Greece in 2010: A Tragedy Without(?) Catharsis

The Greek crisis in 2010 was a tragedy waiting to happen. However, and contrary to the impression created by the stabilization program’s immediate focus on restoring fiscal balance, its roots lie in the erosion of international competitiveness over the past three decades and the attendant de-industrialization of the country. Catharsis, i.e., the creation of the conditions for sustainable long-run growth, requires a coherent, medium-term strategy, bolstered by wide social consensus, to improve competitiveness and redeploy labor and other production factors to the tradeable sector. Nevertheless, owing to the accumulated imbalances, catharsis is fraught with risks. Yet, the proposed alternatives, such as, government debt rescheduling with possible discount and a temporary or permanent exit from EMU, are even worse. They are not likely to succeed, for they do not adequately address the dramatic erosion of competitiveness and have severe potential repercussions.     

Equilibrium price formation in markets with differentially informed agents

We consider a pure exchange economy with a finite set of types of agents which have incomplete and asymmetric information on the states of nature. Our aim was to describe the equilibrium price formation and analyze how the lack of information may affect the allocation of resources. To do so, we adapt to an asymmetric information scenario a variant of the Shapley–Shubik game introduced by Dubey and Geanakoplos (J Math Econ 39:391–400, 2003 ).     

Assessing fiscal sustainability subject to policy changes: a Markov switching cointegration approach

We propose a Markov switching cointegration approach to assess long run fiscal sustainability. This method allows us to simultaneously: (1) test for cointegration in the presence of significant fiscal policy changes; (2) assess the type of fiscal regime that a country experienced at a given period and (3) analyse the timing of the transition between the estimated regime types. Given its flexibility, our approach enable us to uncover a richer and more complex dynamics in the analysis of fiscal sustainability, which standard linear cointegration methods fail to capture.     

Economic and Monetary Union – Current Fiscal Disturbances and the Future

At the moment of its setting up the Economic and Monetary Union did not meet the criteria of the optimum currency area. Neither does it today. The crisis of public finance in the eurozone results from the abandonment public finance reforms, lack of consistency in enforcing the decision of the Stability and Growth Pact and, additionally, economic recession and financial crisis. Further functioning of the eurozone will depend on radical reforms of public finance and structural reforms enhancing efficiency of the market as an adjustment mechanism, and competitiveness of economies. The very establishment of the European Stabilization Mechanism and European Financial Stability cannot make up for the above mentioned necessary undertakings. It is important to change the socioeconomic model existing in the EU member countries.     

Cost economies,efficiency and productivity growth in the Chinese banking industry: evidence from a quarterly panel dataset

This article examines cost economies, productivity growth and cost efficiency of the Chinese banks using a unique panel dataset that identifies banks’ four outputs and four input prices over the period of 1995–2001. By assessing the appropriateness of model specification, and making use of alternative methodologies in evaluating the performance of banks, we find that the joint-stock commercial banks outperform state-owned commercial banks in productivity growth and cost efficiency. Under the variable cost assumption, Chinese banks display economies of scale, with state-owned commercial banks enjoying cost advantages over the joint-stock commercial banks. Consequently, our results highlight the ownership advantage of these two types of banks and generally support the ongoing banking reform and transformation that is currently taking place in China.     

Federalism and decentralization—a critical survey of frequently used indicators

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge on the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey the existing indicators for both federalism and fiscal decentralization. We argue that federalism is a constitutional institution, whereas decentralization is the outcome of a policy choice, and that the two ought to be systematically distinguished because decentralization can also occur in nonfederally structured states. We further argue that institutional details are very important with regard to federalism and that dummy variables usually capture only very specific aspects of these institutional details. We use factor analysis to test whether the latent variables behind the observed indicators support these assumptions. More than two important factors are derived, implying that a more fine-grained differentiation beyond simply “‘federalism” and “decentralization” might be in order. The correlations of the most important proxies for various aspects of federalism and decentralization with a number of quasi-exogenous variables, as well as with institutional variables, are usually rather modest.     

The distributional impact of large dams: Evidence from cropland productivity in Africa

We examine the distributional impact of large dams on cropland productivity in Africa. As our unit of analysis we use a hydrology based spatial breakdown of the continent that allows one to exactly define regions in terms of their upstream/downstream relationship at a highly disaggregated level. We then use satellite data to derive measures of cropland productivity within these areas. Our econometric analysis shows that while regions downstream benefit from large dams, no beneficial effects accrue to cropland within the vicinity. Moreover, we find that the productivity enhancing impact of upstream dams is dependent on the local climate. Overall our results suggest that upstream dams have quantitatively on average provided up to 12% of the minimum daily per capita amount of kilocalorie needs in downstream communities and increased agricultural production by 1%.     

大学文化与大学内涵发展研究——以中南林业科技大学为例

我国大学未来的发展模式是从重视规模增长的外延式发展转变到依靠质量提高的内涵式发展的轨道上来。中南林业科技大学以文化建设为引导,以＂求是求新、树木树人＂为学校文化核心精神,以学科引领为龙头,以教育提质为中心,以人才强校为根本,以管理创新为保障,坚持走内涵式发展道路。