Identifying the scope effect on a meta-analysis of biodiversity valuation studies

Insensitivity to scope is an issue of much debate in contingent valuation (CV) even today. Although the literature about insensitivity to scope is abundant, the reasons for it are not yet well known. Through a meta-analysis of CV studies of biodiversity, the treatment of the different possible measures of the quantity of the good is explored in relation to scope sensitivity. Overall, the findings suggest that CV results are sensitive to the amount of the good being valued, although the result depends on how the environmental change is measured. Results support the use of absolute sizes when conducting CV studies.     

On the bilateral trade effects of free trade agreements between the EU-15 and the CEEC-4 countries

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC-4, i.e. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania) and model their effects on trade flows by treating the agreement variable as endogenous. Our theoretical framework is the gravity model, and the econometric method used to isolate and eliminate the potential endogeneity bias of the agreement variable is the fixed effect vector decomposition (FEVD) technique. Our estimation results indicate a positive and significant impact of FTAs on trade flows. This finding is robust to the inclusion in the sample of a group of control countries (specifically Belarus, the Russian Federation and the Ukraine) that did not sign an FTA. Besides, we show that trade growth after the FTA agreement with the EU was signed exceeded trade growth of the control group of countries, which did not become members.

中国的设备投资与经济开放

从传统的Solow增长模型的视角看,资本积累与政府政策对于经济的长期增长都是无效的.但是从内生增长理论的视角看,资本积累(特别是设备投资)和经济开放程度都是长期经济增长最重要的决定因素.长期以来,中国保持高速持续发展的策略主要集中于在市场化进程和贸易开放进程中鼓励投资,以及最近实行的鼓励出口,这一策略允许从更为发达的国家进口研发密集型的机器设备.在这个背景下,本文的目的在于探讨设备投资与出口是否如内生增长理论模型所言对经济增长具有长期的效应,或者相反,如传统的增长模型所言对中国的经济增长没有解释力.除此之外,我们还检验了设备投资、出口和产出在长期和短期的本质联系.在方法上,我们采用了协整VAR模型.我们的发现为设备投资和出口都是导致中国过去数十年中高速发展的重要因素这一观点提供了证据.     

Non-market valuation of forest goods and services: Good practice guidelines

The European COST Action E45 on European Forest Externalities (EUROFOREX) participants developed a set of good practice guidelines for the non-market valuation of forests, elaborating on stated and revealed preference methodologies, as well as benefit transfer and meta-analytical procedures. This article presents a summary of the guidelines.     

Trade integration and within-plant productivity evolution in Chile

We analyze the impact of trade integration on plant TFP using Chilean plant-level data (1982–1999) and 3-digit bilateral trade flows. Our contribution is to disentangle the impact of export and import barriers, estimated as border effects within a multilateral context. A fall in export barriers is positively correlated with plant productivity in traded sectors. The reduction of import barriers, however, can only be associated to productivity improvements in export-oriented sectors. In import-competing sectors a robust positive correlation shows up between plant productivity and protection. We then test several channels linking trade integration and firm productivity.     

The Costs of Increasing Transparency

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (Amer Econ Rev 92(5): 1521–1534, 2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always beneficial to social welfare. Svensson (Amer Econ Rev 96: 448–451, 2006) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not all that likely. In that respect, therefore, increasing ‘transparency’ remains most of the times beneficial to social welfare. In this paper, we extend the Morris and Shin attempt by setting it up as an explicit interactive game between the Central Bank, the objectives of which we model explicitly, and the private sector. We show that in the absence of costs, both players benefit from transparency in the manner described previously in the literature, and point the differences in their gains. Following that, we then introduce the fact that increasing transparency comes at some costs and show how both players face incentives to free ride on each other as a result. The presence of costs thus alters the way in which greater transparency is attained.

Scarcity of Resources in a Sraffian Framework of International Trade

This paper deals with the theory of differential rent within a Sraffian small open economy. Its aim is to study the determination of the wage rate, the rent rates and the activity level of each productive process when the profit rate is given, and either the vector of final demand, or the available homogenous labour, is exogenously set. It also analyses the relation between the total value of the net product and the labour employed and shows that it is not monotonic.     

Determinants of Efficiency in the Electricity Industry: Bayesian Analysis

Atlantic Economic Journal -