European versus American Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative

China has started to deploy its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the European Union (EU), and the EU in turn has regional and global interests that intersect with the BRI's scope. Subject to future adjustments of China's BRI strategy, the initiative's potential contribution to the EU requirements for infrastructure development could be significant, even though its modalities in the EU are inevitably different from those in countries that are poorer or have more difficult financial market access. The EU's attitude to the BRI, however, has not yet fully coalesced. Despite superficial similarities in public discourses, the EU has a profoundly distinct perspective from that of the US on the BRI, and more generally on the rise of China and its growing global influence. For the EU, the BRI generates challenges but also potential benefits. The EU should improve its ability to welcome sensible BRI projects, including through the adoption of greater reform of screening frameworks for foreign direct investment. More generally, the EU should enhance its ability to define policies independent of the US on China and the challenges resulting from China's rise. China should also make further efforts to foster a constructive relationship with the EU.     

Product-based cultural change: Is the village global?

We provide a model of product-based cultural change where trade integration leads to cultural convergence. A standard trade model of Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition is coupled with a micro-founded model of cultural dynamics. We show that access to varieties that are attached to a global cultural type changes the incentives of parents to socialize their children and transmit their type. The resulting increase in agents of the global cultural type leads to a magnification of the initial shock. A striking feature of the model is that even temporary shocks to openness may have permanent effects through the changing distribution of preferences in the economy.     

Aggregation of multiple prior opinions

Experts are asked to provide their advice in a situation of uncertainty. They adopt the decision maker?s utility function, but each has a potentially different set of prior probabilities, and so does the decision maker. The decision maker and the experts maximize the minimal expected utility with respect to their sets of priors. We show that a natural Pareto condition is equivalent to the existence of a set Λ of probability vectors over the experts, interpreted as possible allocations of weights to the experts, such that (i) the decision maker?s set of priors is precisely all the weighted-averages of priors, where an expert?s prior is taken from her set and the weight vector is taken from Λ; (ii) the decision maker?s valuation of an act is the minimal weighted valuation, over all weight vectors in Λ, of the experts? valuations.     

NGOs Address Structural Racism: After the Storm in New Orleans

The long history of institutional and historical racism found an explosive expression in the events around Katrina in New Orleans. Racial inequalities were evident in the actual destruction caused by the hurricane and even more significantly in the government response to the disaster. The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) sector provided alternative approaches to recovery and reconstruction, but such alternatives were inadequate to counter the formidable forces of capitalism arrayed against them. NGOs provided substantial direct service to the most distressed residents of the city and, in some cases, provided important advocacy roles in addressing the inequities caused by government action and/or inaction. The specific initiatives of six NGOs are reviewed here, including the work of the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Common Ground Collective, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition, and the People’s Organizing Committee. NGO initiatives were not structurally capable of generating a broad militant anti-racist mass movement of New Orleans’ working class for social change. Five years after the storm the working class of New Orleans faces deepened racial and economic distress. A return to the strategy of bold anti-racist mass movements confronting capital and the state would seem to be in order for the coming period of time.     

Pairs trading: does volatility timing matter?

Pairs trading is a dollar-neutral trading strategy. Using the components of two major stock indices, the S&P 500 and the Nikkei 225, this article deals with the performance of a pairs trading system based on various pairs selection methods (distance, stationarity, cointegration) over a 10-year period. On both markets, using a classical framework, cointegration appears superior and effective. On the U.S. market and also in Japan to a lower extent, pairs trading strategies exhibited an impressive performance during the 2008 financial crisis. Bearish periods are associated with a high level of the VIX index: the ‘investor fear gauge’. Using a modified trading system, this article examines the link between pairs trading performance and volatility/VIX timing. It is shown that for the best selection technique (cointegration), timing volatility has no economic value in a pairs trading context.     

Import price dynamics in major advanced economies and heterogeneity in exchange rate pass-through

This article aims at showing heterogeneity in the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import prices in major advanced economies at three different levels: (1) across destination markets; (2) across types of exporters [distinguishing developed economy (DE) from emerging economy (EE) exporters] and (3) over time. Based on monthly data over the period 1991–2007, the results show first that large destination markets exhibit the lowest degree of pass-through. The degree of pass-through for goods imported from EEs is also significantly lower than for those from DEs. Regarding the evolution over time, no clear change in pricing behaviours can be identified and the well-identified decline in the exchange rate pass-through between the 1980s and 1990s appears to have stopped during the period considered.