进口货物特许权使用费海关估价之完善路径分析

在经济全球化背景下,涉及知识产权的贸易越来越普遍,而现代国际贸易的特点之一,就是进口货物的商标权、专利权等无形的特许权伴随着有形货物的转移,因此,目前进口货物的特许权使用费成为中国海关估价难点之一.文章在综述我国现行特许权使用费海关估价规则的基础上,针对我国进口货物特许权使用费海关估价所面临的问题,着重就如何进一步完善进口货物特许权使用费海关估价,从海关估价技术、估价法规、估价制度、外部环境等四条路径进行了具体分析,并提出了相关建议.     

Exploring under-utilised low carbon land resources from multiple perspectives: Case studies on regencies in Kalimantan

Mobilising under-utilised low carbon (ULC) land resources for future agricultural production can help reducing pressure on high carbon stock land from agricultural expansion, particularly for deforestation hotspots like Kalimantan. However, the potential of ULC land is not yet well understood, especially at regency level which is the key authority for land-use planning in Indonesia. Therefore, this study explored ULC land resources for all regencies in Kalimantan. By analysing information from six monitoring domains, a range of indicators were derived to provide insights into the physical area of ULC land from various perspectives. It was found that these indicators show largely different values at regency level. For example, regency Pulang Pisau has a substantial area of ‘temporarily unused agricultural land’ but a very limited area of ‘low carbon land’ – this implies that not all ‘temporarily unused agricultural land’ is ready for future exploitation when assessing from different aspects. As a result of such diverging indicators, using a single indicator to quantify available ULC land resources is risky as it can either be an over- or under-estimation. Thus, ULC land resources were further explored in the present paper by taking four regencies as case studies and comparing all the indicators, supported with relevant literature and evidence collected from narrative interviews. This information was used to estimate ULC land area by possible land-use strategies. For example, Gunung Mas was found to have a large area of low carbon land which is not occupied and might be suitable for oil palm deployment. However, the major limitation is that physical estimates cannot provide a complete picture of ‘real’ land availability without considering a broader range of socio-economic factors (e.g. labour availability). Therefore, physical land area indicators from different domains must be combined with other qualitative and quantitative information especially the socio-economic factors underlying land under-utilisation to obtain better estimates.     

Board size,corporate regulations and firm valuation in an emerging market: a simultaneous equation approach

We investigate the association between board size and firm valuation for a sample of 169 firms from 2002 to 2011 in South Africa (SA). The SA corporate context is interestingly and uniquely characterised by an urgency to meet affirmative action regulations, such as black empowerment in board appointments, limited qualified and experienced directors, especially black directors, concentrated ownership, weak enforcement of corporate regulations and greater government ownership. These features make SA corporate boards perform a weaker agency (advisory, monitoring and disciplining) role than Western European and US boards, but a stronger resource dependence role, by providing access to resources, such as business contacts and contracts. This suggests that any positive impact of board size on firm valuation is likely to depend on the effective execution of the resource dependence role more than the agency role. Our results suggest that board size has a positive association with firm valuation, consistent with larger boards providing better access to resources. Overall, our results support the resource dependence role of boards more than their agency role. The results are robust across a raft of econometric models that control for different types of endogeneity, as well as different types of accounting and market-based firm valuation measures.     

Is there decentralization in North Korea? Evidence and lessons from the sloping land management program 2004–2014

In the 1990s, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) suffered from severe food shortages and large-scale deforestation, which triggered a stage of rural conservation reform. Since 2004, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), North Korea’s Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection (MoLEP) has implemented a Sloping Land Management Program (SLMP). The SLMP established sloping land user groups and granted these groups the right to use marginal land for agroforestry development. This devolution of land rights from state control onto local groups is a landmark in North Korea, and this decentralization initiative has now expanded to over eight counties to involve thousands of households. It has also led to the launch of a National Agroforestry Policy and Strategy. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 2008 to 2014, this paper documents the process and effects of the SLMP. It argues that the decentralization reform in land management has contributed to not only food security with increased food crop diversity and productivity, but also notably forest recovery through an expansion of tree plantations and agroforestry practices on degraded sloping lands. However, an insufficient power transfer in the form of a lack of timber rights granted to the local user groups has hampered the effectiveness of the SLMP. There are also institutional and geopolitical challenges that are limiting further scaling-up of land-use decentralization across the country. The policy implication calls for more international investment as well as national land-use policy reforms in order to promote and facilitate further decentralization of sloping land management and to secure greater use rights for sloping land user groups.     

Industrial land price between China’s Pearl River Delta and Southeast Asian regions: Competition or Coopetition?

The planned economy system’s previous form of industrial land market control in China has led to current market failure because of a large amount of industrial land being sold at a very low price, causing extensive overuse of land and negative effects on land management. As the “World Factory”, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is well known for its rapid urbanization largely driven by Foreign Direct Investment in labor-intensive industries. A low-land price strategy has been commonly adopted by the local government in order to attract industrial investment. In the past decade, the PRD has increasingly faced the increasing competition from its neighboring competition from its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia that have established preference policies to attract FDI and foreign enterprises. Despite a growing body of literature on the internal forces of industrial land in China, little is known of the external forces involved except for the importance of FDI and the intensity of interregional competition between China and other countries in attempting to attract foreign investment. This research fills the knowledge gap by modeling the situation in the form of an international cooperative game model aimed at revealing the industrial land price formation mechanism between the PRD region and Southeast Asian regions. The conditions of industrial land in the area and several Southeast Asian countries are first analyzed for their industrial land price movements in recent years. A game theoretic model is then built that exhibits similar characteristics. The result indicates that the governments’ low land price strategy and the competition between the PRD and its neighboring countries have created unnecessarily high social and environmental costs. Policy suggestions are made to encourage a more appropriate use of industrial land in China, and the most important being the need for a mindset shift from competition towards coopetition between the PRD and Southeast Asian regions.     

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.     

Theoretical analysis and model design of search for ecological conservation redlines based on the sensitivity assessment of ecosystem services

Most small-scale social economies are characterised by their deficiency, lack, and/or difficulty in matching natural data. Against this backdrop, this paper builds a relatively uniform theoretical framework and designs a more economical and objective method for demarcating ecological conservation redlines (ECR) based on sensitivity assessment of ecosystem services. The results show that the sensitivity assessment model designed in this study can identify sensitive zones effectively, and that the ECR in Hubei Province are well within the sensitive zones so identified. The delimited areas based on the sensitive assessment of ecosystem services have great similarities (95%) with the actual ECR areas in Hubei Province. The most ecologically important functional zones (EIFZ) can also be identified using the regional ecological sensitivity coefficient. When the threshold of EIFZ is set higher, the probability that it falls within the ecologically sensitive areas is greater and the ECR delimited by the method proposed in this study will be more reliable. Theoretically, the delimitation of ECR can be inserted at any evaluation level with a grid resolution higher than that of the land use data, which can be used as a supplement to the ECR delimitation method in ecology or geography.     

The influence of risk preferences,knowledge, land consolidation,and landscape diversification on pesticide use

Researchers have spent substantial effort to identify factors influencing pesticide use intensity. However, few studies have compared the relative importance of these factors. This study examines four categories of factors that potentially influence farmers’ pesticide use decisions by evaluating incentivized experiment data, farm survey data, and remote sensing data in China. Our results suggest that land diversification has the largest effect on farmers’ pesticide use. Compared with the most rice-intensive landscape type, less rice-intensive systems cause farmers to spray less on middle rice. Heavy pesticide use intensity is associated with land fragmentation as small-scale farms still dominate crop production. Farmers’ integrated pest management knowledge has significant effects on pesticide use. We also find that loss and ambiguity preferences, rather than risk preferences, are more likely to affect pesticide use intensity.     

基于结构方程模型的集聚农户共生认知及影响因素分析:以重庆市为例

研究目的:探讨对集聚农户共生、集聚区土地利用率提高的影响因素,为提升农户共生的认知水平、优化农户共生关系及促进资源的节约集约利用提供有效路径及理论指导。研究方法:参与式农户调查,结构方程模型。研究结果:(1)户主自身特征、农户家庭特征、集聚共生效益特征及外部环境与政策特征这4类外源潜变量对农户共生认知产生重要影响且影响程度大小不同,其中,集聚共生效益特征的影响最为显著,外部环境与政策特征、户主自身特征和农户家庭特征的影响依次减弱;(2)是否为干部、对原集聚模式的满意度、是否促进农户生产生活条件和政府对集聚区的补贴力度分别对这4类外源潜变量具有较好的解释能力。研究结论:显化农户共生效益、增强"精英"农户及村干部的正向引导、提升农户成员受教育水平、培养农户"共生共荣"理念等是深化农户共生关系,促进和谐乡村人居环境建设的重要路径。