The Interaction of Wage Bargaining Institutions and an Independent Central Bank – A Methodological Reflection on Current Theories

The paper analyses the increasingly popular literature on strategic interactions from a methodological viewpoint. These political economy approaches focusing on interactions between wage bargaining institutions and an independent central bank do not follow unified methodological rules and so cannot be categorised under a single particular paradigm. Moreover, the literature remains in a way circumscribed by the limits of our logical capacities and of mathematical tractability and therefore relates to the 'real world' of wage bargaining and economic policy institutions in a very limited way only. A consideration of the vast complexity of institutional conditions that impact economic performance in EMU reminds and cautions one that actual economic policy research is able to cover only very few of the numerous conditions responsible for the overall outcome.     

转型期中国县级政府的客观治理绩效与政治信任——从“经济增长合法性”到“公共产品合法性”

善治是中国政府的执政要务,政治信任反映着公民对政府治理的认可和支持。文章利用2008年中国公民意识调查及政府统计数据,实证分析了政府治理绩效的主观和客观维度对政治信任的影响。研究发现,公民对政府在经济增长、民生福利、纯公共产品领域治理绩效的回顾性和前瞻性积极评价都正相关于政治信任;纯公共产品提供的主观评价对政治信任的影响大于经济增长和民生福利。县级政府的客观治理绩效对政治信任有重要影响,在高人均福利支出、低基尼系数和低失业率的县级单位,政治信任更高,而人均GDP反而微弱地负作用于政治信任。因此,尽管经济增长仍然是政治信任的重要来源,但民生福利和纯公共产品正赶上并超越经济增长,成为公民提供政治信任的新源泉。     

Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV): Issues in combining economic and political processes to value environmental change

This paper explores and contrasts the different social processes of valuation now appearing as economic means of valuing the environment. Monetary valuation via stated preference approaches has been criticised for assuming well formed and informed preferences and excluding a range of sustainability concerns such as rights, fairness and equity. Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) in small groups is a novel hybrid of economic and political approaches which raises the prospect of a transformative and moralising experience. Critics of standard contingent valuation approaches have advocated this as offering a way forward. However there has been a lack of clarity as to the means of obtaining values, the expected outcomes and their role. Moving to group settings of deliberation raises concepts of social willingness to pay and accept which are distinct from an aggregate of individual value, although this does not seem to have been widely recognised. A new classification of values is presented appropriate to the literature trying to merge economic and political processes. Values associated with the individual may be exchange values, charitable contributions or fair prices, while social values can be speculative, expressive or arbitrated. The use of DMV is shown to result in different values due to variations in the institutional setting and process of valuation.     

房价与经济波动的区制转移——基于STAR系列模型的实证研究

本文运用平滑转移自回归(STAR)系列模型定量分析了1998-2010年间我国经济波动区制转移(Regime Transition)过程及房价波动在其中的作用。研究结果表明,我国经济在受到外生刺激时会产生跳跃冲动,但能否出现区制转移现象取决于外生刺激的持续性,单纯依靠以往经济的表现不能充分地解释这种现象;房价作为外生变量有效地解释了经济波动中存在的动态转移过程,这表明房价波动中存在着先行信息并可用于预测未来经济走向。此外,经济波动转移过程并非不可逆转,足够的反向推动力能够扭转经济势头,这使得政策干预成为可能。     

Political Control of Administrative Spending: The Case of Local Governments in Norway

Excessive administrative spending in local governments has been a concern in the public debate in Norway. Administration takes resources away from welfare services such as primary education and care for the elderly. Since administrative spending varies considerably between local governments, a study of the political and economic factors involved is warranted. The central hypothesis is that the administrators will have more power relative to the politicians when political control is divided between parties. Estimation of a demand model of administration added political structure shows strong empirical correlations between types of coalition governments and socialist controlled governments and the level of administrative spending. Divided political control strengthens the hands of the agenda setting bureaucrats.     

Paradigms in English political economy: Interregnum to Glorious Revolution

The paper provides a model for describing how paradigms of political economy were engendered in England, 1647-c.1690. It is submitted that 1 a paradigmatic distinction can be drawn between an atomistic perspective and a corporatist one; 2 the two perspectives were simultaneous, and engendered by alternative theories of sovereignty as presented by political discourse; 3 the connection between economic and political freedom was the opposite of what is commonly assumed. Free trade in any sense was endorsed by champions of absolute royal sovereignty, and state intervention in the economy was a common outcome of the way economic activities were conceptualized by supporters of a free constitution or a mixed monarchy. No historical narration follows the model, but some evidence for its historical plausibility is provided in sections 2 and 3.     

PERFORMANCE CONTINGENT PROTECTION*

In this paper we ask how to construct a tariff or quota schedule which depends on the behavior of a domestic monopsonistic monopolist in order to achieve the best tradeoff between two objectives of a government. We consider various political and economic tradeoffs which could face the policy maker: aggregate welfare versus industry profits, output and imports; and trade barrier revenue versus industry profits and domestic price. In all cases considered, performance contingent protection which takes the form either of a tariff which depends on domestic output or a quota which depends on the price charged is generally superior to a fixed tariff or quota and is sufficient to achieve optimality.     

政绩推动、政治关联与民营企业投资扩张

地方政府以行政方式推动民营企业投资扩张是造成投资过度和产能过剩的重要原因。以2004-2011年民营上市公司为样本,本文实证分析了地市级政府面临的政绩压力对民营企业投资的影响,并重点考察了政治关联在其中的作用以及政绩压力对信贷资源配置的影响。研究发现,控制地区固定效应后,地方政府政绩压力影响辖内民营企业投资,政绩压力特别是经济增长压力越大时,辖内民营企业过度投资越严重。政治关联弱化了政绩压力对民营企业投资的推动作用,地方政府面临较大的政绩压力特别是经济增长压力时,政治关联民营企业过度投资程度相对较低。进一步研究还发现,地方性政治关联对政绩压力推动民营企业投资扩张的弱化作用更为显著。政绩压力特别是经济增长压力增大时,地方政府同样有着强烈的动机推动非管制行业民营企业扩张投资。信贷资源在政绩压力影响政治关联民营企业投资行为方面扮演了重要角色。本文的相关结论对于理解地方政府推动企业投资扩张造成产能过剩以及政治关联的经济后果具有一定的参考价值。     

Will Gradualism Work When Shock Therapy Doesn’t?

When shock therapy is politically infeasible, will gradualism work? This paper takes up this question by: (i) building a political economy model in which it makes sense; (ii) stating the relevant political economy constraint rigorously; and (iii) analyzing the question in the context of a neoclassical model of adjustment, based on Mussa (1978). The paper answers the question in the affirmative, thus contributing to the scientific and policy literature on the economic analysis of policy reform.     

The quality of government

We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality ofgovernments in a large cross-section of countries. We assessgovernment performance using measures of government intervention,public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government,and political freedom. We find that countries that are poor,close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, useFrench or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholicsof Muslims exhibit inferior government performance. We alsofind that the larger governments tend to be the better performingones. The importance of (reasonably) exogenous historical factorsin explaining the variation in government performance acrosscountries sheds light on the economic, political, and culturaltheories of institutions.     

Evolution of Risk and Political Regimes

The risk of political predation impedes the achievement of economic prosperity. In this study, we analyze how the risk of predation evolves in different political regimes. Formally, we look at the interaction between a government and citizens in which, in each period, the government has an option to predate. Citizens prefer governments that are competent and non‐predatory and strive to replace ones that are not. Regimes differ in the degree to which citizens can succeed in doing so. In pure democracies, citizens can displace incumbent governments; in pure autocracies, they cannot; and in intermediate cases, they can do so in probability. After economic downturns, the posterior probability that the government is competent and benevolent declines. According to the model, in intermediate regimes, but not in others, governments can separate by type. One implication, then, is that these regimes are politically and economically more volatile, with higher levels of variation in assessments of political risk and in economic performance. Another is that in such regimes, political leadership can make an economic difference. Empirically, we test our argument by measuring the impact of economic downturns on the perceived risk of political expropriation in different regime types, using as instruments the incidence of natural disasters and unexpected terms of trade shocks.     

A strategic analysis of the war against transnational terrorism

We study a two stage game in which a transnational terrorist organization interacts with an arbitrary number of countries that may differ in their political or economic power, their military effectiveness, the benefit from cooperating against terrorism and the value they assign to damage. Only a subset of countries that emerges endogenously takes proactive measures to fight the terrorist, while all countries incur defensive expenditures to protect their soil. We characterize analytically the pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium of the game and show how the equilibrium strategies depend on the key model parameters. We provide an algorithm to find the endogenous set of cooperating countries based on their benefit from cooperation and their political/economic power.     

Exogenous shocks,dynamic correlations,and portfolio risk management for the Asian emerging and other global developed and emerging stock markets

ABSTRACT

This study examines the potential influence of exogenous shocks on time-varying correlations and portfolio strategies between the Asian emerging and other global stock markets including developed and other emerging markets. Using the ARMA-cDCC-FIEGARCH model with and without exogenous shocks, our results highlight the usefulness of including other global stock assets in the traditional portfolio for Asian emerging market investors. However, investors have limited opportunities to diversify their assets during the global financial crisis. Moreover, the shocks from the U.S. stock market have a greater influence on global stock markets compared to that from U.S. economic policy. Fortunately, the model with exogenous shocks improves its accuracy, which plays the same role of controlling structural breaks in the model. More importantly, incorporating exogenous shocks in our model also provides better value-at-risk performance results and hedging effectiveness. These results have several important implications for investors, researchers, and policymakers.     

TWO OR THREE PROBLEMS CONCERNING SOCIAL STABILITY AND OUR MEASURES OF WELFARE: WHAT CAN ECONOMISTS LEARN FROM OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES?*

This paper takes up several problems that are related to psychology, political science and ethics—disciplines that we regard as neighbours on the boundaries of economics. I pay particular attention to such topics as mass psychology and social stability, democracy and economic performance and the notions of wellbeing and happiness. After laying out some of the history of academic discourse on these problems and notions, I reconsider the nature of discrepancy between microlevel motivations and macrolevel phenomena, trade‐offs between equality and liberty and the problem of measurement of social welfare and “happiness” from the perspective of “dissociation of intention and consequence”.     

TOWARDS A PARADIGM OF DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION: CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND CO-PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL SOCIAL SERVICES IN SWEDEN

ABSTRACT:  Many countries in Europe are now searching for new ways to engage citizens and involve the third sector in the provision and governance of social services in order to meet major demographical, political and economic challenges facing the welfare state in the 21st Century. Co-production provides a model for the mix of both public service agents and citizens who contribute to the provision of a public service. Citizen participation involves several different dimensions: economic, social, political and service specific. The extent of citizen participation varies between different providers of welfare services, as too does user and staff influence. Empirical materials from a recent study of childcare in Sweden will be used to illustrate these points. However, the role of citizens and the third sector also varies between countries and social sectors. Third sector providers facilitate citizen participation, while a glass ceiling for participation exists in municipal and for-profit providers. Moreover, co-production takes place in a political context, and can be crowded-in or crowded-out by public policy. These findings can contribute to the development of a new paradigm of participative democracy.     

A demographic-economic explanation of political stability: Mauritius as a microcosm

"This paper examines current models of economic and political development--social modernization theory, political and economic characteristics of stable regimes, and cross country analysis of political stability--and tests them on the Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius. The analysis continues with a causal explanation for political stability in Mauritius' recent history, derived from an examination of economic policies and demographic patterns. Political change in Mauritius over the past sixty years seems to be explained best by a model for political stability which integrates specific economic and demographic factors. The model, applicable to development in other third world nations, revises Malthus' conclusion that population and economic conditions move in an oscillatory relationship and replaces it with a more comprehensive theory, suggesting that political stability is a function of both economic development and a repeating cyclical relationship between economics and population."     

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.     

宏观经济学中的政治经济学——以新政治经济学的研究方法为视角

新政治经济学以使用经济学现代方法对政治与经济相互作用的研究为核心,成为政治经济学的一个新发展。宏观经济学中的政治经济学作为新政治经济学的一个重要分支,其研究对象是政治对宏观经济运行和政策的影响。宏观经济学中的政治经济学的出现对当代宏观经济理论的影响,则表现在研究形式和研究方法所做的创新。     

Ethnicity, Politics and Economic Performance

The paper investigates the effects of ethnic diversity on economic performance. Previous studies have found that diversity has various detrimental microeconomic effects, tending to reduce public sector performance, and has large detrimental effects on the overall growth rate. I develop a simple model of the effect of ethnic diversity on a government decision problem in which there is a tradeoff between growth and distribution, in the contexts of democracy and dictatorship. I find that in democracy ethnic diversity has no effect upon the decision, whereas in dictatorship ethnic diversity leads to a government choice which reduces the growth rate. I then test these propositions on two data sets. The first is for 94 countries over the period 1960–1990. I find that whether diversity adversely affects overall economic growth depends upon the political environment. Diversity is highly damaging to growth in the context of limited political rights, but is not damaging in democracies. The second is for World Bank projects in 89 countries. I find that the same relationship between diversity and democracy affects the proportion of projects which are successful.     

ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF POLITICAL MOVEMENTS IN CHINA: LOWER BOUND ESTIMATES

We construct a structural econometric model to measure partially the economic effects of political movements in China. Consumption, or equivalently investment, is determined by a central planner trying to maximize a multiperiod objective function. Political events are modeled by exogenous changes in the shocks to productivity and to investment which affect the time paths of major economic variables. Effects of the events are measured by comparing the time paths generated by the model with and without the changes in the shocks. The dynamic optimization model is estimated using data from 1952 to 1993. In contrast with our earlier work, we assume a trend-stationary process for log total productivity rather than a random walk process and estimate that without the Great Leap Forward Movement output per capita in China up to 1993 would have been on average 1.18 to 1.71 times as great. Without the Cultural Revolution the corresponding figure would have been 1.08 to 1.12 times as great.