Privatization,commodification and transformation in Japanese housing: ephemeral house – eternal home

The space and place of the Japanese home holds an iconic status in both foreign and indigenous understandings of Japanese life. The architectural forms and bounded spaces of Japanese houses have historically been embedded in social practices that integrate individuals with hierarchical orders of space and social relations moving outwards from the house to community. Housing units and residential neighbourhoods have, however, undergone considerable transformation in the last century. Homes have been increasingly privatized, commodified and marketized, while the features of housing and neighbourhoods have been intensively modernized and urbanized. This paper considers transformations in the form of Japanese housing and the extent to which contemporary housing production and consumption mediates historically embedded notions of domestic relations and space.     

全球银行业产权结构的私有化变革趋势分析

在以金融为核心的现代经济中，银行是一种关键的经济金融组织，其产权结构对经济效率有重要影响。自20世纪80年代尤其是90年代以来，无论是在发达国家还是在发展中国家，也无论是在转型国家集中的地区，还是在非转型发展中国家集中的各个地区，总体上讲，政府在银行业中的产权份额都经历了不同程度的下降；尽管目前发展中国家的政府产权份额水平仍然高于发达国家，但是差距进一步缩小的趋势明显；产权份额的下降在发展中国家中还具有重要的区域特征。银行业产权结构变革的机制比较复杂，然而，作为现代私有化运动一部分的银行私有化，在全球银行业产权结构的去国有化方面却扮演着主要角色。     

我国公用事业民营化改革的必要性和可行性分析

本文首先分析了我国公用事业民营化的必要性,然后总结了公用事业民营化改革的六种实现模式,并指出其优越性所在。最后就如何推动我国公用事业民营化改革提出了三条政策建议:建立激励和制约机制、营造良好的投资环境和建立科学的监管体系。     

The Transfer of Property Rights from the Public to the Private Sector in Hong Kong: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

The privatization idea may have lost some of its luster in recent years, but it remains relevant in today's socio-economic environment and is pursued consistently in industrialized and industrializing countries alike. Hong Kong has followed the general pattern in a manner reflecting its particular circumstances and its institutional modus operandi. The underlying logic may not appear highly compelling, from a short-term perspective, yet there are sound grounds for approaching the task positively, if viewed from a multi-year standpoint. Rather surprisingly, for such a quintessentially capitalist society, Hong Kong has not confronted the privatization challenge astutely on the political front and has handled it somewhat mechanically in managerial terms. The benefits to the community may have thus been more modest than one could legitimately expect, given the historical backdrop.     

How Can Chinese Farmers' Property Income Be Improved? A Population–Land Coupling Urbanization Mechanism

Balancing urban and rural development is an important political goal in China. The failure of rural land privatization has led to a low level of rural economic development and a vast property income gap between citizens and farmers. This paper illustrates the reasons for property income inequality from the perspective of the land tenure system and the dualistic household registration system. After evaluating the segmentation of the rural land market and the rigid nature of rural land assets, a population–land coupling urbanization mechanism is proposed. The paper argues that China's land property system has externalized a high degree of geospatial and social urban and rural intertwinement. Major reform of the rural land property rights system is required to correct the situation (further development of the social security system and stable urbanization) and to increase property income potential for farmers.     

Cost of capital and valuation in the public and private sectors: Tax,risk and debt capacity

Cost of capital and valuation differ in the private and public sectors, because taxes are a cost to the private sector but are only a transfer to the public sector. We show how to transform the after-tax private sector cost of capital into its pre-tax equivalent, for comparison with the public sector cost of capital. We establish the existence of a tax induced wedge between these two costs of capital. The wedge introduces a preference on the part of the private sector for assets with rapid tax depreciation, high debt capacity and low risk. We show that, in circumstances where an asset has identical public and private sector valuation in the absence of taxes, the tax induced difference in valuation is identical to the change in government tax receipts that results from having the asset owned by the private rather than the public sector. We provide some examples of distortions that result from failure to adjust for changes in tax revenues, and show how to effect such adjustment.     

Strategic incentive in mixed oligopoly

This paper develops a two stage game model with two competing firms in a mixed oligopolistic market, a public firm and a private firm, and only the public firm giving its manager an incentive contract. The paper presents three types of public firm owner’s objective function and each objective function corresponds to three types of delegation, either of a profit-revenue type, or of a relative performance, or, finally, of a market share one. In an equilibrium, the public firm owner has a dominant strategy to reward his manager with an incentive contract combining own profits and competitor’s profits. Different from Manasakis et al. (2007), this paper suggests that the dominant strategy of the public firm owner is to reward his manager with a profit-revenue type of contract or a market-share type of contract, that is to say profit-revenue is identical with market-share. Using relative-performance type of contract will move the manager away from the owner’s true objective function when the public firm owner only pursues maximizing the social welfare. The private firm will be crowded out and the public firm is the only producer of the market. Under profits-revenues type of contract, the owner’s objective of maximizing the summation of the profit and consumer surplus leads the manager more aggressive. Different combinations give us different results. By comparing the results, each type of incentive contract is an owner’s best response to his decision.     

公用事业民营化改革:五大问题和政策构想

随着政治、经济体制改革向纵深推进 ,我国拉开了公用事业民营化改革的序幕。而随着改革的逐步深入 ,一些深层次的问题已经开始暴露出来。文章就这些问题进行了分析并提出了相对的政策构想