中澳尚缺战略互信

中国铝业公司增持力拓股份的交易失败后，无论是力拓集团，还是澳大利亚政府，都强调这是一次商业运作，与政治无关。但实际上，交易背后一直有政治因素在起作用。从地缘政治角度看，澳大利亚在地理位置上是亚太国家，与亚洲国家在政治、经济与安全上有着密切的联系。同时，澳大利亚又有着强烈的西方国家意识，—-直强调其历史文化、社会制度、思想体系、价值观念源自西方。澳大利亚的对外关系，以美国和亚太为两个支柱，其中，澳美关系是澳大利亚外交的基本支柱。     

Local Confidence——Global Opportunities

Confidence in your own profes- sional judgement; that＇s one goal all internationally-minded business executives need to embrace.Far too often, management teams spend a great deal of time and energy looking for “outside solutions”, or transplanting foreign business models into their strategic plans （which may or not be suitable for the context）. Instead, sometimes the ‘best practice＇ might be the one closest at hand; one＇s own orofessional iudgement.     

Contractual governance and illiberal contracts: some problems of contractualism as an instrument of behaviour management by agencies of government

This paper considers the significance, as a matter both of politicaland of legal analysis, of the considerable and growing use inthe UK of ostensibly contractual or contract-like arrangementsbetween public authorities and members of society whose behaviourit is judged necessary to manage and control. We argue thatthese new arrangements often amount to instruments of illiberalpolicy, both in procedure and implementation. Drawing on a modelof contractual relations found in social work policy, we assessthe manifestation of contract-like features in recent governmentpolicy toward young offenders and workfare participants. Wethen provide a detailed application of the illiberal argumentin respect of the contractual arrangement promoted in the UKGovernment's New Deal programme and Jobseekers' Allowance. Weconclude that illiberal tendencies in these workfare schemesmay have unintended but nonetheless significant brutalisingeffects upon both participants and administrators.     

Classical and technological convergence: beyond the Solow-Swan growth model

Recent investigations into cross-country convergence followMankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) in using a log-linear approximationto the Swan-Solow growth model to specify regressions. Thesestudies tend to assume a common and exogenous technology. Incontrast, the technology catch-up literature endogenises thegrowth of technology. The use of capital stock data rendersthe approximations and over-identification of the Mankiw modelunnecessary and enables us, using dynamic panel estimation,to estimate the separate contributions of diminishing returnsand technology transfer to the rate of conditional convergence.We find that both effects are important.     

The Fable of the Keiretsu

Central to so many accounts of post-war Japan, the keiretsu corporate groups lacked economic substance from the start. Conceived by Marxists committed to locating "domination" by "monopoly capital," they found an early audience among western scholars searching for evidence of culture-specific group behavior in Japan. By the 1990s, they had moved into mainstream economic studies, and keiretsu dummies appeared in virtually all econometric regressions of Japanese industrial or financial structure. Yet the keiretsu began as a figment of the academic imagination, and they remain that today. Regardless of the keiretsu definition used, cross-shareholdings within the "groups" were trivial, even during the years when keiretsu ties were supposedly strongest. Neither does membership proxy for "main bank" ties. Econometric studies basing "keiretsu dummies" on the available rosters produce predictably haphazard and unstable results. In the end, the only reliably robust results are the artifacts of the sample biases created by the definitions themselves.     

Are CO2 Emission Levels Converging Among Industrial Countries?

Time paths of carbon dioxide emissions intwenty-one industrial countries are examinedfrom 1960–1997 to test for stochastic andconditional convergence. Both panel unit roottests and cross-section regressions areperformed. Overall, we find significantevidence that CO₂ emissions haveconverged.     

Purchasing Power Parity

The paper provides a selective and critical review of the literature on purchasing power parity and real exchange rates, with special reference to the literature of the last two decades.