of current monetary discussions in economics. Part I looks at the contribution of Georg Simmel in context and offers remarks about the changing structure of economics as a discipline composed of many different subdisciplines. It is argued that Simmel is able to transcend subdisciplinary borders, to great benefit for today's scholar. Part III explains Heinsohn and Steiger's recent contribution to monetary economics in terms of transactions and property rights; although the contribution has been made more in the context of post-Keynesian economics, this is the only way to comprehend and integrate it into the mainstream of scholarly discourse. This examination shows that Simmels approach, transgressing interdisciplinary borders, has merits even today. Part IV looks at the perplexing phenomenon of European monetary integration with a similar interdisciplinary perspective in mind. In this case, it is not monetary economics but constitutional political economy which is the unifying concept to explain the peculiar features of European monetary integration.     

A Brief History of the American Economic Association

The 20^th‐century American economics profession and its leading professional organization—the American Economic Association (AEA)—were privileged and shaped by the federal government's need to direct resources and to call on experts. Bureaucratic tendencies to classify and count had an impact on the discipline's self‐concept, the articulation of subdisciplines, and the establishment of multiple research agendas. They also powerfully framed the strategies for growth and development formulated and deployed by the AEA itself. A consensus of professional opinion and the standardization of curriculums emerged out of the involvement of economists and the AEA with governmental affairs. At the same time, such public engagement was fraught with risks and contradictions—posing challenges and difficulties with which the AEA and the profession would have to contend for decades to come.     

Self-serving Bias in Annual Report Narratives: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Economic Crises

Consistently, management's explanations of corporate performance in accounting narratives have been found to suffer from self-serving bias. Yet there is no unequivocal evidence as to whether this bias is the product of conscious efforts to manage the impressions of the audience or the result of unintentional cognitive biases. The present study contributes to this discussion by comparing the narratives of the letters addressed to shareholders of Europe's most highly-capitalized companies in crisis and non-crisis settings. We find that a crisis situation leads to more extensive use of self-serving bias as adverse external economic conditions are used by managers to present themselves in the best possible light. Given that the letters to shareholders are widely used for capital allocation decisions and considering the evidence that intentional self-serving behavior can be successful, our results imply that investors need to be alert to misleading explanations of performance, particularly during external crises. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has formulated a practice statement proposing non-mandatory guidance on the management commentary that accompanies financial statements. Our results suggest that the quality of narrative information in annual reports is unlikely to be augmented by guidelines that encourage the discussion of corporate performance through the eyes of management.