东亚消费风险分担的度量及潜在福利分析

文章利用1970-2004年的相关数据,度量了东亚13个经济体的消费风险分担的程度以及东亚地区在实现完全风险分担后带来的潜在福利收益.实证结果表明:东亚区域资本市场在平滑GDP冲击方面的作用非常小,对区域借贷市场虽有一定的作用,但较为有限,这说明东亚的消费风险分担程度还相当低;相比OECD国家和欧盟国家,东亚各经济体风险分担的福利收益是比较高的.     

On the Provision of Insurance against Search‐Induced Wage Fluctuations*

Should workers be provided with insurance against search‐induced wage fluctuations? To answer this question, I rely on the numerical simulations of a model of on‐the‐job search and precautionary savings. The model is calibrated to low‐skilled workers in the United States. The extent of insurance is determined by the degree of progressivity of a non‐linear transfer schedule. The fundamental trade‐off is that a more generous provision of insurance reduces incentives to search for better‐paying jobs, which increases the cost of providing insurance. I show that progressivity raises the search intensity of unemployed workers, which reduces the equilibrium rate of unemployment, but it lowers the search intensity of employed job seekers, which reduces the output level. I also solve numerically for the optimal non‐linear transfer schedule. The optimal policy is to provide little insurance up to a monthly income level of $1350, so as to preserve incentives to move up the wage ladder, and nearly full insurance above $1450. This policy reduces the standard deviation of labor income net of transfers by 34 per cent and generates a consumption‐equivalent welfare gain of 0.7 per cent. The absence of private savings does not fundamentally change the shape of the optimal transfer function, but tilts the optimal policy towards more insurance, at the expense of a less efficient allocation of workers across jobs.     

巨灾压力下的公共财政:国际经验与启示

从保护公共财政的角度看,为了让巨灾保险充分发挥作用,如果政府有充分选择的自由,政府的最优选择应该是回避对巨灾损失承担直接责任,而是让居民和保险人共同承担.但政府可以通过为商业保险人提供再保险、为居民购买巨灾保险提供补助等方式积极承担间接责任.第二,在政府不得不承担直接责任的情况下,政府次优选择应当是位居商业保险之后.而且提供比商业保险更低的保障.总之,政府应当尽可能让商业保险在前面首先承担直接责任,并减少自身的直接经济责任.     

心理会计、公共福利保障与居民消费

消费需求不足是我国经济快速增长过程中的一个突出问题。考虑到经典理论的局限性,我们提出了基于心理会计的消费行为假说,并对假说的真实性进行了验证。研究发现,居民心理会计账户结构的变化是当前制约我国消费需求增长的根本原因,而改革进程中出现的一些制度结构的失衡是问题的根源。据此我们指出,通过提高公共福利和社会保障水平,降低经济发展过程中的不确定性进而调整居民心理会计账户的结构,与单纯增加居民收入相比能够更加有效地促进消费的增长。     

The Welfare State, Budgetary Pressure and Labour Market Shifts

Public debate about the welfare state in OECD countries has emphasized the need for reform to meet a twofold set of shocks: budgetary pressure and a labour market shift against unskilled workers. The aim of the paper is to set out a framework for examining the implications of these shocks for the optimal scale of social transfers and, in particular, the impact on different societies, distinguishing a restricted welfare state, labelled "the United States" and a more extensive welfare state, labelled "Continental Europe".     

Banks,Financial Markets and International Consumption Risk Sharing

In this article, we explore how characteristics of the domestic financial system influence the international allocation of consumption risk in a sample of OECD countries. Our results show that the extent of risk sharing achieved does not depend on the overall development of the domestic financial system per se. Rather, it depends on how the financial system is organized. Countries characterized by developed financial markets are less exposed to idiosyncratic risk, whereas the development of the banking sector contributes little to the international diversification of consumption risk.     

Labour Demand, Wage Mark-ups and Product Market Integration

Globalization makes it easier to relocate production and thus employment across countries. Therefore, it is often asserted that labour demand becomes more elastic, causing wage mark-ups to fall and thus erode the effective market power of trade unions. We explore this issue in a general equilibrium model where the elasticity of labour demand is endogenized and related to the facility by which production can be relocated across countries. Wages and employment increase unambiguously as a result of product market integration, but it is ambiguous whether wage mark-ups decrease or increase. A numerical illustration suggests that the elasticity effect – even when the wage mark-up falls – is of second order relative to the gains from trade.      

Integration, Fragmentation and the Geography of Welfare

The welfare effects of trade integration with endogenous production technology are examined in a monopolistic competition framework. In addition to explaining industry location, trade patterns and accompanying effects on local welfare, the analysis highlights the endogenous change in the costs of supervising fragmented production when economies open up to trade. By regarding fragmentation as a skill‐intensive activity, factor proportions (rather than size) strongly affect the international distribution of gains from trade. Nevertheless, albeit not generally, for a wide range of parameter values, even a skill‐poor country can participate in the gains—despite loss of industry.     

Colonialism,Postcolonialism and the Liberal Welfare State

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state with a particular emphasis on the liberal welfare state of the USA and UK. Both are understood in terms of the centrality of the commodified status of labour power expressing a logic of market relations. In contrast, we argue that with a proper understanding of the relations of capitalism and colonialism, the sale of labour power as a commodity already represents a movement away from the commodified form of labour represented by enslavement. European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclusion and exclusion which remain racialised through into the twenty-first century.     

Migration,Foreign Aid and the Welfare State

Aspects related to the links between international migration, foreign aid and the welfare state are highlighted in this paper. Migration is modeled as a costly movement from an aid‐recipient developing country with low income and no welfare state, towards a rich donor, developed country with a well‐developed welfare state. Within this model, it is found, among other things, that the best response of the developed donor country is to increase aid as the co‐financing rate by the recipient country increases. When the immigration cost decreases, e.g. as a result of greater economic integration between the two countries, it is beneficial for the donor country to increase aid and the recipient country to increase the co‐financing rate.     

Information, trade and incomplete markets

The no-trade result of Milgrom and Stokey, J Econ Theory 26:17–27 (1982), states that if rational traders begin with an ex-ante Pareto optimal allocation then the arrival of information cannot generate trade. This paper allows traders to trade before and after the arrival of information. If there are enough securities to hedge against all payoff relevant risk, then the preinformation-arrival allocation is Pareto optimal and information arrival has no effect. This no-retrade result is the competitive analog of the no-trade result of (1982). However, information generically generates trade when markets are state-contingent incomplete.We thank seminar participants at Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon,Cornell, Essex, London, Maastricht, USC, and York and participants at the 2003 SITE, the 2003 SAET and the Fall 2002 Cornell–Penn State Macro Conference. We also thank Karl Shell and a referee for this journal for useful comments     

我国对外贸易发展:挑战、机遇与对策

本文针对我国加入世界贸易组织后,对外贸易环境总体改善的情况下出现的严峻贸易摩擦现象,提出应深入研究我国对外贸易高速增长过程中的深层矛盾和制约因素,以及如何分析和对待国际贸易保护主义这两个相关联的问题。文章同时分析了国际贸易保护主义依然存在的原因,并得出贸易保护主义阻挡不住我国的战略机遇的判断。根据以上分析,文章最后提出了政策思考和建议。     

国际贸易中企业社会责任壁垒的演进与应对

企业社会责任理论上不应成为贸易壁垒,然而在现实中常常被发达国家作为贸易保护的借口而成为变相的贸易壁垒,并且日益成为当前可持续发展理念下影响我国外贸发展最难以跨越的障碍,不可小视。了解企业在国际贸易中容易遭遇的企业社会责任壁垒的影响,提出有针对性的应对策略,尤其是政府、行业协会和企业三方联动,有效地化解企业社会责任贸易壁垒,积极促进我国对外贸易。     

城乡公共福利差距的影响因素研究

长期以来,我国财政投入明显偏向城市的政策使城乡基本公共福利存在着巨大差距。随着我国国民经济的快速发展,国家经济实力的增强,农村公共福利供给有所改善,但城乡在教育、卫生医疗、社会保障、基础公共设施和就业服务等方面存在很大差距。目前,在我国公共福利分配主要由地方财政承担的前提下,区域经济发展不平衡、各地区财力大小的不同等因素是导致我国城乡公共福利差异的主要原因。     

Trade Costs and the Open Macroeconomy

Trade costs are known to be a major obstacle to international economic integration. Following the approach of New Open Economy Macroeconomics, this paper explores the effects of international trade costs in a micro‐founded general equilibrium model that allows for different degrees of exchange rate pass‐through. Trade costs are shown to create an endogenous home bias in consumption and the model performs well in matching empirical trade shares for OECD countries. In addition, trade costs reduce cross‐country output and consumption correlations, and they magnify exchange rate volatility. Trade costs turn a monetary expansion into a beggar‐thy‐neighbor policy.     

Marriage, Divorce and Reciprocity-based Cooperation

This paper considers partnership formation, partnership dissolution and reciprocity‐based cooperation by couples in the form of voluntary transfers to smooth consumption. While risk sharing is one benefit of having a partner, it is also limited by the (endogenous) risk of separation. The equilibrium formation and dissolution of partnerships are determined simultaneously with cooperative behavior. Publicly provided earnings insurance is shown to increase the “turnover” rate in the marriage market as well as to reduce the steady‐state marriage rate and the implicit financial cooperation between partners.     

Financial Globalization,International Business Cycles and Consumption Risk Sharing*

In spite of two decades of financial globalization, consumption‐based indicators do not seem to signal more international risk sharing. We argue that the fraction of idiosyncratic consumption risk that gets shared among industrialized countries has actually increased considerably over the period 1980–2000 and, in particular, during the 1990s—from around 30 to more than 60 percent. However, standard consumption‐based measures of risk sharing—such as the volatility of consumption conditional on output or international consumption correlations—have been unable to detect this increase because consumption has also been affected by the concurrent decline in the volatility of output growth in most industrialized countries since the 1980s. First, the volatility of output at business‐cycle frequencies has declined by more than has the volatility of permanent fluctuations. Since consumption reacts mainly to permanent shocks, it appears more volatile in relation to current changes in output. This effect seems to have offset the tendency of financial globalization to lower the volatility of consumption conditional on output. Second, because the variability of permanent global shocks has also fallen, international consumption correlations have also generally not increased as financial markets have become more integrated.