EXPERIENCES AND PROBLEMS OF THE CIS COUNTRIES IN TRANSITION FROM THE MPS TO THE SNA

This paper reviews the transition of national accounts in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries from the Material Product System (MPS) to the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) and discusses the major problems that still need to be solved in order to improve the quality of their national accounts. It argues that the MPS practice tended to exaggerate growth not because of different concepts, but because of methodological problems such as inadequate deflation due to poor price data and incomplete coverage of the non-observed economy as well as overpricing of new or modified products and institutional flaws that motivated data fabrication by enterprises. However, the heritages of the problems under the MPS, together with the emerging new types of institutional units, new sources of income and market-driven new services, have made the transition difficult.     

Incomes policy reconsidered

In this study a large data base of individual contract data is used to analyse the impact of wage controls on different groups in the Canadian unionized private sector. Of particular interest is the behavior of the controlled relative to the uncotrolled sector. Statistically significant reductions in wage inflation are discerned both sectors with the effect in the controlled sector being, approximately, twice large as that in the uncontrolled sector.     

ANALYSIS OF THE POSSIBILITIES FOR EXPANSION OF SERVICES IN TANZANIAN SAVINGS AND CREDITS CO‐OPERATIVE SOCIETIES: LEARNING FROM ECONOMIES OF SCALE

Savings and Credit Co‐operative Societies (SACCOS) increasingly recognized as the valuable tool for economic development in low‐income countries. However, recently researchers reported that one of their primary challenges to their expansion is the high level of inefficient. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between growth and efficiency of SACCOS using economies of scale concept. Then we address the role of management of the capital structure and allocation of resources in the expansion of SACCOS. The study used financial statement data from 60 SACCOS in Tanzania for the period of 2004–2011. The findings supports that most of SACCOS are small and cost inefficient because the industry is young, but, the efficiency increases as SACCOS expand. Second the allocation of resources in liquid, financial and non‐financial investment leads to no expansion in SACCOS. Thus, the growth of SACCOS via increasing loan to members, members’ savings, shares, and institutional capital should be encouraged as it increases the efficiency of SACCOS. Also, SACCOS should minimize the allocation of assets in other investments which are different from credit to members.     

Financialisation and Rising Shareholder Power in Kaleckian/Post-Kaleckian Models of Distribution and Growth

We establish the link between rising shareholder power on the firm level, increasing pressure on labour, and redistribution at the expense of wages, with the macroeconomic effects on capacity utilisation, profits and capital accumulation. Three channels of transmission of ‘financialisation’ and increasing shareholder power, the ‘preference channel’, the ‘finance channel’ and the ‘distribution channel’, are introduced into two different variants of the Kaleckian distribution and growth model, the Kaleckian model and the Post-Kaleckian model. Within these models, three potential regimes of accumulation are derived, the ‘contractive’ regime, the ‘profits without investment’ regime, and the ‘finance-led growth’ regime. Only the ‘profits without investment’ regime generates a strict micro-macro identity, whereas the other two regimes are characterised by fallacies of composition, a ‘paradox of accumulation’ in the ‘finance-led growth’ regime and a ‘paradox of profits’ in the ‘contractive’ regime.     

Understanding Empirical Boundaries: A Systems-Theoretical Avenue in Border Studies

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries.     

Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. We investigate a class of cooperative games that generalizes some economic applications with a similar structure. These are the so-called line-graph games being cooperative TU-games in which the players are linearly ordered. Examples of situations that can be modeled like this are sequencing situations and water distribution problems. We define four properties with respect to deleting edges that each selects a unique component efficient solution on the class of line-graph games. We interpret these solutions and properties in terms of dividend distributions, and apply them to economic situations. This research has been done while the third author was visiting Tinbergen Institute at the Free University, Amsterdam. The research is part of the Research Programme “Strategic and Cooperative Decision Making” at the Department of Econometrics. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the framework of the Russian-Dutch programme for scientific cooperation, is gratefully acknowledged. The third author also appreciates partial financial support from the Russian Leading Scientific Schools Fund (grant 80.2003.6) and Russian Humanitarian Scientific Fund (grant 02-02-00189a). We thank three anonymous referees for their valuable comments.     

Does seeing more deeply into a game increase one’s chances of winning?

The substantively rational value of the games studied in this paper does not help predict subject performance in the experiment at all. An accurate model must account for the cognitive ability of the people playing the game. This paper investigates whether the variation in measured rationality bounds is correlated with the probability of winning when playing against another person in games that exceed both players’ estimated rationality bound. Does seeing deeper into a game matter when neither player can see to the end of the game? Subjects with higher measured bounds win 63 percent of the time and the larger the difference the more frequently they win.     

An efficient budget allocation policy for decentralisation of responsibility for site decontamination projects

Selection and execution of site decontamination projects is often best left to local authorities, in accordance with the subsidiarity principle, even though the budget for such projects is made available through a central authority. In this paper we suggest a practical budget allocation policy which a central authority can employ to allocate budgets to local authorities, while still optimising the central authority's environmental objective function. The procedure is fully consistent with the principle of decentralisation of responsibility for selection and execution of projects, and requires a minimum information exchange between local and central levels. Despite the information asymmetry between local and central levels, incentive compatibility problems can be (partially) prevented by choosing an appropriate evaluation mechanism. At the same time, the procedure is computationally effective and efficient, and can guarantee a fair budget allocation, making it easy to implement and politically acceptable.