移动支付产业变迁趋势及政策建议

支付是经济活动链条中的重要环节,承担着资金划拨和转移的基础性功能。随着 现代信息通信技术的发展,电子商务的持续渗透,“互联网+”等各项政策的利好推动,以移 动支付为代表的新兴电子支付方式迅速兴起,成为促进消费、便利民生的推动力量。在演进历 程方面,现代化支付体系建设为移动支付奠定基础,电子商务发展助推远程支付方式普及,线 上线下融合的商业模式推动了移动支付迅猛发展。本文结合当前移动支付市场情况,从监管政 策、行业格局、技术创新等角度提出了移动支付产业发展趋势,以及促进移动支付产业健康发 展的相关政策建议。     

Home is Where You Make it? Gender and Ahmet Davutoğlu’s Strategic Vision in the Middle East

The Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) policymakers have aimed to position Turkey as the leader of the Middle East by assessing its soft power since they came to power. Drawing on Strategic Depth of Ahmet Davuto?lu, Prime Minister of Turkey, this article attempts to offer a critical constructivist, postcolonial and feminist analysis of Turkey’s recent foreign policy discourse in the region by showing how the myth of leadership is constitutive, and is constituted by Davuto?lu’s discourses on women/femininities and men/masculinities. The leadership is imagined by localising Enlightenment notions of masculinity through a re-reading of local traditions, namely Ottoman history and Islam. In doing so, Strategic Depth aims to feminise Turkey’s imagery without necessarily putting it out of the masculinity continuum. As such, Turkey mimics the West but differs from it so as to perpetuate a good masculinity over the people of the Middle East. Implicit in such an imagery, the text distinguishes itself from the competing self-perceptions (and masculinities) in the country, namely the Kemalist one. I further argue that this imagery underlies the recent hypermasculinisation of politics within and beyond the country when political elites feel threatened in the face of political crises.     

The causality between FDI and sector-specific production in Turkey: evidence from threshold cointegration with regime shifts

This article considers bidirectional nonlinear cointegration relation between FDI and industrial output in Turkey. The data cover the monthly period 2005:1–2013:10 for the time series of total industrial production, 36 sub-industrial sectors’ production and FDI. Following nonlinear threshold cointegration and VECMs, the article yields that (i) total industrial production and nine sub-industrial productions have positive long-run impact on FDI with significant error corrections, (ii) six sub-industrial productions have short-term influence on FDI, (iii) FDI has long-run positive impulse on total industrial production and nine sub-industrial productions with some significant error corrections and (iv) FDI affects four sub-industrial productions in the short run as well as in the long run. The results of VECMs from (i) also reveal that the all short-term adjustment parameters are found significant and powerful in 10 typical regimes (Regime-1s) and in 5 extreme regimes (Regime-2s). Finally, the outcome of VECMs from (iii) yields that short-term adjustment parameters are found significant and powerful in two typical regimes and in four extreme regimes. Eventually, considering FDI’s positive impact in the short and long run, this article suggests that policymakers promote specifically the FDI inflows to the sectors of intermediate goods, manufacture of beverages, manufacture of rubber and plastic and manufacture of other nonmetallic mineral products.     

中国不良资产管理行业的发展新趋势

自1999年四大资产管理公司成立以来，中国不良资产管理行业从无到有、从小到 大，经历了政策性阶段、市场化转型和全面市场化发展的不同阶段。进入全面市场化阶段以 来，各类资产管理公司不断涌现，处置手法也在不断丰富。当前中国经济正处于产能出清、利 润修复、产业结构重塑的新旧动能转换期，无论是金融机构还是实体企业的不良压力都不小， 而资产管理公司业务具有逆周期的特点，2016年以来各地涌现大量地方不良资产管理公司， 截至2017年末，地方资产管理公司已达58家，大量资产管理公司在内的多种投资者也在不断涌 入。基于此背景，文章通过分析不良资产管理行业的发展历程以及面临的新挑战，对行业未来 的发展方向进行了展望。     

Sources of productivity differentials in manufacturing in post-transition urban South-East Europe

The paper analyses the effects of urbanization and localisation economies on manufacturing firms’ productivity across urban landscapes in post-transition South-East European (SEE) countries. Fixed-effects panel data estimations on a large sample of firms show that the factors accounting for productivity advantages of manufacturing firms in urban post-transition SEE are related to the firms and to the environment in which these firms operate. Firms located in diversified cities benefit from a productivity premium generated in this type of agglomeration, while no evidence was found that the relative specialization across industries has any effect on firm productivity levels.     

Approximation of Asymmetric Multivariate Return Distributions

We develop a new method to approximate the asymmetric multivariate probability density function (pdf) of financial asset returns by using series expansions; a rate of convergence for the mean absolute error of this approximation is also provided. We then propose the method of maximum likelihood and the generalized method of moments to estimate the parameters of the approximated pdf. A Monte-Carlo experiment corroborates the feasibility of our approach.     

Soft landing in a Markov-switching economy

We analyse the monetary policy implications of boom–bust cycles in asset prices using a Markov-switching rational expectations model. In our simulations, when a bubble bursts, the Taylor rule fails to achieve a soft landing, contrary to the optimal policy.     

The determinants of FDI in Turkey: A Markov Regime-Switching approach

This paper considers movements of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in Turkey, and therefore, to understand the dynamics of FDI, runs several nonlinear FDI equations in which the basic determinants of FDI in Turkey are determined through Markov Regime-Switching Models (MSMs). The statistical properties of Markov Regime-Switching time series models are more desirable than those of conventional time series or panel regression models. Through these properties of MSMs, i) one can observe structural changes, if they exist, in FDI equations through time, ii) if, in fact, the true FDI regression equation follows a nonlinear relationship, MSMs fit data better than the linear models. This paper eventually follows maximum likelihood methodology of Markov Regime-Switching Model (MSM) to search for the possible structural changes in level and/or trends and possible changes in parameters of independent variables of FDI–MSM equations through the transition probabilities. In conclusion, this paper yields the outcome that Turkish FDI growth equation has significant structural changes in level and trend and that has significant coefficient shifts in explanatory variables. These explanatory variables are Turkish GDP Growth, Labor Cost, the Electricity Price Growth, the growth in average prices of High Sulphur Fuel Oil, Cooking Coal, Steam Coal and Natural Gas, Export Growth, Import Growth, Discount Rate and Country Risk Indexes for Turkey, US and EU, respectively, within the time interval from 1988 first quarter to 2010 second quarter.