公共卫生支出、健康人力资本与经济增长

本文通过构建随机动态一般均衡模型（DSGE）和基于该模型的数值模拟,分析了公共卫生支出、健康人力资本和经济增长的关系。主要结论有：从长期看,扩大公共卫生支出、医疗技术革新均会带来宏观经济的繁荣和居民福利的提升;从短期看,恶性突发卫生事件的冲击将给宏观经济的波动带来显著的负面影响,但这一影响一般会在短期内得以消除。本文进一步借助中国1998～2008年的面板数据,以数据包络分析（DEA）得到的公共卫生支出投入产出效率作为健康人力资本的代理变量,进行计量分析后发现：健康人力资本对本地区和相邻地区的经济增长均有显著的促进作用;在经济增长水平较高、健康人力资本集聚的地区,健康人力资本可以更有效地促进经济增长,即存在显著的门限效应。     

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY: POLICY AND MEASUREMENT PARADIGMS

Abstract Equality of opportunity is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice and it is the leading idea of most political platforms in several countries. According to this principle, a society might institute policies that secure an equal distribution of the means to reach a valuable outcome among its members. Once the set of opportunities have been equalized, which particular opportunity, the individual chooses from those open to her, is outside the scope of justice. Ex ante inequalities, and only those inequalities, should be eliminated or compensated for by public intervention. The recent literature on the opportunity egalitarianism often merges these questions introducing two different economic issues. On one side the design of a public policy intended to implement the equality of opportunity view and on the other side the problem of measuring the degree of opportunity inequality in a society. We describe the basic setting and assumptions of some different approaches derived by Roemer’s algorithm for public policy and then we discuss some theoretical and empirical studies to separate and test alternative paradigms on the measurement of inequality of opportunity. Accordingly, an extended critique on the causality issue on policies and measurements is taken into account.     

Motives and consequences of IPOs in cold periods

We analyze the motives and long-term stock price performance of firms that pursue IPOs in cold IPO periods. We find that firms are more likely to engage in an IPO during a cold period when their earnings are relatively high and are expected to decline in the future. We also find that IPO firms during a cold period are more likely to have managed their earnings prior to the IPO. Furthermore, we find that cold IPO firms experience significantly weaker stock price performance than hot IPO firms, and results are robust to different criteria for defining hot and cold IPO periods, different measures of stock price performance, and different investment holding periods. We find that investment opportunities, the backing of a venture capitalist, and an increase in earnings in the year of the IPO lead to significantly higher long term stock price performance of IPO firms. Our multivariate models confirm the adverse cold IPO period effect on stock price performance even after controlling for the IPO motives and the firm's earnings performance. Our results also hold within the post-Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) era.     

From Theory to Practice: Policy Analysis,Cultural Bias and Organizational Arrangements

This article discusses the inter-relation between policy analysis (PA) in public policy making, cultural bias and organizational arrangements. It provides a theoretical explanation for differences of PA approaches based on adherance to various organizational contexts and political cultures and lays the ground for future research on an important but rather neglected study area.     

Reshaping Community Mental Health Services in a Restructured State: New Zealand 1984-97

The concept of the hollow state has been proposed as a general framework for public sector restructuring, with New Zealand seen as a leader in reforming social and welfare services, including mental health. This article reports on documentary and interview research into the provision of community-based mental health services in terms of hollow state characteristics: privatization, decentralization and flexibilization. The evidence suggests that privatization occurred only at the margins, that decentralization led to significant regional differences in contractual arrangements and services and that flexibilization brought mixed blessings to the agencies involved. Consistent with findings from elsewhere related to hollow state mechanisms, performance assessment and accountability became more difficult. It is concluded that such frameworks are not appropriate for sectors such as mental health where there is high uncertainty and vulnerable service recipients. Recent policy changes suggest a retreat from privatization and flexibilization, and the emergence of a new balance between centralized and decentralized decision making.     

Studying governance within the British public sector and without

Abstract

In the critical arena of public management and policy debates several schools currently try to make sense of governance structures and processes, although one has so far had the strongest impact in terms of academic and policy influence in particular in the United Kingdom: network governance.

Network governance has been associated with Stakeholder Capitalism – as represented for instance by the European (usually German) social-democratic settlement – and as the direct opposite of the New Public Management (as the epitome instead of Shareholder Capitalism). In this essay it will be argued that the alleged novelty of the reforms being currently implemented under the aegis of the ‘modernization’ or (network) governance rhetoric (by the Blair government, for instance) must be questioned, since they are the direct inheritors of the NPM tradition. Through the development of a multiparadigmatic model of ethical and organization theories it will be shown that alternatives to network governance are not only thinkable but also (institutionally) practicable.     

Objectives,Techniques and valuation of state-owned companies in privatization processes

This article aims to analyse the objectives and the techniques of privatization and the valuation methods applied in the state-owned company privatization processes in order to determine the coherence between the formal privatization objectives stated by governments and the techniques and the valuation methods chosen to carry out the sale of state-owned companies. From the results of an international survey carried out by the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI), we study the privatization practices in three groups of countries: the most developed OECD countries, Eastern European countries and developing countries. While the reasons that have motivated state-owned company privatizations all over the world are quite similar, the techniques of privatization used by these three groups are different with regard to the purpose of the privatization, the ways of carrying it out and the methods of fixing the sale price.     

The offspring of new public management in English Universities

New Public Management emphasizes the importance of Accountability and Performance evaluations. The purpose of this article is to explore the use of performance models and goal-setting in universities as a means for gaining insight into the use of similar performance approaches in the broader context of the new public management. The article deals with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) which is a research evaluation mechanism used by the English Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) to determine the distribution of research funding among the universities.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: The effects of contractualism and devolution on political control

This article analyzes effects and implications of New Public Management (NPM) when implemented in the civil service systems in New Zealand and Norway, focusing especially on the effects of devolution and contractualism on political control. Using a transformative perspective, we interpret these effects as a result of a melding of environmental factors, polity features and national historical-institutional constraints. Norway scores low on both environmental and internal factors enhancing administrative reform, furthering a soft version of NPM and small changes in political control. In contrast a combination of external pressure, weak countervailing cultural forces and ‘elective dictatorship’ in New Zealand produces a radical version of NPM, resulting in a weakening of central political control.     

小产权房向公共租赁住房转化问题研究

小产权房的存在是“高房价”下的产物,它不仅损害农村集体成员的利益,也会给购买人造成不可避免的风险。以北京为例,目前小产权房问题屡禁不止。时下我国在大力发展公共租赁住房,以此为背景对北京目前存在的小产权房进行全面研究。首先分析目前小产权房存在的原因,再通过二者特征对比进而对其转化的可能性加以论证,最终提出小产权房向公共租赁住房转化的具体建议,以此来解决一直存在且屡禁不止的小产权房问题。