逆向外包、价值链租金与欠发达国家产业升级

当代国际分工的突出特征是以"内部化"和"外包"两种方式开展的"产品内分工"不断深化。在外包方式中,欠发达国家作为发包方从发达国家进口中间产品的"逆向外包"最近才进入研究视野。本文通过三个方面的理论分析得到一些关于"逆向外包"的理论命题:首先以Romer的中间产品模型为基础,针对逆向外包模式的逆向特征、阶段性、先决条件等进行讨论;进而基于一般化企业租金与全球价值链租金理论分析了逆向外包分工中的租金来源;并从"获得在位权"、"横向拓展"、"纵向拓展"、"链间超越"四个层面探讨了欠发达国家的逆向外包策略以及产业升级路径,重点针对链间升级的多层次性进行了创新性讨论。文章以中国本土手机品牌的发展历程和逆向外包现象为案例,对得到的理论命题进行了验证,同时得到针对欠发达国家逆向外包以及价值链升级的启示。     

Hospital performance standards and medical pricing: The impact of information disclosure in cardiac care

A policy concern is that the initiation of Hospital Compare (HC) reporting in Medicare provided leverage to insurers in price negotiations for lowering private sector prices without regard to hospital performance. Using the sequential Nash bargaining framework we provide economic intuition to the contrary: while average hospital prices decline under quality disclosures, hospitals with above‐average quality are able to exert a stronger bargaining position, consequently capturing prices above the market rate. To explore this issue empirically we estimate variants of difference‐in‐difference models, examining the effects of the three main scores (heart attack, heart failure, and combined mortalities) on transaction prices of related hospital procedures. States which had similar mandated reporting systems in place before the initiation of HC form the control group. Analyzing claims data of privately insured patients, we find that HC exerted downward pressure on prices. However, hospitals rated “above‐average” captured higher prices, thereby offsetting the overall policy effect fully or partially. Leads and lags analysis lends further support for our difference‐in‐difference approach. We find that highly ranked hospitals received a quality premium of 8–14%, comparable to price effects found in other health care markets. We conclude that HC was effective at constraining prices without penalizing high performers.     

Local Public Debt with Overlapping Generations

Discussions of Ricardian equivalence for local public debt have generally centered on the role of land within a particular generation. This paper examines the full neutrality of local public debt in determining whether local public debt is neutral in the resource allocation between (1) mobile and immobile individuals who belong to the same generation, and between (2) individuals belonging to different generations. We find that local debt neutrality continues to hold across generations under migration.     

Climate Change,Crop Selection and Agricultural Revenue in Ghana: A Structural Ricardian Analysis

We apply a Structural Ricardian Model (SRM) to farm‐level data from Ghana for seven principal food crops in order to model the factors which influence farmers' decisions about which food crops to grow and the revenue conditional on these choices. Our application of the SRM incorporates a flexible functional form to allow for the possibility that the effects of temperature and rainfall may not be linearly separable. We use this model as a basis for simulations of the effects of climate change. These simulations suggest that extreme climate change will lead to a significant reduction in the average net revenue per hectare from maize, which accounts for over half of current food production. Across a range of climate change scenarios, there is also substantial substitution of maize for heat‐tolerant millet, and a reduction in the cultivation of other crops. Under most of the climate change scenarios that we consider, these results imply a substantial reduction in the aggregate value of agricultural production, since millet is the lowest‐value crop.     

经济开放度与城市住宅租金分析

作为重要的非贸易品,世界大都市核心区住宅投资主体的国际化特征越来越明显,但城市住宅的租金变动是否满足巴拉萨-萨缪尔森效应,即经济开放度的提高是否会相应提高城市住宅的相对价格还没有实证研究的文献。本文选取44个分布于全球不同国家的大都市为样本,证实分析了都市核心区住宅的租金变化情况,研究表明经济开放度与城市规模具备正向相关性,并在城市不动产领域检验了巴拉萨-萨缪尔森效应。这一研究成果可为我国在经济全球化背景下,正确制定以平衡租房与买房来引导商品住宅价格走向合理化的政策提供一定参考。     

Housing and Income Inequality in Europe: Distributional Effects of Non-Cash Income From Imputed Rents

This article uses survey data to estimate non-cash income from imputed rents, using a consistent methodology for all countries to assemble comparable statistics that allow for a valid inter-country comparison. We can confirm a significant impact of non-cash income and find an inequality-decreasing effect for the unconditional income distribution which highly correlates with the proportion of owner-occupiers in the respective countries. However, aggregated inequality measures are not suited to analyze the increase in the conditional income inequality between owner-occupiers and renters, who do not obtain income from imputed rents by definition. Therefore, we apply a reweighting decomposition that controls for the heterogeneous housing characteristics among European countries and allows us to decompose the distributional changes into a part that is explained by the proportion of tenure types and household size and a remaining part that reflects the relative dispersion of imputed rents along the income distribution.     

SECTORS MAY USE MULTIPLE TECHNOLOGIES SIMULTANEOUSLY: THE RECTANGULAR CHOICE-OF-TECHNOLOGY MODEL WITH BINDING FACTOR CONSTRAINTS

We develop the rectangular choice-of-technology model with factor constraints, or RCOT, a linear programming input–output model for analysis of the economy of a single region. It allows for one or more sectors to operate more than one technology simultaneously, with the relatively lowest-cost one supplemented by others if it encounters a binding factor constraint. The RCOT model solves for sector outputs, goods prices that are set by the highest-cost technologies in use, and scarcity rents that correspond to binding factor constraints experienced by the lower-cost technologies. The model is motivated by the fact that mineral deposits of different qualities may be exploited simultaneously, as may primary and recycled sources for the same materials or irrigated and rain-fed techniques for producing the same crop. RCOT generalizes Carter's square choice-of-technology model, in particular adding the factor constraints that allow several alternatives to operate simultaneously. The Appendix gives a numerical example.     

Fiscal Adjustment and Inflation Targeting in Less Developed Countries

Inflation targeting may not be viable in less developed countries (LDCs) where policymakers rely too heavily on cuts in infrastructure investment to balance the budget. Using a mix of analytical and numerical methods, we demonstrate that the equilibrium ceases to be saddle point stable under active policy when infrastructure cuts account for 30–70% of fiscal adjustment and the return on infrastructure exceeds a comparatively low threshold value. The result is robust to the form of the Taylor rule, the degree of real wage flexibility, the initial level of debt, the choice of a balanced‐budget or debt‐targeting rule, and the q‐elasticity of private investment spending.     

租金、力量和绩效——全球价值链背景下对竞争优势的思考

本文以“租金”、“力量”和“绩效”为核心构建概念框架来考察全球价值链中的行动者的竞争优势问题。行动者的竞争优势可以通过多种租金来源而获得,但最终体现为对市场力量和领导力量的掌握,这是由全球价值链的治理特征所决定的。不仅如此,对竞争优势的绩效衡量也应是多样化的．包括经济租金、控制权、在位权和社会就业等,这些绩效目标在一定程度上存在替代关系。     

Environmental degradation,energy consumption and sustainable development: Accounting for the role of economic complexities with evidence from World Bank income clusters

The anthropogenic consequences of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, economic growth, and air transport have been assessed enormously in the literature. However, given the complexities in many economies of the world today, it is important to reassess the ecological concerns of these factors in light of the Environmental Kuznets Curve framework. Therefore, this current study investigates the global assessment using data from World Bank Development database from 1995 to 2016. Evidence from the method employed, sys-GMM, revealed that the economic complexities index increases the carbon emission in low-income groups while it significantly decreases the carbon emission for upper-middle and high-income groups. For the combined group, the EKC hypothesis holds, and ECI significantly hampers carbon emissions. For the other variables, it is worthy of note that (1) economic growth contributes to the high carbon contents across the income group especially for low-income, upper-middle-income and high-income group; (2) the effects of air transport on carbon emission is positive for lower-middle-income and high-income group and negative for the upper-middle-income group; (3) the use of coal rents and energy use leads to high release of carbon contents across all the income groups; and (4) a significant increase in the utilization of energy leads to increase in carbon contents except for lower-income group, it leads to a decrease. From this empirical assessment, vital energy policy directions are suggested.