Optimal choice of monetary policy instruments when policymaking is costly

Poole's analysis of the optimal choice of monetary policy instruments assumes that stochastic disturbances are temporary, that a monetary authority determines instrument settings each period, and that policymaking is a costless activity. This paper considers an environment in which shocks are cumulative, the monetary authority precommits to instrument settings for an interval of its own choosing, and the authority incurs costs when it adjusts its instrument settings. The key result that arises in this framework is that costs of policymaking generally induce a monetary authority either to choose a socially suboptimal policy instrument or to adjust its policy instrument settings over time in a manner that appears to be inefficient.     

Pension systems and intragenenerational redistribution when labor supply is endogenous

In models with exogenous labor supply, a reallocation of fundsfrom a wage-related pension to a basic pension affects inequalitythrough changes in the pension paid, redistributing resourcesfrom the rich to the poor. We show that in a model with endogenouslabor supply, another effect is present: indeed changes of thebenefit formula have an impact on the labor/leisure choice.This effect goes in the opposite direction of the standard effectthat is also present in models with exogenous labor supply andit could be quite relevant, also depending on the differentassumptions on the working of the labor market. In particular,under specific assumptions on the utility and the productionfunctions, inequality is unaffected by a reallocation of fundstowards the basic pension. However this result changes if aminimum wage is introduced, since in this case inequality turnsout to be reduced.     

专利知识的低效使用和最优专利设计

首先 ,本文确定了由专利知识被低效使用而导致社会福利净损失 ,并说明它随创新知识的生产性的增加而增加。其次 ,最优的专利总保护度由创新知识的生产性所决定 ,并随之递减。第三 ,尽管我们的专利政策包括法定期限T和保护宽度B两个维度 ,但厂商利润和社会福利仅和专利总保护度Φ直接有关 ,由此 ,最优专利政策对应于 (T,B)空间中的一条曲线 ,而在现有文献中却对应于一个点。     

Higher education and social redistribution in a socialist society: The Chinese case

This paper examines successive attempts by the Chinese government to equalize social opportunities by redistributing access to higher education. There has been considerable success in improving the social position of labouring class children, partly at the expense of pre-revolutionary élites, but the impact of redistributive educational policies has fallen short of leadership intentions. The main constraints are the ideological ambiguity caused by competing definitions of fairness and equality, the policy clash between equality and modernization, and the political struggle among established and emergent social strata. The educational reforms of the post-Mao era can be seen as mechanisms by which two strata - officials and intelligentsia - are asserting their ideological and material dominance over social reproduction.     

高等教育与职业教育融合下教育管理机制的研究

文章以高等教育与职业教育的融合为背景,介绍了当前院校融合下的审计干部培训管理机制和考评机制,提出在学员管理中需要重视的若干方面。继而对教学管理团队运作模式进行分析建议,并对院校融合的推进提出若干建议,希望可以为审计事业的发展贡献微薄之力,将高等教育与职业教育的融合发展向前推进。     

Taxation and the redistribution of income

Conclusion This paper has offered no empirical evidence, and is not trying to argue that after-tax relative wage rates will not change at all in response to a change in the progressivity of the tax structure.⁸ Rather, the point is that there is a market mechanism that causes changes in progressivity to be at least partially offset by changes in the pretax wage structure. This mechanism is not taken into account by any model of redistribution through taxation that treats labor output as a homogeneous factor of production. Treating labor output as homogeneous eliminates adjustments to relative wages that are certain to occur in response to a change in the progressivity of the tax structure. Thus, progressive taxation has less ability to redistribute income than is commonly realized. Any shortcomings in the paper remain the responsibility of the authors.     

Personal savings,ethnicity and redistribution

The effects on personal savings of measures to equalise incomes are prominent in current policy debates. Both supporters and opponents of redistributive measures adopt the Keynesian position that greater income equality will itself reduce savings. However, not only income level affects household savings. Different ethnic groups have very different savings behaviour: surveys suggest that black households in the larger urban areas have a higher savings function than white households and a higher marginal propensity to save. Equalising incomes in South Africa implies shifting income to black households from white ones. In these circumstances redistributive measures could actually increase savings. These findings do not, however, point to specific measures to achieve that end or indicate how redistributive measures themselves could shift the savings functions of the various ethnic groups. Nor do they ensure that higher personal savings will translate efficiently into higher investment.     

Investment in education in developing nations: Policy responses when private and social signals conflict

In most developing countries the net private benefit of higher education exceeds its net social benefit because education-related wage differentials are excessive and the beneficiaries of higher education are subsidized. The resulting political pressures seem to favor investment in education over the creation of employment opportunities. A more balanced allocation of investment may require the revision of basic policies dealing with wage determination, the incidence of educational costs and the role of private sector education. The aim should be narrow the gap between private and social signals and thus reduce excess private demand for higher education.     

Economic growth and redistribution in South Africa

The debate over appropriate methods of reducing racial income and wealth inequalities in South Africa has thus far yielded two opposing schools of thought. ‘Growth through redistribution’ and ‘redistribution through growth’ make countervailing claims concerning the efficiency gains and losses attendant upon redistribution. But the relation between economic growth and the redistribution of income and wealth may be more complex than commonly realised. From the literature surrounding Olson's (1982) Rise and Decline of Nations, especially Brock & Magee (1984) and Magee et al (1989), it can be shown that redistributive behaviour can actually increase the rate of economic growth in the short term, and depress growth in the longer term.     

Introduction to income inequalities and redistribution in china

This special section presents the main findings about long-run trends in inequality in China and its driving factors as they emerge from a country case study carried out under a UNU-WIDER supported project.¹ Special focus in the umbrella project were on three issues: (i) the role of earnings inequality and its determinants; (ii) the role of top incomes when administrative records or other sources can be combined with household surveys; and (iii) the redistributive impact of public policies. Main findings of the project including those for China results were presented in a special panel during the UNU-WIDER Think Development – Think WIDER development conference held in Helsinki in September 2018.²

1. Motivation

Inequality has once again emerged as a major issue in economic development across the developed and developing world, and addressing this challenge is key in the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. The UNU-WIDER conference on Mapping the Future of Development Economics held in Helsinki in September 2016³ led to the formulation of a project to study inequality in five major developing countries accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world’s population. UNU-WIDER implemented these studies under its Inequality in the Giants project,⁴ designed as part of a broader international effort to shed light on a set of new questions on between-country and within-country inequalities, by generating integrated datasets and applying a consistent methodology to investigate the determinants of inequality dynamics in some of the world’s largest economies. China was included among the five case countries, and the effort included both a series of papers on China, produced under the coordination of Professor Shi Li and various workshops and meetings. Coming to grips with inequality in China is an obvious priority for anyone interested in trends in global inequality; and the present special section contains five key papers produced in the context of the UNU-WIDER project and subsequently accepted for publication by the China Economic Review.

2. Content of the special section

The five papers on inequality in China presented in this special section cover different topics and jointly illustrate a key set of important themes in the recent evolution of China’s income distribution.The opening study by Luo, Li, and Sicular (LLS) provides an overview and analysis of the long-term evolution of inequality in China, while the next three papers — on urban wage inequality, public transfers, and top incomes — each illustrates and delves more deeply into important aspects of the broader trends in inequality.What are the main findings of these papers? The core finding is that inequality in China rose markedly from the 1980s through the early 2000s; only since 2008 has the upward trend stopped or reversed. LLS report and examine the underpinnings of this core finding, using the five waves of the China Household Income Project surveys conducted during 1988-2013. This paper also finds a considerable, ongoing reduction in rural poverty, and a poverty decomposition analysis indicates that this poverty reduction was mostly due to income growth rather than redistribution in rural areas.The second paper by Gustafsson and Wan (GW) is on urban wage inequality from 1988 to 2013 and it sheds further light on the changes in the distribution of wage earnings. The authors highlight that average wages have grown rapidly and that wage inequality increased until 2007. Moreover, age has become weaker and education stronger related with wage. Importantly, the gender wage gap once small widened rapidly between 1995 and 2007, and workers in foreign owned firm and the state sector enjoy a wage premium.While wages are the most important component of income, it is only part of the inequality story. One important additional question is the role of government taxes and transfers. Since the early 2000s, China has embarked on a major effort to put in place a universal social safety net. The study by Cai and Yue (CY), which is the third paper, assess the consequences of these efforts. Their key conclusions include that the same public policy may produce different redistributive implications. Moreover, if the government keeps increasing the social security transfer scale without changing its distribution, then inequality will increase in China. In addition, formal-sector pension takes up the biggest share and is the most un-equalizing sub-item of all social security transfers; and related to the first paper in the special section they argue that the government should spend more on Dibao and rural residents pension to reduce inequality.Arguably, income inequality measured using household survey data understates actual inequality because surveys have difficulty in capturing top incomes. In the Chinese case, concerns about such bias have increased in the past ten years due to the expansion of private wealth and growing numbers of super-rich. The fourth paper by Li, Li, and Wan (LLW) is on top incomes in China and it attempts to correct for this bias using income information for the Chinese super-rich from various sources. They conclude that the Gini coefficient of income inequality increases substantially when samples of top incomes are incorporated.Finally, Gradín and Wu (GW) analyse in the fifth and final study the distribution of income and expenditure in China in a telling comparative perspective with India. Both countries represent two extreme cases in the relationship of inequality using both wellbeing indicators. It emerges that the joint distribution of income and expenditure differs between China and India because there is a higher prevalence of people with a large mismatch between their ranks in income and consumption in India, especially in rural areas, and particularly amongst those reporting low income and high expenditure. The main compositional effects identified are the different demographic and geographical composition of the countries’ populations, mostly the smaller households (especially in rural areas) and the higher level of urbanization in China than in India. The lack of consistency of cross-country comparisons based on income or expenditure calls for the use of hybrid inequality measures combining data on both provided they are available in the same survey.

3. Concluding remarks

The studies brought together in this special section provide telling insights about the trends in inequality in China from which scholars and policy makers can learn a great deal. In a global perspective, further increases in China’s mean income and wealth, both now above the global means, will begin to raise global between-country inequality. This is important in and of itself. Moreover, while we cannot expect that all the world’s poorest countries will follow the same path as China considering that the initial conditions and the international context they face will be very different, the experiences from China do reinforce the observation that much can be done by policy to influence inequality outcomes. In particular, and as argued by Gradin, Leibbrandt, & Tarp, 2020 (forthcoming):“well-functioning labour markets that promote job-creation, decent pay and social inclusion, removing any legal or de facto discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity or place of origin, providing equal access to human and physical capital, and empowering the most disadvantaged population groups, are a key driver of increased equality”.These insights also emerge clearly from the five China studies in this special section.     

Capitalist development and educational structure

This essay presents a theoretical overview of the relationship between the accumulation process and educational change in the capitalist periphery. The author argues that the school system may serve the interests of the capitalist class by (a) regulating the labour flow between the capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production, (b) raising labour productivity in the capitalist mode, (c) thwarting the development of either a large and class-conscious proletariat or a peasant-worker alliance, and (d) undermining the ideological and political position of traditional elites. Data are introduced consistent with the proposition that where the state represents primarily the interests of the capitalist class, it is these objectives, not a commitment to equality or to maximizing the rate of economic growth, which dominate educational policy.     

Time-consistent linear taxation and redistribution in an overlapping-generations framework

We study time-consistent labour and capital income linear taxationusing an infinite-horizon overlapping-generations model of asmall open economy. Individuals have different productivitiesand the government intervenes for purely redistributive purposes.The study of time-consistent taxation requires the introductionof borrowing restrictions in the economy. We characterize thetime-consistent solution and consider alternative solutionsbased on a simple tax rule. We demonstrate the existence andthe uniqueness of the time-consistent solution using a log-linearutility function. We provide numerical comparisons between time-consistentand time-inconsistent linear taxation: the importance of beingable to make commitment decreases when the differences betweenindividuals increase.     

民办教育机构教育科研现状、问题及推进策略

通过对民办教育机构近五年公开发表的科研成果的统计分析,了解了民办教育机构的科研状况令人担忧,主要存在成果数量少、整体质量不高、研究领域单一、各机构间科研发展极不均衡等问题,并从宏观、中观、微观三个层面分析其成因:政策及制度支持不力、缺乏教育中介组织引领、民教机构教师科研意识淡薄、科研能力缺失。最后提出做好顶层设计,促进民教机构科研发展;加强组织引领,充分发挥教育中介组织作用;引智助力,提升教师科研能力;积极探索,突显民教特色等建议,以期助推民办教育培训机构科研活动开展,提升民办教育质量。     

Tax evasion and intertemporal choice

It has often been argued that the misreporting of regular wage income is limited by third-party withholding and reporting requirements. However, income arising from savings investment is often not subject to such withholding requirements. This paper uses a simple dynamic model to examine the problem of tax evasion of investment income. Assuming that individuals can misreport investment income but not wage income, it is shown that alterations in the audit rate and penalty rates affect an individual's saving (or investment) decisions. This suggests that parameters traditionally used to control tax evasion impact the aggregate output of an economy and the rate of economic growth. This paper is based on the author's dissertation completed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The author is indebted to the dissertation committee, Helmuth Cremer (co-chair), Firouz Gahvari (co-chair), Catherine Eckel, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Richard Steinberg for their guidance and suggestions. All remaining errors are the author's responsibility.