Control of SO2 emissions from power plants: A case of induced technological innovation in the U.S.

This paper investigates how the details of government actions induce innovation—the overlapping activities of invention, adoption and diffusion, and learning by doing—in “environmental technology,” products and processes that either control pollutant emissions or prevent emissions altogether. It applies multiple quantitative and qualitative measures of innovation to a case subject to several “technology-push” and “demand-pull” instruments: sulfur dioxide control technology for power plants. The study employs analyses of public R&D funding, patents, expert interviews, learning curves, conference proceedings, and experience curves. Results indicate that: regulation and the anticipation of regulation stimulate invention; technology-push instruments appear to be less effective at prompting invention than demand-pull instruments; and regulatory stringency focuses inventive activity along certain technology pathways. Increased diffusion of the technology results in significant and predictable operating cost reductions in existing systems, as well as notable efficiency improvements and capital cost reductions in new systems. Government plays an important role in fostering knowledge transfer via technical conferences, as well as affecting the pattern of collaborative relationships within the technical research community via regulatory changes that affect the market for the technology. Finally, the case provides little evidence for the claim that cap-and-trade instruments induce innovation more effectively than other instruments.     

天津市城市基础设施需求弹性测度研究

通过对相关文献和城市基础设施投资决策的政绩、寻租、效率以及需求导向进行分析,并利用修正的鲍莫尔模型,可为分析居民需求弹性对基础设施投资倾向的影响提供了一个微观的理论框架。结合天津市基础设施建设的实证分析,从经济性基础设施和社会性基础设施两方面,探讨基础设施需求弹性反映出的结构差异。     

对我国保险产品创新的思考

保险产品创新是保险业创新的重要组成部分,对于保险业的发展具有举足轻重的地位.本文从我国保险产品创新的必要性与可行性出发,着重分析了我国现阶段产品创新中存在的一些问题,提出了一些加快产品创新速度的思路.     

Discrete-order admission ATP model with joint effect of margin and order size in a MTO environment

Swarming demands and seasonality periodically induce a stringent capacity problem in the made-to-order (MTO) B2B environment. Desirable order admission is a tactic with minimal application cost for handling this problem. A real-time order admission problem with limited major-customer population and batch-size demand with heterogeneous distributions is modeled as a dynamic and stochastic knapsack problem. The optimality of the Markovian deterministic reward-threshold policy is verified. Optimal policy, basic policy, and the capacity rationing method are compared in the designed experiment. The numerical results suggest great potential for increasing profit using the optimal order admission policy for MTO businesses.     

Long-term forecasting of fuel demand at theater entry points

Managing the distribution of fuel in theater requires Army fuel planners to forecast demand at the strategic level to ensure that fuel will be in the right place, at the right time, and in the amounts needed. This work presents a simulation approach to forecasting that accounts for the structure of the supply chain network when aggregating the demand of war fighters across the theater over the forecasting horizon. The resulting empirical distribution of demand at the theater entry point enables planners to identify forecast characteristics that impact their planning process, including the amplitudes and temporal positions of peaks in demand, and the estimated lead time to the point of use. Experimentation indicates that the forecasts are sensitive to the pattern of war fighter demand, the precise structure of the in-theater supply chain network, and the constraints and uncertainty present in the network, all of which are critical planning considerations.     

Three bubbles and a panic: An explanatory review of recent food commodity price events

This paper is a summary of the behaviour of food commodity prices in 2007–2008 and a review of the causes of the price increases, extracted from a report to the Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty’s Government [Thirtle, C., Piesse, J., 2008. An Explanatory Review of the World Food Commodity Price Events of 2007–2008. A Report to the Chief Scientific Advisor. Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, London]. The historical background shows that the price spike was much less severe than in the 1970s. The conventional wisdom that prices of the main food commodities were falling prior to 2006 is questioned. Most ceased falling and were quite stable from the 1980s. The paper separates the causes of the spike from the underlying changes driving the long run trends. The literature on the causes of the spike is critically reviewed and summarised. There is a reasonably broad consensus on most of the causes, but much less on the impact of the depreciation of the US Dollar. There are also concluding speculations on the future.     

Other financial institutions' portfolio behaviour and policy implications: A study of India

Abstract

Applied literature has largely neglected the asset decision of other financial institutions (OFIs), though it may possess important policy implications. In this paper, portfolio behaviour of OFIs in India is modelled by using the annual flow of funds data for 1951/52 to 1993/94. The long-run model of the Almost Ideal Demand System and the allied concepts of cointegration generated economically and statistically plausible results. We find a strong influence of interest rates on portfolio behavior, thereby the role of interest rates on resource allocation. The paper concludes that the macroeconomic management through monetary policy actions may not be unnecessarily limited through the channel of OFIs in the post-financial reform regime in India.     

Transfer payments from the central government to the local governments and the local governments' efforts on taxation: taking China as an example

The influence of the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments on the local governments' efforts on taxation must be taken into consideration by every country for the design of the transfer payments. Based on the theoretical analysis on the influence of the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments on the local governments'payments, this paper indicates that the local governments'efforts on taxation depends on the demand elasticity of the district for public goods. It increases with the increase of the elasticityλ.Judge the degree of the local government's efforts on taxation by measureλ. After an empirical analysis on the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments from 2000 to 2004, thins paper gets the conclusion that the local governments'efforts on taxation abates with the increase of supporting payments or with the increase of the ratio of transfer payments to local willing public payments. Under specific circumstances, the higher the ratio of transfer payments to the local fiscal expenditure is, the smaller the local governments' efforts on taxation is under the central payments, whereas the higher the local income is, the higher the efforts is under the eentral payments. Based on this. this paper gives the meanmg of its corresponding policies.     

中国经济扭曲的表现及形成机制:一个奥地利学派的角度

中国经济发展过程中存在某种形式的扭曲已是不争的事实,既往发展模式的不可持续性也已逐渐显现,但对造成该扭曲的深层次原因在理论上仍然存在分歧.从奥地利学派的角度吸取合理的部分可以更深刻地认识中国经济发展历程.中国经济扭曲最突出的表现是在城市化过程中,政府主导式发展制约了全体公民共同参与,而在发展思路上则过于强调需求管理的短期政策,忽视了供给在长期经济发展中的核心作用,经济的健康发展应是一个分工和专业化不断深化的过程.     

Money demand in the czech republic since transition

We analyse the demand for money since the “break up” of the Czech-Slovak Republics at the beginning of 1993 and for the aggregates M0, Ml, and M2 using monthly data. Due to the widespread use of foreign currency in formally centrally planned economies, we also investigate the issue of currency substitution. Because of our relatively small sample period the Johansen cointegration approach is not used and instead we use the general to specific methodology in a single equation framework. Previous empirical evidence on money demand in Eastern Europe, and specifically Czech Republic, has been mixed. Both graphical and empirical results suggest that any currency substitution was a one-off event due to increased uncertainty at the end of 1992 at the time of the monetary dissolution. Certainly, currency substitution in the Czech Republic is not as strong as has been found in other former centrally planned economies. However, our results do indicate that Czech National Bank may have to take account of foreign interest rates when interpreting movements in the monetary aggregates.