Spatial targeting of payments for environmental services: A tool for boosting conservation benefits

Payments for environmental services (PES) have become an increasingly popular market-based instrument to translate external, non-market environmental services into financial incentives for landowners to preserve the ecosystems that provide the services. However, lack of spatial differentiation in the targeting mechanism may lead to efficiency losses. Addressing this challenge, we construct an applied site selection tool, which takes into account three variables that vary in space: environmental services provided, risks of losing those services, and participation costs. Using data from Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, we empirically test the tool's potential to increase the financial efficiency of the forest-focused PES program in place. Results show that, given a fixed budget, efficiency increases radically if per hectare payments are aligned to landowners' heterogeneity in participation costs, involving opportunity, transaction and direct costs of protection, respectively. Selecting sites based on environmental service potential also moderately increases efficiency. Overall additionality could in the best case be doubled, but remains generally limited due to current low deforestation risks prevailing in Costa Rica. To take advantage of the high efficiency potentials of flexible payments, we propose inverse auction systems as a cost-effective approach for the determination of micro-level participation costs.     

Evolutionary targeting

Evolutionary Targeting is a dynamic, systems-evolutionary policy perspective which focuses on triggering, re-enforcing and sustaining market-led evolutionary processes of emergence of Multiagent Structures (industries, clusters, markets, etc). A major aspect is leveraging existing successes in firms to promote emergence of such structures. This requires discrete policy interventions directed at varying areas of system/market failure, which make their appearance at difference phases of the overall process. The paper briefly illustrates the approach through an analysis of VC policies in Israel and selected European countries, and by referring to the traditional view of Infant Industry development and existing views on high tech cluster development. The resulting framework of analysis, which differs radically from the ‘Picking Winners’ policies of the past and from the successful targeting of infant industries in Korea and post war Japan, seems to fit the increasingly turbulent and high return/high risk global environment prevailing today.

数量规则还是利率规则？——我国转型时期量价混合型货币规则的理论基础

本文对我国货币政策转型时期兼顾数量和价格的货币政策调控实践进行了深入的分析。在货币数量论和货币效用模型的基础上,从理论上阐明了货币数量规则与利率价格规则的等价关系,并构建了符合中国货币政策实践的数量与价格混合型货币政策规则。这对于更好地理解我国货币政策转型时期的量价混合型货币政策操作具有重要的理论和现实意义。相关推论表明,正是由于数量和价格混合型货币规则,在利率低于均衡水平的情形下,中国的货币增速并未引发恶性通胀;修正的物价稳定泰勒原理表明,利率调整幅度小于通胀变化仍能够实现物价稳定。对中国的经验分析支持了理论和推论结果。在利率市场化基本完成和流动性格局逆转的当下,货币政策价格调控方式转型的必要性和迫切性日益上升,转型的条件日趋成熟。     

通货膨胀目标制的政策内涵及其应用

本文从分析货币政策的规则和相机抉择之争入手，分析通货膨胀目标制作为名义锚在货币政策中的作用与政策含义，在此基础上探讨如何有效地设计和实行通货膨胀目标制。本文认为，我国货币政策在向通货膨胀目标制过渡过程中，要明确货币政策和汇率政策的主从地位，增强中央银行的独立性以及对宏观经济的分析和预测能力，解决中央银行承担最后贷款人义务而造成的通货膨胀隐患，建立核心通货膨胀指标。