Structural Changes in China’s Import Market: A Comparison with Korea’s Exports to China

The article examines the structural changes of China’s import market for domestic demand and the corresponding structural changes of Korea’s exports to China for Chinese domestic demand. Using 8-digit HS code data covering the period 2006–2014 and analyzing the processing steps as well as by industry, this study reveals that while the share of ordinary trade in total China’s imports has increased rapidly, the share of processing trade has decreased continuously since the mid-2000s. The article also shows that Korea’s exports to China is still processing trade-oriented. The slowdown of Korea’s exports to China is because of the concentration on processing trade, intermediate goods, electronics and chemistry.     

基于层次分析的农业企业竞争力研究

农业是具有天然弱质性的产业,不但表现出对自然条件的高度依赖,而且还很难抵御市场风险的影响,故此从事农业的企业竞争力相对比较低下。针对这一状况,以层次分析作为研究方法,结合农业企业自身特点,通过对影响农业企业竞争力的因素进行排序、分析,找出适合其发展的拓宽融资渠道,加快人才培养措施建议。     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXPORT STATUS AND PRODUCTIVITY IN SERVICES: A FIRM‐LEVEL ANALYSIS FOR SPAIN

This paper analyses the relationship between export status and productivity in a major service exporter, Spain, during 2001–07. I find that exporters in the services sector are 45 percent more productive than non‐exporters. This productivity premium is larger for firms that supply non‐internet‐related services than for firms that supply internet‐related services. The results show that exporters were more productive than non‐exporters before beginning to export, and also that exporting increases productivity growth; however, this positive shock vanishes quickly.     

基于目标满意改进的辽宁农产品出口影响因素分析

辽宁是农产品出口大省,虽然出口额呈逐年上升趋势,但近几年受国内外不同问题和因素的影响,导致辽宁农产品出口出现了瓶颈。本文在总结了辽宁农产品出口的现状的基础上,探讨了辽宁农产品出口的问题,以此总结了影响出口的因素,并基于目标满意对影响因素进行了分析,最终提出了解决措施。     

EXPORT AND HEDGING DECISIONS UNDER CORRELATED REVENUE AND EXCHANGE RATE RISK

This paper examines the behaviour of a competitive exporting firm under joint revenue and exchange rate risk. The firm can trade unbiased currency futures contracts for hedging purposes. We show that neither the separation theorem nor the full‐hedging theorem holds when the revenue shock prevails. If the correlation between the revenue shock and the random spot exchange rate is non‐positive, the firm optimally produces less than the benchmark level when the revenue shock is absent. If, in addition, the firm is prudent, the optimal futures position is an under‐hedge. Finally, we derive sufficient conditions under which the firm's optimal output level is higher in the presence than in the absence of the revenue shock. Operational hedging and financial hedging as such interact in a complicated way to better cope with the multiple sources of uncertainty faced by the firm.     

The Sexual Economy,Gender Relations and Narratives of Infant Death on a Tomato Farm in Northern South Africa

Based on an extended case study of a large‐scale tomato farm in northern Limpopo province, the paper examines how the restructuring of agriculture transforms the sexual economy through shifts in the composition of labour and management practices on farms in this area. The employment of Zimbabwean migrants, rather than relatively permanent Venda families, suggests a potentially greater variety of people participating in the sexual economy. While families as units of employment have declined, black supervisors increasingly serve as a primary locus of coercion on the farm and in the sexual economy. The monetization of erstwhile paternalistic services places pressure on women to earn income however they can, including transactional sex. Contested interpretations over the causes of infant deaths on the farm, in the form of hygiene, blood‐mixing and infanticide, provide an ethnographic framework for a deeper analysis of the sexual economy and its social effects. While the sexual economy presents opportunities for women to increase their income, it also exposes them to the risks of HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancies, resulting in contradictory implications for the status of women on farms.     

Are Current Account Deficits in the OECD Countries Sustainable? Robust Evidence from Time-Series Estimators

This study examines the sustainability of current account deficits (CADs) and validity of intertemporal budget constraint (IBC) for 24 OECD countries. While the OLSEG, ML system, and OLSGH estimates of the model do not provide support, the GMM, DOLS, and NLLS estimates provide consistent support for the sustainability of CADs across most countries. The estimates of the model with multiple structural breaks reinforce the sustainability of CADs. The results provide dominant support for the sustainability of CADs and validity of IBC across most countries. The CADs are only short-run phenomena and are balanced by future surpluses.     

The impact of FTAs on MENA trade in agricultural and industrial products

This article analyses the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) trade for the period 1994–2010. The analysis distinguishes between industrial and agricultural trade to take into account the different liberalization schedules. An augmented gravity model is estimated using up-to-date panel data techniques to control for all time-invariant bilateral factors that influence bilateral trade as well as for the so-called multilateral resistance factors. We also control for the endogeneity of the agreements and test for self-selection bias due to the presence of zero trade in our sample. The main findings indicate that North–South-FTAs and South–South-FTAs have a differential impact in terms of increasing trade in MENA countries, with the former being more beneficial in terms of exports for MENA countries, but both showing greater global market integration. We also find that FTAs that include agricultural products, in which MENA countries have a clear comparative advantage, have more favourable effects for these countries than those only including industrial products.     

Institutions and Work Incentives in Collective Farming in Maoist China

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that assumes widespread shirking and inefficiency in agricultural production under the collective system in Maoist China, and attributes these problems to egalitarianism in labour remuneration and difficulties in labour supervision. Drawing on interviews with 131 former production team members from 16 provinces, this paper re‐examines the issue of work incentives by placing it in a historical and social context in which formal institutions, such as the different forms of collective organization, income distribution and state extraction, as well as informal institutions, such as indigenous social networks, communal norms and collective sanction, interacted with non‐institutional factors, especially local geographical, demographic and ecological conditions, to constrain and motivate Chinese villagers participating in collective production. The complexity and fluidity of this context gave rise to a multiplicity of patterns of peasant behaviour in team farming, which accounts for the contrasting performances of rural collectives in different areas and periods.