South Korea’s finance–growth nexus: evidence from VARX analysis with financial crisis and openness

South Korea’s finance–growth nexus is empirically investigated by taking the elements of financial crisis and trade and financial openness through the newly developed approach of vector error-correction models (ECMs) with weakly exogenous I(1) variables (VARX). Considering financial development as a more complex phenomenon, we take into estimation two aspects of financial deepening that are measured by its size (private credit to GDP) and efficiency (private credit to total domestic deposits). The main findings are (1) financial efficiency contributes to accelerating economic growth; (2) the causality between economic growth and financial size is bilateral and negative; and (3) financial crisis is negative to both economic growth and financial development, whereas the growth-promoting effects of trade and financial openness are confirmed.     

日本岛根分收林制度及对中国杨树产业化的借鉴

运用制度分析的方法从组织模式、利益分配与制度保障上对日本岛根的分收林制度进行剖析的结果表明:日本岛根在保证生态环境不受损害的前提下,持续地为林业产业提供可靠的林木产品。具有相似经营条件的中国杨树产业由于经营目标不明确,经营模式粗放、经营规模小导致木材供应不足、质量低下。由此指出杨树产业化应借鉴日本分收林的制度安排,并提出加强对林业产业链的有效控制、建立稳定的利益分配机制、确立合理的组织形式等政策建议。     

Integrating business modeling and roadmapping methods - The Innovation Support Technology (IST) approach

The purpose of this paper is to report the integration studies of business modeling and roadmapping methods for the “Innovation Support Technology (IST)” and the IST's practical application to real-world cases. The IST is conducted for the purpose of offering a convenient tool for engineers and researchers in order to enhance corporate value from R&D outputs. “Japan's lost decade” has forced companies to change R&D management and R&D operation style, especially regional industries. We propose the framework for revitalization of regional industries by using the Strategic Technology Roadmap made by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI-TRM) with business modeling. We applied this IST method to several real-world cases to show its effectiveness. This study represents the result of over four years (fall 2002) of work with the value creation framework of the business modeling method for R&D outputs, done by a group of researchers from JATES (Japan Techno-Economics Society).     

Choice and individual welfare

We propose an abstract method of systematically assigning a “rational” ranking to non-rationalizable choice data. Our main idea is that any method of ascribing welfare to an individual as a function of choice is subjective, and depends on the economist undertaking the analysis. We provide a simple example of the type of exercise we propose. Namely, we define an individual welfare functional as a mapping from stochastic choice functions into weak orders. A stochastic choice function (or choice distribution) gives the empirical frequency of choices for any possible opportunity set (framing factors may also be incorporated into the model). We require that for any two alternatives x and y, if our individual welfare functional recommends x over y given two distinct choice distributions, then it also recommends x over y for any mixture of the two choice distributions. Together with some mild technical requirements, such an individual welfare functional must weight every opportunity set and assign a utility to each alternative x which is the sum across all opportunity sets of the weighted probability of x being chosen from the set. It therefore requires us to have a “prior view” about how important or representative a choice of x at a given situation is.     

Child Benefit Payments and Household Wealth Accumulation

Using the life‐cycle/permanent income hypothesis, we theoretically and empirically assess the impact of child benefit payments on household wealth accumulation. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that higher cumulative benefits received increase current assets, higher future benefit payments lower asset holding, and that these effects systematically vary over the life cycle. We find different wealth responses to child benefit payments for liquidity constrained and unconstrained households, as predicted by the model.