中部崛起中的六省旅游联动发展

中部崛起关系我国经济发展的全局,具有重要战略意义.借鉴长三角地区成功发展的启示,中部地区要实现崛起必须在发挥六省各自优势的同时,充分进行区域协作,实行区域联动.在目前六省竞争有余、协作不足的情况下,有必要利用旅游资源丰富、互补性强,旅游产业发展态势良好的有利条件,充分发挥旅游业关联带动作用明显、区域协作性强的产业特质,以旅游业为联动的首选行业,进行协作,实现旅游资源、客源市场共享,域内各级政府与旅游企业间的联动.并以此为范例,带动其他产业的协作与联动,开创六省上下一条心、紧抓机遇共谋崛起的良好局面.     

Fostering creativity from an emotional perspective: Do teachers recognise and handle students’ emotions?

Emotions have a significant effect on the processes of designing and creative thinking. In an educational context, some emotions may even be detrimental to creativity. To further explore the link between creativity and emotion, a series of interviews were conducted with design and technology (D&T) teachers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Beijing concerning their experiences of working with students on design projects. The intent was to investigate how these teachers understood and managed their students’ emotions while teaching creative design skills. Some teachers indicated that they understood their students’ emotions through observing their behaviour, connecting with them by synchronising emotions or by evaluating student performance. The teachers also reported using various other methods to handle their students’ emotions. This study highlights the importance of equipping D&T teachers with skills for awareness and regulation of emotions so that they can better enable students to cultivate creativity in the design process.     

Urbanization as A Process of State Building: Local Governance Reforms in China

Existing scholarship suggests that local transformation in reform‐era China has been a process of decentralization of state power driving extractive local governments to pursue economic growth through rapacious land appropriation and producing many miserable landless villagers. This study puts forward an alternative perspective by arguing that local governance reforms in China to advance urban development should also be interpreted as a process of state building, whereby local government reshaped its governance strategy so as to mitigate potential social unrest and strengthen its political legitimacy in governing rapidly urbanizing areas. Based on intensive fieldwork in a periurban district in southern China, this research examines how the local state has heightened its control over urbanizing villages through its day‐to‐day governance practices and the pursuit of a complex policy agenda comprising social welfare provision, shareholding reforms and intervention in grassroots politics. The findings of this study shed new light on understanding local state transformation in periurban China and on explaining why the country still maintains tremendous urban growth despite incessant land disputes and numerous social tensions at different localities.     

FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE PUT-CALL PARITY IMPLIED RISK-FREE INTEREST RATE

In this paper the put-call parity implied riskless rate of borrowing and lending is re-examined. Using a rigorous model, it is shown that, given the level of an observable proxy of the risk-free rate of lending (T-bill rates, for example), the put-call parity provides an opportunity to borrow at rates substantially below the market rate of lending. This is especially true when high interest rates prevail. The major conclusion is either that American option prices may invalidate the parity, or that option markets are not as frictionless as one might wish.     

WHAT MOTIVATES GOING PRIVATE?: AN ANALYSIS OF AUSTRALIAN FIRMS

We investigate going private transactions in Australia between 1988 and 1991. Approximately ten percent of all takeovers during this period are instances of going private. In contrast to studies of similar transactions in the United States, we find no direct evidence to support a free cash flow explanation for going private, although going private is frequently preceded by the threat of a takeover offer. However, the free cash flow explanation for going private may not be applicable in Pacific Basin countries where exchange-traded investment activity is in relatively high growth sectors and foreign ownership accounts for a large part of those investment sectors where managerial abuse of free cash flow has been alleged.     

The Use of Forward Contracts for Hedging Currency Risk

This paper derives an optimal rule for hedging currency risk in a general utility framework. Ex ante hedging performance of the forward markets is examined using the optimal hedge ratio derived from the utility model and an optimal rule derived from another model (excess return per unit risk) suggested in the hedging literature. Results of this study indicate a naive (one-to-one) hedge performs similarly to the optimal hedge ratios under either model. An implication of this study is that financial managers of multinational firms should simply follow a one-to-one rule when hedging foreign exchange risk in the forward markets.     

On Footloose Industries and Labor Disputes with Endogenous Information Asymmetry

If capital becomes internationally mobile but labor does not, are outcomes of labor disputes tilted in favor of workers or employers? In this paper, we show that the answer depends critically on how the information structure of the dispute changes endogenously with capital mobility, and in addition, whether international investment incentives selectively favor the outflow of capital from the most or the least productive firms. In doing so, this paper brings together three strands of literature that are not often seen together—incentive compatible contracting, wage and unemployment outcomes of labor disputes, and international capital mobility with heterogeneous firms.     

Civic Engagement in the Performance Evaluation of the Public Sector in China: Building horizontal accountability to enhance vertical accountability

Abstract

This article accounts for the logic of building of an accountability mechanism with elements of civic engagement in an authoritarian regime. It is elaborated by a performance evaluation programme ‘Democratic Review of Administrative and Business Style’ (DRABS) in Wuhan in central China. The author argues that the DRABS does help form government agencies’ responsiveness to the public with various public scrutiny instruments including mass media and the internet, and that it is more accurate to frame the mechanism as having the function of building horizontal accountability to enhance vertical accountability.