Nachrichten und ihre kommunikative Qualität

German literature on the history of journalism in agreement relates as a certainty that the inverted pyramid in news writing was established as a professional standard during the American Civil War (1861–1865), along with, and because of, the use of the electric telegraph for transmitting news and its propensity, in its early days, to fail at times. Besides this technological thesis, three others are discussed: one related to political science, the other to cultural studies, and the third to economics. All four theses trace the diffusion of the «hard» news style, founded on the principle of relevance, back to factors that affected journalism from the outside. In contrast to this, a longitudinal study of innovative 19^th century New York daily newspapers shows that the principle of «lead and body» did not prevail before the eighties of the century, and its establishment occurred in an effort to make newspapers more readable and more attractive for readers by editing the copy received. The introduction of «inside editing» was not in the least based on economic calculations of cost and benefit. This provides a starting point for explaining the spread of the public sphere and the development of professional journalism by the dynamic of the capitalist market economy, rather than considering journalistic ethos and commercial calculation as opposites. In any case, the origin of the professional news style of the inverted pyramid is to be found in the striving for communicative quality in the journalists’ product. That it can be traced back to the telegraph’s propensity to malfunction is a myth, eagerly retailed but not at all substantiated.     

Kenneth Starck Gastprofessor in Dortmund

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Central Bank Independence,Wage Bargaining,and Labor Market Performance: New Evidence

Using data on 20 industrial countries over the period 1982 to 2003, this article finds central bank independence to favorably affect both unemployment and employment rates. The size of these effects appears to be substantial, particularly in the long term. In contrast to some of the previous literature, the article finds that the favorable effects of central bank independence do not depend on the degree of wage bargaining centralization or coordination. Furthermore, it finds that higher centralization as well as higher coordination of wage bargaining may also have favorable direct effects on labor market performance.     

Taxing Energy to Improve the Environment: Efficiency and Distributional Effects

We study the effects of environmental tax policy in a dynamic overlapping generations model of a small open economy with environmental quality incorporated as a durable consumption good. Raising the energy tax may yield an efficiency gain if agents care enough about the environment. The benefits are unevenly distributed across generations since capital ownership, and the capital loss induced by a tax increase, rises with age. A suitable egalitarian bond policy can be employed in order to ensure everybody gains to the same extent. With this additional instrument the optimal energy tax can be computed.     

Optimal Strategies in 2-Stage Sampling

In many survey situations simple random sampling of units and estimation of a total of interest by the expansion estimator are attractive methods, at least at first sight. Considering cost aspects suggests rather to use multiple stage sampling which, in general, is cheaper, but less effective. The design effect is an adequate criterion of the decrease of efficiency. We discuss this criterion for clusters (primary units) of equal size and derive exact conditions for a decrease of efficiency. The equality condition for cluster sizes seems not to be very restrictive, because in many cases one will be interested in clusters of approximately the same size, or, if sizes differ essentially, the clusters are partitioned into strata according to their sizes and the procedures for different strata are independent, each dealing with clusters of equal size or nearly so. In the context considered the use of the Horvitz–Thompson estimator is quite general. We examine a class of estimators with the Horvitz–Thompson estimator and a straight forward modification of it as special elements. As for the design effect all elements of the class are very similar, as for other aspects such as admissibility there are remarkable differences.     

China: Coming to Grips with the New Global Player

This paper analyses China's economic performance in the last 25 years and discusses its prospect for growth in the future. Exports and investment have been the two driving forces for the high annual GDP growth rates. FDI plays an important role. However, structural issues such as the loss‐making state‐owned firms and the fragile banking industry have to be solved. Monetary policy is complicated by the accumulation of reserves which, however, provide an insurance for the fragile banking system. Property rights, a crucial element in transforming a communist society, are far from being clearly developed. Major policy issues in the future include the correction of the distorted growth process and of the institutional deficits, especially with respect to the rule of law and the lack of democracy.