Effect of Approved Destination Status on Mainland Chinese Travel Abroad

Approved Destination Status (ADS) agreements facilitate international leisure travel by Chinese citizens, allowing authorized travel agencies to offer group tour arrangements, including visa applications. The number of destinations with ADS agreements increased from 2 in 1983 to 114 in 2012. Using panel data for Chinese visitor arrivals in 58 countries from 1985 to 2005, we estimate a semi‐parametric matched difference‐in‐differences model of the impact of ADS on overseas departures from mainland China. Treatment with ADS increased Chinese visitor arrivals in the 3‐year period following ADS designation by more than 10 percent annually, with results varying substantially across countries.     

The impact of microcredit on women's empowerment: evidence from China

The impact of microcredit on women's empowerment remains controversial, as documented in the microfinance literature. While some studies claim that microcredit helps women increase their income earning abilities, leading to greater power to overcome cultural asymmetries, others contend that small loans allocated to women are usually controlled by their spouses, which results in more severe subordination of women and leaves them more vulnerable to the patriarchy system within the household and/or at society level. This paper evaluates the empowerment impact of microcredit on rural women in China. Logistic regression is employed for empirical analysis and data are collected through a rural household survey. The results confirm that microcredit has a significant impact on five dimensions of women's empowerment, ranging from economic security to awareness of social/legal issues.     

The Case Against a U.S.-Arms Monopoly

The U.S. government is the dominant player in the global arms market. Existing literature emphasizes the many benefits of an international U.S. government arms monopoly including: regional and global balance, stability and security, the advancement of U.S. national interests, and domestic economic benefits from international sales. The purpose of this paper is to balance this largely one-sided treatment of the U.S. government’s dominant position in the international arms market. We discuss several negative consequences and costs associated with U.S. arms sales which call into question the net benefit of the U.S. government’s control over global arms.     

The Macroeconomic Role of Fiscal Policy

This article examines the new consensus that fiscal policy shouldhave no macroeconomic role in ‘flexible inflation targeting’regimes. There is little basis for this presumption. Fiscalpolicy remains important in setting the policy mix and in managingshocks and imbalances. The credibility of an inflation-targetingregime should be enhanced rather than reduced if fiscal policyplays its proper role. It is true, nevertheless, that the costsof focusing fiscal policy narrowly on public-sector concernsmay not be very great, most of the time. However, when interestrates cannot be used, the role of fiscal policy must be different.With interest rates at their lower bound of zero, there is noplausible alternative. For asymmetric shocks and adjustmentsin EMU, fiscal policy needs, ideally, to substitute for theinterest-rate policy reaction function of the consensus, butthe difficulties are very great. We suggest a policy focus onreal exchange rates as a way of resolving some of the dilemmas.There is a serious danger that orthodox views about fiscal policy,drawn from the consensus, will be inappropriately applied, especiallyin Europe. Footnotes ¹ E-mail addresses: christopher.allsopp{at}new.ox.ac.uk; david.vines{at}economics.oxford.ac.uk     

Beyond radical affordability in the base of the pyramid: The role of consumer self-confidence in product acceptance

When developing products and services for base of the economic pyramid (BoP) consumers, it has been widely assumed that organizations must set extremely low prices that are dependent on substantial product acceptance and economies of scale. However, such pricing is often not feasible. Growing evidence suggests that more moderate price levels are needed for organizations to viably serve the needs of low-income consumers. However, price sensitivity is less understood in low-income contexts. To promote the success of social enterprises through fresh insight, we reexamine the extremely low-price BoP assumption by investigating product acceptance among low-income consumers using two experiments in Latin America. Results reveal that a belief in one's capabilities to make effective consumption decisions, consumer self-confidence, helps explain the acceptance of moderately-priced products. Discussion highlights directions for stimulating acceptance of socially beneficial products in low-income contexts.     

Bimodal issues,the median voter model,Legislator's ideology,and abortion

The median voter model is widely used in the public choice literature to explain legislator's behavior. According to the model, if voter preferences are unimodal, a vote-maximizing legislator should mirror the position of the median voter. However, the median voter model has not been tested on bimodal issues. This paper fills this critical void by empirically testing the applicability of the median voter model on an issue which clearly meets the criteria for being bimodal: abortion. Using a variety of attitudinal measures from large sample public opinion polls and constituency demographics, this study finds that Senate voting on the 1994 Freedom of Abortion Access bill was highly related to the senator's personal characteristics—especially ideology—and not to constituent opinion or demographics.     

The Policy Choices and Reaction Functions of Bank of England MPC Members

The results of an econometric exercise are presented, showing that Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members appointed from outside the ranks of Bank of England staff (outsiders) react differently to forecasts of inflation and output than those appointed from within the Bank (insiders). All results are reinforced by the well‐established findings that, compared with outsiders, insiders choose higher interest rates, are more likely to vote as a bloc, and feature on the winning side of policy decisions more frequently. On the basis of these results, it is argued that the current MPC framework is biased toward the policy choices of insiders.