美国联邦政府政务公开制度的实践及启示

美国联邦政府的政务公开制度包括两大方面：政府信息的公开和政府会议的公开。规范前者的法律是《信息自由法》和《隐私法》，规范后者的法律是《阳光下的政府法》和《联邦咨询委员会法》。两者都与政务公开和公民的知情权有关。本文通过对四部法案背景、主要规定的介绍，揭示了美国政务公开制度的核心内容，同时考察了政务公开法案实施的现状。最后，本文还结合中国实际，论述了我们可以借鉴的方面。     

“Do Fiscal Deficits Influence Current Accounts? A Case Study of India”

This paper examines the effects of fiscal deficits on the current account deficits in the Indian economy. In many developing countries, fiscal deficits are mostly financed through monetization, causing crowding out of private investment expenditures. However, fiscal deficits in India are mostly financed through official borrowings from various external sources, leading to higher interest payments and outgoings on the external account. Such a policy could eventually precipitate balance of payments crises despite favorable trade account and real exchange rate. Data over three decades for the Indian economy show that, in addition to the real exchange rate and the ratio of private investment to GDP, fiscal deficits significantly contribute to the current account deficits.     

代理成本与经营管理者财务监督

委托代理关系存在三类形式,各类委托代理关系都存在相应的代理成本。本文从第三类代理成本的理论阐述入手,分析了经营管理者财务监督存在的客观必然性,探讨了第三类代理成本对经营管理者财务监督体制的影响,并按照降低第三类代理成本的要求,对构建经营管理者财务监督体制思路提出了设想。     

Externalities from Intra-Firm Trade by U.S. Multinationals

International Advances in Economic Research - The share of world trade attributed to intra-firm trade is large and fast-growing. This paper offers new information on the welfare outcome of these...     

“长三角”旅游服务质量预警机制建立的研究

打造中国旅游的“金三角”,苏、浙、沪三地必须实现旅游资源的整合。而建立有效的旅游服务质量预警机制是实现旅游资源整合的基础。     

The customer consequences of returns in online retailing: An empirical analysis

Pressure continues to build on the operations management function to facilitate system and firm level benefits. In the online marketplace, one area of growing interest is that of product returns. Though commonly viewed as a cost center from an operations perspective, operations’ actions have the potential to strongly influence future customer buying behavior in several ways. Using an archival database of actual purchase and returns history provided by a moderately sized online retailer, this study examines the relationship between a customer's experience of product returns, and subsequent shopping behavior. Employing transaction cost, consumer risk, and procedural justice theories, we demonstrate that the returns management process, rather than being regarded as an afterthought to the production and deployment of goods, can significantly and positively influence repurchase behavior. Additionally, we provide evidence that certain customers should be considered for prioritization in the returns process. We suggest ways through which operations managers can take care in discharging their responsibilities in this area – to make returns processing more than simply a “necessary cost of doing business” rather, using it to their advantage in engendering repeat and increased purchase behavior.     

On the variance of the ratio estimator for midzuno-sen sampling scheme

Summary For the sampling scheme ofMidzuno [3] andSen [4], which provides unbiased ratio estimators an expression for the variance of the estimator does not seem to be available in literature. An expression for the same is derived in this note.     

Economic evaluation of human urinary kallindinogenase for patients with acute ischemic stroke in China

Objectives: In China, both human urinary kallindinogenase (HUK) and 3-n-butylphthalide (NBP) are recommended for clinical use to improve cerebral blood circulation during an acute ischemic stroke (AIS). The objective was to evaluate the economic value of HUK vs NBP for patients with AIS from a Chinese payer’s perspective.

Methods: An economic evaluation based on data of patients who have been treated with either HUK (n?=?488) or NBP (n?=?885) from a prospective, phase IV, multi-center, clinical registry study (Chinese Acute Ischemic Stroke Treatment Outcome Registry, CASTOR) was conducted to analyze the cost and effectiveness of HUK vs NBP for AIS in China. Before the analysis, the patients were matched using propensity score. Both a cost-minimization analysis and a cost-effectiveness analysis were conducted to compare the matched pairs. A bootstrapping exercise was conducted for the matched arms to demonstrate the probability of one intervention being cost-effective over another for a given willingness-to-pay for an extra quality-adjusted life-year (QALY).

Results: After propensity score matching, 463 pairs were matched. The overall medical cost in the HUK arm is USD 2,701.20, while the NBP arm is USD 3,436.83, indicating HUK is preferred with cost-minimization analysis. Although the QALY gained in the HUK arm (0.77176) compared with the NBP arm (0.76831) is statistically insignificant (p?=?.4862), the cost-effectiveness analysis as exploratory analysis found that, compared with NBP, HUK is a cost-saving strategy with the lower costs of USD 735.63 and greater QALYs gained of 0.00345. Among the 5,000 bootstrapping replications, 100% indicates that HUK is cost-effective compared with NBP under a 1-time-GDP threshold; and 97.12% indicates the same under a 3-time-GDP threshold.

Conclusion: This economic evaluation study indicates that administrating HUK is a cost-saving therapy compared with NBP for managing blood flow during AIS in the Chinese setting.     

A General Method of Deriving the Inefficiencies of Banks from a Profit Function

This article develops a new method of estimating inefficiencies in joint production and shows that unlike the approaches utilized in the previous studies of inefficiency, this method maintains a consistent relationship between the error term of a profit function and the error terms of its price derivatives. A useful by-product of the method is a proof of a Hotelling-like lemma that relates stochastic input demand and output supply functions to stochastic profit functions. While the previous studies fit a single frontier to data on all firms, this paper estimates a frontier unique to every observed firm to allow each one to have a different potential of achieving maximal levels of profit. The new method is applied in the analysis of annual data, 1984–1989, for U.S. commercial banks. Both the analytical and numerical results of the paper show that the residual that the previous studies attribute to inefficiency includes the effects of excluded variables and of inaccuracies in the specified functional forms. Once accurate estimates of these effects are subtracted from the residual, the distortions in the measured inefficiencies should be considerably reduced. Consequently, this article considers how such estimates might be obtained.