Economics,environment and equity

Although allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses to satisfy unlimited human wants in the positivist framework (a la Lionel Robbins)has been a focus of economists for a long time, awareness of resource scarcity in the ecological sense and discussion of the relevant issues in the context of distributive justice, as well as intergenerational equity, are of more recent vintage. A perspective encompassing judicious use of natural resources inevitably leads to a discussion which includes ecological, economic and ethical dimensions. This essay examines the contributions included in a recent book.     

文化要素与经济增长

狭义地说,文化是世代相传下来的、规则化的"惯例",以及一套价值观念和相应伦理规范的"信仰"。关于文化对经济增长的作用机制,大致可以从三个方面给出初步解释:文化要素影响企业家职业选择和企业管理者选择机制,影响企业层次生产率,进而影响总生产率和经济增长;文化作为知识资产,以其特有的方式进入总生产函数,决定了经济增长率和增长路径;经济和文化的共生演进,将成为服务经济时代的典型化事实,并影响经济增长方式和经济竞争方式。     

Economics,Ethics and Thanatology: Lessons from the Ancients

The normative presuppositions motivating rational choice decision-making based on optimizing objectives amount to a thin account of ethical economic behavior. Ancient thought offers insights that can provide a firmer basis both for personal, individual choice as well as for public policy. After a brief review of Epicurean and Stoic ethical principles, a comparison is made of modern economic and Hellenistic conceptions of rationality and rational behavior. These competing conceptions are then applied to an examination of a contemporary public policy problem, namely health care, particularly as this applies to “end-of-life” issues. The argument concludes that decision-making based on a eudaimonic conception of the good has the potential to provide us with a more efficient health care system as well as one that more satisfactorily addresses the needs of the chronically ill and dying patients who account for a highly disproportionate share of health care expenditures.     

试析大别山红色旅游区域伦理经济的和谐发展

大别山区域是著名的红色旅游区域,沉积有丰富的伦理经济资源。综合利用这些伦理经济资源,实现大别山红色旅游区域伦理经济的和谐发展,对于这一区域开展社会经济建设,有机融入区域经济圈,提升社会经济发展绩效,实现区域战略价值,沉积优秀区域文化,彰显区域经济特色都具有重要的战略意义。可以结合区域实际,发掘、弘扬这一区域传统文化中的伦理经济因子,保护、创新其非物质文化遗产中的伦理经济因子,合理利用其宗教文化中的伦理经济因子,全面整合其红色文化教育资源中的伦理经济因子,从而促进其伦理经济的和谐发展。     

Problems of Emergency Arbitration

This paper explores ethical burdens facing the economics profession which are associated with epistemic features of economic practice. Economists exert power over those they purport to serve by virtue of epistemic asymmetry between themselves and others, i.e., the intellectual monopoly they enjoy over a vitally important body of knowledge. But they also face the problem of epistemic insufficiency, which implies that they may do substantial harm as they try to do good. The paper explores the ethical entailments of the epistemic features of economics, and argues that managing the ethical challenges requires a new field of inquiry, the field of professional economic ethics, and not just a code of conduct.     

关于人才资本定价问题的思考

现代经济中,人才资本决定着经济增长的速度和资本的利润率,人才在社会经济发展中的作用日益重要,人才资本的定价问题也越来越受人关注,人才资本定价的扭曲,制约了我国现代企业制度的建立和知识经济的发展。合理的人才资本定价需要一个能够在现代经济条件下正确评价人才资本贡献的理论指导。本文从人才资本的价值和使用价值的角度来思考人才资本的定价问题。     

Law, values and economic thought: Notes for a research agenda

This essay suggests that law, economic thought and moral/religious values may be related in ways that condition how each functions. It sketches the potential value of investigating this triad by looking at two patterns of interaction and locating each in a specific narrative context taken from the development of competition law in Europe. In one, law functions as a transforming bridge between religious/moral values and economic thought, while in the other the three domains of thought and discourse combine to create structural synergies that dialectically influence each in return.     

Moral Dilemmas and Factual Claims: Some Comments on Paul Krugman's Defense of Cheap Labor

In 1998, Paul Krugman published a collection of short polemical essays on economic themes under the title The Accidental Theorist And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science . Among those essays was one entitled "In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better than No Jobs at All". This brief article is an extended comment on that piece, which happened to contain factual claims central to the empirical research program of one of us, and ethical and political issues of concern to us both. Our view is that in his essay on cheap labor, (as indeed in many of the others in the collection), Krugman makes some pungent and telling criticisms of other writers on economic matters and—in this particular case—of some analytically weak and ethically dubious claims which are frequently espoused by contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-globalization radicals conventionally regarded as being on the political left. But at the same time—or so we shall argue—his own polemic is, in important ways, undermined by the narrowness of the theoretical framework within which it is constructed, and most especially, by Krugman's almost total lack of an historical perspective in which to see either contemporary debates over global capitalism or the ethical issues at their heart.     

Law,values and economic thought: Notes for a research agenda

This essay suggests that law, economic thought and moral/religious values may be related in ways that condition how each functions. It sketches the potential value of investigating this triad by looking at two patterns of interaction and locating each in a specific narrative context taken from the development of competition law in Europe. In one, law functions as a transforming bridge between religious/moral values and economic thought, while in the other the three domains of thought and discourse combine to create structural synergies that dialectically influence each in return.     

用科学发展观去审视生态伦理观

科学发展观下的生态伦理观是可持续发展的伦理意蕴,是人类在社会实践基础上的人与自然发展的协调性;以人为本为目的的人类与经济社会发展的全面性和以统筹兼顾为方针的生态文明与经济社会发展的持续性的高度统一。     

Economics, environment and equity

Although allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses to satisfy unlimited human wants in the positivist framework (a la Lionel Robbins)has been a focus of economists for a long time, awareness of resource scarcity in the ecological sense and discussion of the relevant issues in the context of distributive justice, as well as intergenerational equity, are of more recent vintage. A perspective encompassing judicious use of natural resources inevitably leads to a discussion which includes ecological, economic and ethical dimensions. This essay examines the contributions included in a recent book. Certain elements of today’s ecological crisis reveal its moral character. First among these is the indiscriminate application of advances in science and technology. Many recent discoveries have brought undeniable benefits to humanity Unfortunately, it is now clear that the application of these discoveries in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful longterm effects. This has led to the painful realization thatwe cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations. (Message of Pope John Paul II for the celebration of the World Day of Peace, January 1, 1990.)     

Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism

Ordoliberalism is the theory behind the German social market economy. Its theoretical stance developed in the context of the economic crisis and political turmoil of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s. It is premised on the strong state as the locus of liberal governance, and holds that economic freedom derives from political authority. In the context of the crisis of neoliberal political economy and austerity, and debates about the resurgence of the state vis-à-vis the economy, the article introduces the ordoliberal argument that the free economy presupposes the exercise of strong state authority, and that economic liberty is a practice of liberal governance. This practice is fundamentally one of social policy to secure the sociological and ethical preconditions of free markets. The study of ordoliberalism brings to the fore a tradition of a state-centric neoliberalism, one that says that economic freedom is ordered freedom, one that argues that the strong state is the political form of free markets, and one that conceives of competition and enterprise as a political task.     

Value and exchange: Two windows for economic theorizing

This essay introduces a symposium on value and exchange as alternative organizing concepts for the pursuit of economic theorizing. These concepts pertain to two distinct conceptual windows through which economic phenomena can be examined. The immediate inspiration for this symposium was the articulation of Kohn (2004) of the distinction, a distinction that, in turn, was central to the articulation of Buchanan (1964). Furthermore, this distinction is central to the divergent orientations toward economic theorizing that were set forth in the early 1870s by Carl Menger (1971) and Léon Walras (1874).     

Ethical Principles that Make the World and its Economy More Equal

Abstract

No doubt, the global economic (and political) structure is very unequal. The paper begins by demonstrating the various dimensions of this inequality as they relate to economic measures such as per capita GDP, degree of consumption and ownership, health measures, education, and power and influence in various global organizations such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others. Next, the paper, supporting a more equal global economic and political structure, investigates the various instruments in welfare economies and ethics theory that can be utilized to justify a sort of distributional change that could lead to more global equality. Finding various economic and ethical instruments associated with utilitarianism, Pareto Optimality and the Hicks–Kaldor compensation test less than satisfactory in dealing with and advocating sufficient global distributional changes, we will investigate ethical principles developed by John Rawls in both his 1971 The Theory of Justice and his 1999 The Law of Peoples, Sen's capability approach, the debate between Rawls and Sen regarding their ethical principles, and whether or not those ethical principles can justify necessary global distributional changes. As we will argue, although the principles developed by Sen and Rawls can be utilized to justify global distributional changes to a degree, they cannot advocate a global difference principle that can justify sufficient global distributional changes. Attempt is made to develop a global difference principle that can justify and advocate more drastic distributional changes.     

Globalisation,Reterritorialisation and the Political Economy of Tourism Development in the Middle East

A major limitation of most political economy studies of globalisation is that they view globalisation almost exclusively in terms of deterritorialisation. This essay, in contrast, emphasises how increases in the transnational mobility of people, capital and information can also result in reterritorialisation, which is the increased relevance of location and characteristics of place for global economic activity. In contrast to the erosion of the territorially based powers of nation-states often associated with deterritorialisation, the reterritorialisation of economic activity can increase the power and regulatory influence of state, societal and transnational agents who are able to exert control over territorial assets and the reterritorialisation process. The essay uses the concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation to develop a framework to analyse the changing political economy of one of the most understudied aspects of globalisation, the international tourism economy. With a focus on the development strategies of states in the Middle East and North Africa, the essay explores efforts to generate ‘experiences of place’ for tourists and territorial-based economic rewards for firms and their political consequences.     

试论企业价值评估

20世纪以来,许多经济学家不断地对企业价值评估的理论和实践进行探索和研究,取得了可喜的成果。本文主要论述了企业价值评估理论的产生、特点和评估的方法;提出了要积极借鉴国外企业价值评估的经验,建立符合我国实际的价值评估理论方法体系的建议。     

现代企业伦理的基本特征及构建策略

现代企业越来越重视企业伦理对企业发展的影响。企业伦理是指以企业为行为主体,以企业经营管理的伦理理念为核心,企业在处理企业与出资者,企业与员工、企业与企业、企业与国家、企业与社会、企业与环境关系中的伦理精神、道德规范以及实践的总和。     

Principles of economic justice: Marketplace and workplace applications

Mainstream economics argues that ethical standards are essentially relative, that they differ from one person to the next, and are entirely outside the limits of legitimate inquiry for economic science. Our view is that there are certain objective ethical standards to be applied that parallel the three modes of human interaction in economic affairs: person to person, superior to subordinate, and member to group. Those standards are given by the principle of equivalence, principle of distributive justice, and principle of contributive justice. The key to integrating those standards into mainstream economic thinking is to begin with what happens in every exchange involving economic agents who are well-informed and free to act. What is gotten in the exchange is more highly valued than what is given up. However, there must be limits to that gain—identified in mainstream economics as profits, consumer surplus, and economic rent—in order to prevent one party from taking advantage of another and to assure that market exchange serves all economic agents fairly and effectively and not just those with the power and will to turn gain into excess. Mainstream economists argue that sufficient limits are imposed by the “invisible hand.” We argue instead that limits must be imposed more deliberately and directly by human economic agents and that those limits are supplied by the three principles of justice.     

关于绿色经济学的几个问题

绿色经济学是在对传统经济学反思与批判的基础上,整合相关绿色理论资源、适应绿色经济实践而发展起来的经济学学科,是经济学内部逐渐发展起来的新因素和新需求,也是重建经济学理论的新思路和新尝试。绿色经济学已在学科涵义、研究对象、基本预设、理论体系和学科体系等方面进行了探索,同时亟待从学科建设角度,对绿色经济学的研究视角、参照标准、分析工具和"成本—效益"模式等问题进行深入研究。绿色经济学将成为推动经济发展、实现社会公平、促进环境优化、推进社会进步的重要力量,对当下我国转变发展方式、实现科学发展有重要的理论价值和实践意义。