Effects of export product diversification on quality upgrading: an empirical study

This paper empirically examines the effects of export product diversification on overall export quality in a panel data set of 115 countries from 1970 to 2010. It uses the data sets of the overall export quality and three export diversification measures of the International Monetary Fund: the extensive margin (variation in the number of new products exported), the intensive margin (variation in export values among existing exports), and the overall (Theil) index. It finds that export quality has only been increasing with a higher variation in export values among existing exports in low- and lower-middle-income countries. It also observes that export quality has been increasing with both a higher variation in export values among existing exports and new products exported in upper-middle- and high-income countries. The results are robust to the changing measures of controls in the benchmark model, the inclusion of many other controls; i.e. various measures of globalization, country size, factor endowments, macroeconomic stance, etc., and the exclusion of outliers.     

Price discovery and volatility spillover in spot and futures markets: evidences from steel-related commodities in China

The price discovery and spillover effect are significant indicators in futures markets. This study examines the price discovery and spillover effects using vector error correction model and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic for seven types of steel products in Chinese spot and futures markets. The results show that the price discovery exists in all of steel futures market. It is also confirmed that futures prices in all items are mainly leading spot prices via permanent-transitory and information share. In the results of spillover effects, it is found that wire rod, coking coal, coke and silico-manganese have the effects between spot and futures market. In rebar market, there is the spillover effect from spot to futures. This information about futures prices can help the market participants to make decisions when they predict the spot prices.     

陕西旅游商品市场问题探析与对策研究

发展旅游商品对提高区域旅游经济效益具有重要作用。但在陕西旅游产业体系中,购物始终是一个明显的弱项,这制约了陕西旅游经济的持续增长。在系统分析陕西旅游商品市场现存问题的基础上,提出发展陕西旅游商品市场的若干对策。     

Crossing spatial analyses and livestock economics to understand deforestation processes in the Brazilian Amazon: the case of São Félix do Xingú in South Pará

The Amazon is the largest tropical forest area on Earth, and has been undergoing rapid deforestation for the last four decades. In the Brazilian Amazon, large‐scale pasture for cattle ranching and soybean production are the main land uses, leading to a yearly deforestation rate of 0.5%. These conversions are mostly located in frontier areas distributed along the so‐called “arc of deforestation”. Within this large zone, various land use change processes are interacting through several modes of land valuation and organisation. From several case studies in the State of Pará (Brazil), the current project aims at analysing how landscape dynamics are related to infrastructure development, ecological conditions, zoning policies and to the evolution and the organisation of the production, consumption and marketing chains of livestock products. This paper presents the results for one test site, the region of São Félix do Xingú, South of Pará This region is the focus of land speculation, cattle expansion, and deforestation. Road construction, investments in electrical energy, financial credit for cattle, and the land reform policies have all fuelled this process. All these factors make this region one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. The main objective of the paper is to improve our understanding of deforestation processes by crossing spatial analyses and 1ivestock economics.studies, and to characterise the role and impact of various natural and anthropic factors in the location and development of the main types of farmers, and their policy implications.     

发展现代物流产业 构建武汉区域性商业分销体系

根据武汉市“十五”规划 ,武汉华中物流中心建设将进入实施阶段 ,它对武汉商贸产业的发展影响深刻 ,从战略层次上构建武汉商贸物流分销体系成为必然     

How Far Can Chinese Motorcycles Roar？——A Study on Motorcycle Export of China

Export of Chinese motorcycles increased dramatically in the past few years. This growth, however, is encountered with many fatal problems, such as over-intensified export market, low value-added, overwhelming fake commodities, awkward technology innovation and intellectual property rights protection, bitter competition from foreign counterparts, and anti-dumping charges by foreign countries, etc. This paper sheds light on these problems and challenges and puts forward suggestion accordingly.     

On Sraffa's Standard commodity: is its price invariant with respect to changes in income distribution?

In his 1960 book, Sraffa suggested using a composite commodity,which he called the ‘Standard commodity’, to solveRicardo's search for an invariable measure of value, i.e., astandard capable of isolating the price movements of any othercommodity induced by changes in income distribution. The absencein Sraffa's book of an explicit proof of the invariance propertyof this standard gave rise to many misunderstandings about itsmeaning and its role as an invariable measure of value. In orderto clear up these questions, Bellino (On Sraffa's Standard commodity,Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 28, 121–32, 2004)has proposed a ‘proper’ definition of an ‘invariablemeasure of value’, showing that Sraffa's Standard commoditydoes fulfil the requirements of this definition. He claims thatthe fulfilment of this property (but not the constancy of its‘nominal’ price) qualifies the Standard commodityas an invariable measure of value. In this paper, a proof ofthe invariance of the price of the Standard commodity with respectto changes in income distribution is given, and the equivalenceof this property with Bellino's definition of invariance isshown.     

Equilibria in large economies with a separable Banach commodity space and non-ordered preferences

The purpose of this paper is to provide an existence result of equilibria for economies with a measure space of agents, a non-trivial production sector and an infinite dimensional commodity space. The commodity space is modeled by an ordered separable Banach space whose positive cone has a non-empty interior. The discretization approach proposed in this paper, allows us to extend the existence results in Khan and Yannelis [Equilibrium in markets with a continuum of agents and commodities. In: Khan, M.A., Yannelis, N.C. (Eds.), Equilibrium Theory in Infinite Dimensional Spaces. Springer, Berlin, 1991] and Podczeck [Economic Theory 9 (1997) 585] to economies with a non-trivial production sector and with possibly non-ordered but convex preferences as well as partially ordered (possibly incomplete) but non-convex preferences.     

Reforming the Direct–Indirect Tax Mix

This paper provides a new framework for evaluating the welfare effects of commodity tax reforms. It is shown that tax reforms are welfare improving if and only if they satisfy the following intuitive property: on average, consumer prices fall for commodities with high marginal excess burdens. The rule is then applied to analyze a shift from differentiated commodity taxation to direct flat-rate taxation of labour income. The welfare impact of such reforms can be decomposed into two effects: (i) the increase in welfare associated with substitution among taxed commodities, and (ii) the loss in welfare associated with substitution between commodities and leisure. On balance, a shift towards direct taxation is desirable when inter-commodity substitution effects are large relative to commodity–leisure substitution effects. The analysis allows us to reconcile the apparently conflicting results of the tax reform and optimal taxation literatures.