Value and Exploitation: A counterfactual approach

A deconstruction of the Marxian theories of value and exploitation is attempted by arguing, first, that the labour theory of value is logically and methodologically inconsistent as a basis for a theory of capitalist exploitation and, second, that it is founded on an ontology of the social being which is not plausibly justified. A counterfactual model economy is then built, called Utopia, in which the workers receive the whole net output while commodities exchange at labour values. This model is used as a benchmark to evaluate a capitalist economy where commodities exchange at production prices and workers are exploited. It is shown that the factor of exploitation can be expressed as a ratio between the labour commanded by, and the labour contained in, the net output, or between the value added produced in a capitalist economy and that produced in Utopia. The resulting theory of exploitation entails a weak ontology of the social being, expressing a worker's point of view.     

Are Underground Workers More Likely to be Underground Consumers?

We investigate the impact of working in the underground sector on the demand for underground commodities. Using a tax evasion model with costly information, we show that the presence of a network effect encourages underground workers to purchase underground commodities. The model is estimated using a unique Canadian microdata set for 1993. An increase in underground hours of work has a strong positive effect on the probability of purchasing underground commodities and on the level of expenditures. This relationship has a sizable effect on the impact of tax and enforcement parameters on the level of the underground economy.     

增强中转地型批发市场辐射力研究

中转地批发商业一直在中国商品流通中起着举足轻重的作用。但是,随着经济体制的调整和政策环境的变化,原来作为流通体系和市场网络中心的中转地批发业态受到猛烈冲击。只有从经营方式、制度、管理及技术等方面进行全面的创新,增强中转批发市场的辐射力,才能使其更加蓬勃发展。     

QUANTITY AND PRICE INDEXES FOR CONSTRUCTION

Construction has traditionally constituted one of the problem areas in the preparation of industry price and quantity statistm with in the system of national accounts of most countries. The difficulty stems from what is considered to be the unique character of construction projects. This has unnecessarily impeded the calculation of output price indexes and has resulted in the use of various input-based prices as proxies for output prices. One of the objectives of the development of the system of construction price statistics described in this paper is to permit deflation of the outputs of construction industries in order to produce industry output data in constant prices in a manner consistent with measures for the rest of the economy. This is a more promising approach to improving constant price industry and expenditure measures within the SNA framework than attempting such improvements through the collection of a vast array of quantity data. Construction industries sell specified configurations of materials-in-place which are, to borrow the jargon of other fields, sub-assemblies of some total system. As in other areas of industrial pricing, some of these products are simple and some are complex. Trade contractors sell these sub-assemblies or commodities mainly to an owner-builder or to a general contractor who, in turn, resells the trade contractors’ commodities along with whatever sub-assemblies the general contractor has produced. These sub-assemblies, when combined with, for example, the relevant outputs (or sub-assemblies) of manufacturers, the design services of service industries and the purchasers’ own contributions, yield the wide variety of plant and structures which constitute the various classes of gross fixed capital formation, which are not typically solely the outputs of the construction industries. The resulting contractors’ selling price indexes will provide deflators for the whole range of outputs of the various construction industries. These will become part of the system of industry selling price indexes from which relevant indexes for the various goods and services can be selected and combined with appropriate weights to yield arrays of deflators for the highly complex capital expenditures of business, institutions and government. Ultimately this integrated system of construction industry statistics will permit the preparation of gross output and value added measures, in both current and constant prices, to be calculated for the construction industries as an integral part of the Canadian System of National Accounts, as well as provide a key element for improving the deflation of fixed capital formation.     

FREE TRADE NETWORKS WITH TRANSFERS*

We investigate the network of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) in the context of a network formation game with transfers. In a previous paper we showed that without international transfers countries with different industrialization levels cannot sign an FTA, so that the global free trade network, in which every pair of countries signs an FTA, is not in general pairwise‐stable. In this paper we show that, even if the world consists of fairly asymmetric countries, the global free trade network is pairwise‐stable when transfers between FTA signatories are allowed. Moreover, it is a unique pairwise‐stable network unless industrial commodities are highly substitutable.     

Cocoa Production Output Response to Smallholder Price Speculation: Case Study of Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria

The paper attempts to analyze the variation in cocoa output response to international price fluctuations in two major cocoa producing countries: Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria. The study employs a Nerlovian price expectation technique as in Ogundari (2015), and a Panel VAR model to empirically estimate changes in cocoa output using time series and an unbalanced panel dataset covering a period from 1967 to 2009. The findings indicate and in accordance with economic theory of demand and supply, that cocoa output is an inverse function of the expected prices of competing agricultural commodities like green coffee. When there is an expected price increase of cocoa, cocoa output rises. Simultaneously, if the anticipated price of coffee rises, through a cocoa–coffee substitution mechanism, smallholder farmers shift their focus to coffee production leading to a fall in cocoa output. A Granger causality test was utilized to investigate causality between cocoa output, and cocoa and coffee prices. In the case of Cote d’Ivoire, while there is only a correlation between cocoa output and price, in the case of Nigeria there was none. In addition, the study shows no unidirectional or bidirectional causality between the intervening variables and cocoa output.     

Linkages, Thresholds, and Development

Growth is rarehistorically, with short expansions interspersed with long periodsof stasis. We examine how well this can be explained by a generalclass of Schumpeterian growth models that treat development asa progress through a space of commodities, from simple to morecomplex goods. This process of sequential innovation in a partiallyordered network of commodities is called linkage formation. The central result of this article is thatSchumpeterian growth models exhibit generic threshold behavior.Below a critical probability of linkage formation, developmentgradually ceases. Above the critical probability, innovationcontinues with probability one.     

Bitcoin for energy commodities before and after the December 2013 crash: diversifier,hedge or safe haven?

We study the relationship between Bitcoin and commodities by assessing the ability of Bitcoin to act as a diversifier, hedge, or safe haven against daily movements in commodities in general, and energy commodities in particular. We focus on energy commodities because energy, in the form of electricity, is an essential input in the Bitcoin production. For the entire period, results show that Bitcoin is a strong hedge and a safe-haven against movements in both commodity indices. We further examine whether that ability is also present for non-energy commodities and our analysis show insignificant results when energy commodities are excluded from the general commodity index. We also account for the December 2013 Bitcoin price crash and our results reveal that Bitcoin hedge and safe-haven properties against commodities and energy commodities are only present in the pre-crash period, whereas in the post-crash period Bitcoin is no more than a diversifier. In addition to uncovering the time-varying role of Bitcoin, we highlight the dissimilarity in the dynamic correlations between the extreme downward and extreme upward movements.     

Forecasting the Australian economy with DSGE and BVAR models

Reflecting the importance of commodities for the Australian economy, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the Australian economy with a commodity sector. We assess whether its forecasts can be improved by using it as a prior for an empirical Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR). We find that the forecasts from the BVAR tend to be more accurate than those from the DSGE model. Nevertheless, for output growth these forecasts do not outperform benchmark models, such as a small open economy BVAR estimated using the standard priors for forecasting. A Bayesian factor augmented vector autoregression produces the most accurate near-term inflation forecasts.     

Financialization and the rise in co-movement of commodity prices

Between January 2000 and June 2008, the FAO food price index rose by 96%. Besides the magnitude, the price rise was remarkable for the broad range of commodities affected; prices of agriculture commodities, energy, and metals all rose and fell together. These dramatic developments coincided with a massive inflow of investment in the commodities futures market, and the rise of commodities as an investment class. In this paper, I study causal links between the increase in the co-movement between commodity prices and financialization of the commodities futures market. I extract common factors from a group of 40 commodities using the PANIC method and include it in a factor-augment VEC model along with a proxy of financialization. Results show that financialization of the commodities futures markets can explain the recent rise in co-movement between commodity prices, after accounting for macroeconomic variables.     

Optimal tax theory: A synthesis

Necessary conditions for optimal taxation are derived (i) when taxes are constrained to be linear, (ii) when the form of taxation is unconstrained, (iii) when some commodities are subject to nonlinear taxation, the remainder to proportional taxation. Among the results obtained are several that help to determine upon which commodities the tax system ought to bear most heavily. In particular, a criterion for the effect of commodity taxes in the presence of an optimal income tax is found. The paper concludes with a general principle of simple form for optimal economic policies of all kinds.     

低碳经济下我国网络零售业发展探究

近年来,我国网络零售业表现出了不容忽视的发展趋势,在网络零售业低碳、节能、可持续发展的消费理念下,越来越多的人开始在互联网上从事商品交易活动。网络零售业的市场空间每天都在扩增,其间蕴涵的无限商机也使其今后的发展更具潜力,如何在发挥网络零售业优势的同时,扫清其制约因素,是未来网络零售业发展的重点。     

考虑风光出力不确定性的含电制氢装置的电-气耦合配网系统经济运行分析

高效节能的电-气耦合配网系统能够同时考虑经济效益和环境成本,对提升配电网系统的经济性具有重要作用。本文提出了一个两阶段分布式鲁棒优化模型来解决经济运行问题,运用Wasserstein测度刻画风光出力预测误差概率分布的模糊不确定集,并构建了考虑风光出力不确定性的含电制氢装置的电-气联合系统分布式鲁棒优化运行模型。仿真结果表明：①电制氢装置的引入可以有效改善配网系统的电-气耦合,提高系统运行的稳定性和经济性。②考虑到环境成本,含电制氢装置的电-气耦合配网系统的污染物排放显著降低,保证了系统的低碳运行。③分布式鲁棒优化（distributionally robust optimization,DRO）模型能够抵抗不确定风电和光伏输出的干扰,保守性和计算复杂度相对较低,具有数据驱动的特点。     

Equilibrium in a Market Game

This paper studies the equilibrium of an exchange economy with the same number of agents and commodities. It is shown that under rather mild conditions on demand the market have a price equilibrium—independently of the divisibility of the commodities. The result extends Gale’s equilibrium theorem for indivisible commodities to the case where some commodities are perfectly divisible. The proof is based on a topological lemma contained in previous paper of one of the authors.     

Should emerging market investors buy commodities?

One reason that investors hold commodities is to receive diversification benefits. However, while an extensive set of existing studies demonstrate diversification benefits when investors hold international stocks or bonds, they are generally silent on the implications of holding commodities. Using an asset pricing framework, we investigate the benefits to investors from holding commodities, both individually and in portfolios. Generally, commodity and stock markets are integrated, although there are time-varying benefits to investors that are subject to sample period selection and investment horizon. We show that Asian investors receive positive risk adjusted returns in gold and rice markets but not in any of the other commodity markets investigated. The risk adjusted returns are time-varying: during the Asian financial crisis risk adjusted returns were negative – a penalty for investing in commodities – whereas during the global financial crisis the reverse was true and investors earned positive excess returns. The time-varying nature of the benefits that arise from diversification in commodities and their breakdown during periods of crisis, highlight the problems that investors may face when using commodities for long-term investment in addition to traditional holdings of stocks and bonds.     

Agricultural policy and performance in Hungary

From a number of perspectives it is demonstrated that Hungarian agricultural development has been quite successful. Five decisions contributed to that success: collectivization via the carrot rather than the stick; transformation of cooperatives into the backbone of Hungarian agriculture; development of symbiotic conditions between socialist and private agriculture; decentralization of agricultural decisionmaking; and fostering of development of new institutional forms that contributed toward the rapid spread of technological advances. Personal incomes have become more dependent on profit; relative profit opportunities among agricultural commodities and markets have played an important role in determining input, output, and marketing decisions.     

Walrasian prices in markets with tradable rights

In this paper, we consider an exchange economy where there is an external restriction for the consumption of goods. This restriction is defined by both, a cap on consumption of certain commodities and the requirement of an amount of rights for the consumption of these commodities. The caps for consumption are imposed exogenously due to the negative effects that the consumption may produce. The consumption rights or licenses are distributed among the agents. This fact leads to the possibility of establishing license markets. These licenses do not participate in agents’ preferences, however, the individual’s budgetary constraint may be modified, leading to a reassignment of resources. Our aim is to show the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium price system linking tradable rights prices with commodity prices.     

The welfare economics of the socialization of commodities

Socialization is defined for the purpose of this paper as the acquisition by the goverment of the total output of a commodity such as medical services and redistribution of that commodity equally to all citizens. Simple general equilibrium models are constructed to show that when decisions are reached by majority rule a commodity is more likely to be socialized the greater the inequality of income in the community and the less diverse the tastes of individuals for that commodity. The interests of producers of commodities are also taken into account, and strategic aspects of voting about socialization are discussed.     

Optimal taxes on wealth and consumption in the presence of tax evasion

This article incorporates tax evasion into an optimum taxation framework with individuals differing in earning abilities and initial wealth. We find that despite the possibility of its evasion a tax on initial wealth should supplement the optimal nonlinear income tax, given a positive correlation between initial wealth and earning abilities. Further, even if income and initial wealth are taxed optimally, it is still desirable to levy a tax on commodities, though it can be evaded as well. Thus, our result provides a rationale for a comprehensive tax system. Optimal tax rates on commodities differ in general, however for the special case of a uniform evasion technology equal rates are optimal if preferences are homothetic and weakly separable.