中国区域经济差距研究综述

近年来中国东、中、西部地区经济差距有逐渐扩大的趋势,再次引起了政府和学术界的关注。中央在十八大明确提出要实施全国经济协调发展战略,让不同地区的人民都能实现中国梦。实现中国梦的第一前提是公平。而区域差距的扩大显然有违公平原则,在这个大背景下,缩小区域差距便成为中国当前时期一个亟待解决的艰巨任务。参考大量国内外研究区域经济差距的重要文献,按照逐步深入的顺序,从区域经济差距的研究方法到中国区域差距度量和变化趋势,再到中国区域经济差距的成因和对策,依次进行概括总结,并进行了相关评述,提出了一个缩小区域差距的新思路,作为下一步研究的重点方向。     

Investment decision-making under economic policy uncertainty

It is widely established that economic policy uncertainty (EPU) affects investment decisions and performance, yet research in this area has overlooked the direct property investment market. This article seeks to rectify this and proposes a multistage multilevel analytical framework to offer new insights and a richness of findings. Using a news-based measure of EPU in the United Kingdom, and controlling for economic conditions, a national-level analysis reveals some evidence of Granger-Causality between EPU and total returns, indicating that pricing is responsive to uncertainty. These findings suggest that EPU is an important risk factor for direct property investments, with pricing implications. Differences in data and performance measure are important, however, with income returns unresponsive. A micro-level investigation begins to reveal some of the asset-pricing decisions underpinning the national results, indicating investors’ concerns for income streams are consistently high, regardless of varying EPU. Pricing can also cause changes in EPU, such as in the retail and industrial markets (increasingly linked through logistics) reflecting sector-specific stakeholder groups and newsworthy issues. This evidence highlights how important it is for policy-makers to understand the complex and bi-directional relationship, that indecision can undermine investment confidence and cause investment market volatility, in turn raising EPU.     

中国生物质利用政策演变与展望

介绍了中国生物质利用政策的背景:保障能源安全,保护环境,促进经济社会可持续发展。阐述了中国生物质利用政策发展演变的四个阶段:早期的生物质利用政策、能源需求增长下的生物质利用政策、能源安全下的生物质利用政策、全球气候变化下的生物质利用政策。展望了中国生物质利用政策的发展前景和方向:非粮,非耕地,立足国内,并注重保护环境。     

我国旅行社行业发展的几个理论问题——对我国旅行社行业制度变迁的考察

简要地回顾和评述了二十多年来我国旅行社行业的发展历程,对一些长期困扰旅行社行业发展的诸如旅游业发展与制度化环境、政府主导与市场主导、“政策失灵”问题,行业垄断还是行业竞争等理论问题提出了独立的见解,并就我国旅行社业的发展趋势与路径选择提出了建设性的意见。     

Can tourism be part of the decarbonized global economy? The costs and risks of alternate carbon reduction policy pathways

Global leaders agree on the need to substantially decarbonize the global economy by 2050. This paper compares potential costs associated with different policy pathways to achieve tourism sector emission reduction ambitions (?50% by 2035) and transform the sector to be part of the mid-century decarbonized economy (?70% by 2050). Investment in emissions abatement within the tourism sector, combined with strategic external carbon offsets, was found to be approximately 5% more cost effective over the period 2015–2050 than exclusive reliance on offsetting. The cost to achieve the ?50% target through abatement and strategic offsetting, while significant, represents less than 0.1% of the estimated global tourism economy in 2020 and 3.6% in 2050. Distributed equally among all tourists (international and domestic), the cost of a low-carbon tourism sector is estimated at US$11 per trip, equivalent to many current travel fees or taxes. Exclusive reliance on offsetting would expose the sector to extensive and continued carbon liability costs beyond mid-century and could be perceived as climate inaction, increasing reputational risks and the potential for less efficient regulatory interventions that could hinder sustainable tourism development. Effective tourism sector leadership is needed to develop a strategic tourism policy framework and emission measurement and reporting system.     

Policies to increase business tourism income: A dynamic panel data model

This article aims to identify the determinants that influence business tourism income and that may be controlled by economic agents and policy makers of destination countries. For the development of the empirical study, a dynamic panel model by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) was estimated using the Gretl 2016a software, and a sample of 122 countries for the period 2002–2013 (12 years) was used. The study reveals that, for the development of policies to stimulate the growth in the short and long-term of business tourism income, countries should develop measures that encourage capital investment in tourism and foreign direct investment.     

Low carbon transport strategy in Europe: A critical review

ABSTRACT

The purposes of this article are to depict ongoing trends regarding the transport system in Europe, to introduce readers to the challenges that Europe (and the rest of the world) will face in the future, to show which strategies Europe plans to deploy to mitigate the negative impacts the transport system imposes on the overall system, and finally to discuss the potential of these suggested strategies to contribute to the objectives of the European Union in the long run.     

The effects of beach characteristics and location with respect to hotel prices

This paper measures the effects of beach characteristics and hotel location with respect to the beach on sun-and-beach hotel prices by using a well-established hedonic perspective. The paper’s main results are that, after controlling for the relevant variables, location in front of a beach increases the price of a room in costal hotels of Catalonia by a figure between 13 and 17%, and that a Blue Flag increases the price by around 11.5%. The effects on hotels’ prices of other beach characteristics (such as beach length, width, sand type or beach services) are also estimated. With these estimates, the paper ranks beaches according to their characteristics and provides a setting to assess different policies regarding beaches from the point of view of hotels, such as regeneration, maintenance or achieving a Blue Flag award.     

The cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy: evidence from the OECD

This paper addresses the topic of cyclicality in fiscal policy. In particular, we show that the level of cyclicality varies across spending categories and across OECD countries. In line with leading theories of fiscal cyclicality, we show that countries with volatile output and dispersed political power are the most likely to run procyclical fiscal policies. Wage government consumption is highlighted as the most important channel by which these variables affect fiscal cyclicality.