日本结束量化宽松货币政策的影响分析

2006年3月9日,日本银行宣布终止实行了5年之久的“量化宽松”政策。朝最终升息跨出了第一步,原因是日本经济从2005年起出现了比较明显的好转,如果再继续实行超宽松的货币政策有可能引发通胀。日本央行这次顶住了政府压力做出改变货币政策的决定, 凸现其独立性进一步提高。在目前状况下日本货币政策的改变对日本经济和全球经济都具有积极影响,对资金流动和金融市场的影响更大,尤其是将提高日本金融市场的吸引力。     

Texas 9-1-1: Emergency telecommunications and the genesis of surveillance infrastructure

Infrastructures of surveillance—everyday, taken-for-granted, institutionalized and technically mediated practices which identify, observe, and analyze individual actions—permeate society. These infrastructures mediate the production of social knowledge and action toward individuals. This article examines the genesis of one such infrastructure, namely the coordinated practices of identifying and locating mobile phone users during emergency (9-1-1) calls. Implementing this infrastructure has entailed creating and coordinating systems to locate wireless phones, to deliver the emergency calls to the appropriate service agency, and to deliver appropriate services to the emergency event. This implementation has occurred within historically specific regulatory, political, cultural, technological, and economic contexts and has specific implications for general surveillance practice. Focusing primarily on the state of Texas, this article examines the development of systems which store and deliver individuals’ geographic location. It argues that, despite privacy laws tightly restricting the use of information generated in the 9-1-1 process, and despite the special purpose to which the 9-1-1 system is dedicated, the wireless 9-1-1 initiative has created the infrastructure for a general purpose locational surveillance infrastructure capable both of surveilling broad patterns of activities and of responding to particular individuals. Moreover, the infrastructure is more available to police agencies and to well-established and well-funded corporate entities than to grass roots organizations. This trend is driven by the need to coordinate a national emergency response system within a fractured telecommunication industry, by the desire of marketers to understand and address their customers’ habits of mobility, and by an increasing willingness of police agencies to include widespread surveillance under the rubric of “emergency services.” Policy responses such as greater ability to opt out of the surveillance system, public oversight of emergency operations, and greater public access to the infrastructure itself might mitigate the most harmful potential social effects of this infrastructure, while distributing its benefits in a more democratic and egalitarian way.     

基于个税递延政策的企业年金保障水平研究

国家明确以税收优惠的形式鼓励和引导企业和个人参加企业年金计划,并于2014年实施了个税递延政策。基于指标模型构建和数据模拟,本文对我国企业年金在个税递延政策实施前后的保障水平进行了比较,通过参数敏感性分析考察了投资收益、工资增长、退休年龄和缴费比例等因素的影响。研究发现,实施个税递延政策后企业职工的养老保障水平在较大程度上低于政策实施前,但不同性别、不同收入水平和不同缴费比例的企业职工保障水平降低的程度有所差异。收入水平和缴费比例越高的男性职工,个税递延政策实施后保障水平降低的幅度越高,但对女性职工而言,这种影响要弱一些。进一步,可以通过增加投资收益、延迟退休年龄和提升缴费比例等方法来提高企业职工的养老保障水平,这与目前正在进行的一系列改革方向也一致。     

A game of give and take: The introduction of multi-layer (water) safety in the Netherlands and Flanders

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Netherlands and Flanders introduced a risk-based approach to flood risk management (FRM), labelled as multi-layer (water) safety. In contrast to a flood defence approach, risk-based management stresses the need to manage both the consequences and probability of a flood. The concept has developed differently in the two countries, as we conclude from a discursive-institutionalist research perspective. The Netherlands is characterised by a high institutionalization of the traditional flood defence discourse and a more closed policy arrangement, whereas in Flanders, the flood defence discourse is less institutionalized and the arrangement is more open. In both countries we see an opening of the arrangement preceding the establishment of multi-layer (water) safety, but at the same time, actors stress different aspects of the concept in order to increase its compatibility with the existing policy arrangement. In the Netherlands, the focus is on probability management, in Flanders on consequence management. In the Netherlands, multi-layer (water) safety as a concept could be established because it stabilises the system in the short-term by reinforcing the importance of flood defence, whereas in Flanders, policymakers were receptive to the concept because it supports a shift of responsibility towards actors outside traditional water management.     

Solving the income fluctuation problem with unbounded rewards

This paper studies the income fluctuation problem without imposing bounds on utility, assets, income or consumption. We prove that the Coleman operator is a contraction mapping over the natural class of candidate consumption policies when endowed with a metric that evaluates consumption differences in terms of marginal utility. We show that this metric is complete, and that the fixed point of the operator coincides with the unique optimal policy. As a consequence, even in this unbounded setting, policy function iteration always converges to the optimal policy at a geometric rate.     

Multi-sectoral interdependencies of regional public infrastructure investments

Public investment decision-making processes involve multiple and interrelated sectoral and regional policy objectives and budget constraints. This paper presents a dynamic spatio-economic model that considers multi-sectoral investment interdependencies using data at the prefecture level in Greece. The expenditure allocation dynamics of most types of regional public investment are found to be competitive with each other. This outcome is attributed to the lack of policy coordination, technological and budget constraints, geographical factors, and equity and political considerations. The investment interrelationships may have a significant effect on future state funding needs and the strategic assessment of infrastructure development at the country level.     

A LITERATURE SURVEY ON PROPOSED AFRICAN MONETARY UNIONS

This study provides a survey of recent advances in the literature on proposed African monetary unions. The survey comprises about 70 empirical papers published during the past 15 years. Four main strands are discussed individually and collectively. They comprise the proposed: (i) West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), (ii) East African Monetary Union (EAMU), (iii) Southern African Monetary Union (SAMU) and (iv) African Monetary Union (AMU). We observe a number of issues with establishing the feasibility and/or desirability of potential monetary unions, inter alia, they are variations in: choice of variables, empirical strategies, sampled countries and considered periodicities. We address this ambiguity by reviewing studies with scenarios that are consistent with Hegelian dialectics and establish selective expansion as the predominant mode of monetary integration. Some proponents make cases for strong pegs and institutions as viable alternatives to currency unions. Using cluster analysis, disaggregating panels into sub-samples and distinguishing shocks from responses in the examination of business cycle synchronisation provide more subtle policy implications. We caution that for inquiries using the same theoretical underpinnings, variables and methods just by modifying the scope/context and periodicity may only contribute to increasing the number of conflicting findings. Authors should place more emphasis on new perspectives and approaches based on caveats of, and lessons from the European Monetary Union (EMU) and CFA zones.     

Progress in indicators to assess agricultural landscape valuation: how and what is measured at different levels of governance

Landscape is defined by the European Landscape Convention as “an area perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. Many efforts have been devoted in addressing the core concepts on which this definition roots: perception and interaction of men and nature, but when coming to large (continental) scale assessments, the latter prevail on the former.This paper aims at presenting a framework for a measurable landscape awareness indicator as a key link to the public demand for a specific type of landscape: the agricultural landscape. This is a necessary effort to complement more physically based assessments, which include as well the impact of human activities on landscapes.The analysis is carried out at different levels of governance: EU and regional, using an example from the Alentejo region in Portugal and EU wide databases, and addresses conceptual and practical questions: what type of societal landscape awareness can be monitored and by whom (e.g., individuals, specific social groups, society as a whole); what are the landscape dimensions that should be assessed; what are the limitations imposed by data-related constraints. By applying the methodology to build composite indicators to map landscape societal awareness, the paper shows the regional and local meaning of indicator approaches developed at European level, presents developments for downscaling to regional level, while introducing the social component to support sound policy development for European rural landscapes.     

Scarcity of safe assets,inflation, and the policy trap

A goal of this paper is to make sense of the seemingly puzzling behavior of interest rates and inflation – and the role of central banks in that behavior – during and after the Great Recession, particularly in the United States. To this end, we construct a model in which government debt plays a key role in exchange, and can bear a liquidity premium. If asset market constraints bind, then there need not be deflation under an indefinite zero interest rate policy (ZIRP). Further, ZIRP may not be optimal under these circumstances. A Taylor-rule central banker could be subject to a ZIRP trap and persistently undershoot target inflation. As well, a liquidity premium on government debt creates additional Taylor rule perils, because of a persistently low real interest rate. We make a case that this is the key policy predicament currently faced by many central banks in the world.     

Policy coordination among the ASEAN-5: A global VAR analysis

This paper aims to analyse the feasibility of policy coordination among the ASEAN-5 economies. This is done by determining whether they experience symmetric responses to common shocks. Given that the problem of dimensionality plagues large-scale macroeconomic modelling, a Global VAR model by Pesaran, Schuermann, and Weiner (2004) and Dees, Mauro, Pesaran, and Smith (2007) is used. The results in this paper provide some weak evidence of symmetric responses to the common (global) shocks of interest: a US monetary policy shock, a US output shock, a Chinese output shock; an oil price shock. Shocks from the US produced the most symmetric responses. The lack of symmetry in some cases has implications for further policy coordination. Since migrant remittances could provide an adjustment mechanism, further labour market integration is needed as it currently lags behind trade and financial integration in the region.