Commodity currencies

This paper looks at real exchange rate behavior by focusing on three OECD economies (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) where primary commodities constitute a significant share of their exports. For Australia and New Zealand especially, we find that the US dollar price of their commodity exports (generally exogenous to these small economies) has a strong and stable influence on their floating real rates, with the magnitude of the effects consistent with predictions of standard theoretical models. However, after controlling for commodity price shocks, there is still a purchasing power parity puzzle in the residual. The results here are relevant to developing commodity-exporting countries as they liberalize their capital markets and move towards floating exchange rates.     

Globalization frustrated: The case of white goods

This paper challenges the common view that mature industries are always ripe for global strategies. Based on data from the European Domestic Appliance industry, this paper shows how changing economic conditions can diminish the value of global strategies. Critical in these shifts were simultaneous rises in demand for variety (that eroded the benefits of scale and continental market share) and decreases in manufacturing scale (that permitted new supply options), which reduced the extent of the strategic market to national dimensions. They added complexity that decreased the profitability of the global players and increased that of national strategies. The fluctuating fortunes of leading firms are shown to have been caused primarily by choices of strategy, not by national factor costs.     

What Can Be Learned from DuPont and the Freon Ban: A Case Study

Between 1974 and 1988, executives of DuPont, the world's largest producer of CFCs, were confronted with emerging evidence that CFCs were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer. The difficulty that executives face in such cases is that scientific knowledge develops over time and does not necessarily proceed in a straight line toward true conclusions. At the beginning of a new field of research, there is much uncertainty and disagreement among the experts. The solution of the ozone problem required a remarkable cooperation among science, business, and international governments. After looking at the role of DuPont executives in this drama, and the difficulties facing any executive dealing with uncertain science, the paper turns to an evaluation of the field of Business Ethics to see what light it might throw on this and analogous problems. Finally, the paper offers specific suggestions in terms of principles in dealing with uncertain science, and concludes that the course of action that DuPont followed, including some mistakes, can serve as a model for analogous crises.     

论市场经济中的艺术收藏

在我国上市公司的重组与并购活动中 ,地方政府一直扮演着一个非常重要的角色 ,这是有其深刻的经济和历史原因的 ,本文就上述问题进行简单的介绍和分析。     

韩国政府为实现环保型企业经营的政策及方案

文章论述了环境问题对人类的重要性及创造环保型的企业环境需要解决的问题,在此基础上,提 出了为实现环保型企业经营韩国政府所应该采用的政策及具体的实施方案。     

Analysis of the Trade Dispute of Chinese Agricultural Products and Its Countermeasures

The trade dispute of agricultural products has become one of the hot issues that international community has paid close attention to for three years. This paper analyzes the current dispute situation, the characters and the causes in international export trade. It also points out how the government, enterprises and employer＇s organizations deal with the trade dispute of agricultural products.     

The Performance of Actively Managed International Mutual Funds

International mutual funds allow individual investors to diversify abroad at a reasonable cost. This paper tests whether international funds that actively engage in country and security selection outperform passive global benchmarks. We apply a mean-variance efficiency test that incorporates the practical prohibition against short sales of open-end mutual funds. Our tests reject the efficiency of the world equity market portfolio over the sample period, and our funds as a group outperform the inefficient world index. However, we find no evidence of security selectivity ability using a 12-country benchmark. We do find that active international funds provide global diversification benefits. Tests using the Positive Period Weight (PPW) measure of Grinblatt and Titman (1989), which is robust to nonlinearity in fund and benchmark returns, yield similar results.     

网络信息安全与政府管制

随着互联网的迅猛发展和广泛应用,日趋严重的网络信息安全问题,对政府管制提出了更为复杂和系统的要求,在此情况下,如何管制"爆炸式"发展的互联网,既使宪法所赋予公民的言论自由可以在网络上充分且方便地享有,又能够抑制侵害他人、国家乃至社会自由和效率的不正当行为,这成为摆在中国政府面前的一项重要课题.本文分析了网络信息安全与政府管制的关系,提出了网络信息安全政府管制的政策选择.     

The Impact of Survey Methodology and Context on Central Tendency,Nonresponse and Associations of Subjective Indicators of Government Performance

A comparison is given of (ordinal) measures of trust in government institutions that were collected with the aim of facilitating comparisons between different modes and contexts of data collection. Statistical analyses reveal that the mode effect could amount upto a 10% change of item nonresponse and a 9% change of the level of trust, whereas the context effect could lead upto a 19% change of the bivariate associations of trust. The observed changes of both measures of central tendency and of associations affect conclusions of social scientific research in isolated studies, which implies that comparative studies are seriously hampered by bias related to mode and context, two sources of obscurity adding to the two other threats which are differences of sample source and differences of question phrasing.     

国际快递公司在华发展特点及启示

简要介绍了联邦快递、联合包裹、敦豪环球快递、荷兰天地快运四大国际快递公司在中国市场发展的特点及成功经验;指出我国目前物流快递业发展的诸多问题,提出有效应对措施与建议,提高我国快递企业的竞争力。