There's something about saving …

The paper considers how people should plan their saving, given certain assumptions about inheritance and changes in household circumstances. The results are produced by a model that takes into account tax and state benefits as well as various private savings vehicles. It concludes that, for many households, saving for retirement through a ‘pension’ might not be optimum and that the best strategy is to vary the incidence and allocation of saving in response to changes in household circumstances.     

西部大开发中的生态旅游业发展

2000年中国政府实施了西部大开发战略，几平所有西部省、市、区都将旅游产业作为支柱产业发展，奠中大部分地区为实现“双赢”提出发展生态旅游业。因此，生态旅游资源的开发已成为推动西部地区经济发展的一项重大政策和支柱性产业。     

贯彻钢铁产业政策走科学发展之路

时光荏苒，钢铁行业不知不觉又沐浴在2006年的春光之中。从2004年以来国家陆续出台宏观调控政策，到2006年年初的平衡过渡，钢铁行业跨越了由风声鹤唳到有惊无险的历程。     

Satisfaction drivers for Internet service technology among stock brokerage customers in Thailand

Many financial services firms are offering the Internet as a self-service technology (SST), for online stock trading, in an effort to increase effciency and give customers greater access. It is important to understand how this technology will influence customer satisfaction. This paper reports results of exploratory research to identify sources of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the service encounter in Thai stockbrokerage firms. Results show that customers and service providers determine sources of customer dis/satisfaction differently, depending on whether the service encounter is technology-based or interpersonal. Different customer profiles give rise to segmentation in response to the use of Internet technology in this industry.     

Continuous extension of preferences

We consider the problem of extending preferences from a subset of a commodity space to the entire space. It is a simple consequence of the Tietze extension theorem that continuous preferences can be extended if they are defined on closed subsets of a normal space and are representable by utility functions. We show the following: If the space is a non-separable metric space, then extension of preferences is not always possible. In fact for (path-connected) metric spaces, extension property, utility representation property, and separability are equivalent to each other.     

Fixed Exchange Rates and Disinflation in Emerging Markets: How Large Is the Effect?

We examine developing countries which have institutional quality ratings for the effects of exchange rate rigidity on inflation. The level of institutional development exerts no effect on the impact of currency regimes. However, the interaction of institutional quality and exchange rates has, in the most plausible specifications, a negative impact on inflation. This suggests that fixed exchange rates exert at most a contingent effect on inflation, and indicates that countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America contemplating currency pegs would be better off improving institutional quality prior to adopting the euro or dollar and expecting a large subsequent disinflationary effect. JEL no.  F31, O11