Rules of Origin in North–South Preferential Trading Arrangements with an Application to NAFTA

All preferential trading agreements (PTAs) short of a customs union use rules of origin (ROO) to prevent trade deflection. ROO raise production costs and create administrative costs. This paper argues that in the case of the recent wave of North–South PTAs, the presence of ROO virtually limits the market access that these PTAs confer to the Southern partners. In the case of NAFTA, we find average compliance costs around 6% in ad valorem equivalent, undoing the tariff preference (4% on average) for a large number of tariff lines. Administrative costs amount to 47% of the preference margin. These findings are coherent with the view that North–South PTAs could well be viewed like a principal–agent problem in which the Southern partners are just about left on their participation constraint.     

Designing Optimal Crop Revenue Insurance

When the indemnity schedule is contingent on the farmer's price and individual yield, an optimal crop revenue insurance contract depends only on the farmer's gross revenue. However, this design is not efficient if, as is the case with available contracts, the coverage function is based on imperfect estimators of individual yield and/or price. The producer's degree of prudence and the extent of basis risks have important influences on the optimal indemnity schedule. In this broader context, optimal protection is not provided by available U.S. crop insurance contracts and may include combinations of revenue insurance, yield insurance, futures, and options contracts.     

EXPLAINING THE SPREAD OF TEMPORARY JOBS AND ITS IMPACT ON LABOR TURNOVER

This article provides a simple model that explains the choice between permanent and temporary jobs. This model, which incorporates important features of actual employment protection legislations neglected by the economic literature so far, reproduces the main stylized facts about entries into permanent and temporary jobs observed in Continental European countries. We find that job protection has very small effects on total employment but induces large substitution of temporary jobs for permanent jobs, which significantly reduces aggregate production.     

Experienced versus decision utility: large-scale comparison for income–leisure preferences*

Subjective well-being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small-scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB-maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.     

全球复苏能否持续仍是未定之数（上）

【IMF《金融与发展》10月29日】在正常的经济衰退中,无论商业和就业遭受的打击何等严重,形势的好转总是可以预期的。然而,本次全球衰退绝非正常的衰退。     

Moral Dilemmas of Participation in Dangerous Leisure Activities

Abstract

Participation in risky leisure activities (including so‐called ‘extreme’ sports) has increased in recent years, along with a concomitant growth in the related supporting industries, and in media coverage of events and associated lifestyles. The rise in popularity of dangerous leisure pursuits has led to questions about whether these activities should be regulated, or whether legislation should be enacted to prohibit particular activities. Arguments have centred on harm to individuals, and on the potential costs to others, such as families, rescue workers, and society at large. Very little work has been done on the moral legitimacy of dangerous leisure pursuits, and this paper attempts to address this, using a multidisciplinary approach. The paper evaluates both paternalistic and libertarian approaches, and pursues solutions to the moral problem from both utilitarian (consequence‐based) and deontological (duty‐based) perspectives. It is concluded that mature, rational individuals ought to retain the right to pursue activities that have potential deleterious consequences for themselves. While recognising that individuals ought to concern themselves with the effects of their actions on others, the paper accepts arguments based on autonomy, and defends the right to engage in dangerous leisure activities.     

Sustainability adrift: An evaluation of the credibility of sustainability information disclosed by public organizations

This article aims to evaluate the credibility of information disclosed by public organizations in terms of sustainable development. It focuses on an under-studied aspect in the sustainability reporting literature—namely, the factors that may affect the credibility of disclosure practices. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of the sustainable development content of annual management reports disclosed by 113 ministries and public bodies in the province of Quebec, Canada. The findings shed more light on the main factors that affect the credibility of the information disclosed therein, particularly in terms of lack of transparency and flawed monitoring mechanisms.     

Unit roots and infrequent large shocks: new international evidence on output

The nature and magnitude of the economic shocks that have affected the per capita GDP of 16 OECD countries are analyzed over a long period using the outlier method. Strong proof of infrequent large permanent and transitory shocks were found, essentially resulting from the two major wars in the twentieth century, the recession in the 1920s, the Great Depression, among others. We also examine the nature of the output trend by combining different tests of non-stationarity on different GDP series corrected by the outliers detected. It is shown that the per capita GDP series cannot reject the unit root hypothesis in 13 of the 16 countries examined. No conclusion could be drawn for the other countries because the test results were contradictory.