Induced innovation and land degradation: Results from a bioeconomic model of a village in West Africa

This paper introduces a modeling method which simulates a village's response to population and market pressure. The method combines a recursive and dynamic linear programming model with a biophysical model of soil condition and plant growth that predicts yields and land degradation for different type of land, land use and cropping patterns. The linear programming model simulates farmers' plans aggregated at the village level under constraints of risk aversion, food consumption, land area, soil fertility, soil depth, labor and cash availability. Detailed agroecological factors determine Ihe main processes of land degradation. A large number of technological alternatives, representing different degrees of labor and/or land-saving techniques available in the study areas, are introduced, taking into account their respective constraints, costs and advantages. The method has been calibrated for a village located in the sub-humid region of Burkina Faso. Several simulations are carried out to the Year 2030. The results show that population pressure leads to intensification and investment in land conservation practices out not necessarily to better farm incomes. Increasing market opportunities can play a more positive role in boosting productivity, but for the next decades the best way to increase production per farmer is to let farmers migrate from the high-population-density areas to the low-population-density areas because, under the current economic conditions of most Sahelian countries, intensification per hectare is stil more expensive than the fallow system.     

公共政策过程中公民参与的作用及其限制性因素分析

公民参与是民主政治的必然趋势。有关公民参与的研究既有政治学的视角,也有公共行政学的视角。公共行政学视野里的公民参与研究涉及到公民参与政策制定、执行、评估的全过程。公民通过各种合法途径表达利益需求,使政策更具有回应性,更符合民众的需要。公民参与具有重要的作用,但其作用的发挥却受很多因素的限制。因此,对公民参与的作用需要作辩证的理解。只有这样,才能在政策过程中融入有效的、积极的公民参与。     

Impacts of price and exchange rate policies on pesticide use in the Philippines

Pesticide prices can influence producer decisions to apply pesticides as opposed to nonchemical means of pest control. Those prices are are turn influenced by price and exchange rate policies. The effective rate of protection for nine pesticides commonly applied to vegetables in the Philippines was calculated to determine whether government policies are creating incentives or disincentives to adopt more integrated pest management methods. Calculations found that direct price policies, primarily through an import tariff, tax pesticide use while an overvalued exchange rate subsidizes pesticide use. The net effect is a 6 to 8% pesticide subsidy. This subsidy results in economic surplus gains to vegetable producers and consumers when negative externalities associated with pesticide use are not accounted for. However, recent analysis of human health effects of pesticide use on rice in the Philippines demonstrates that these externalities can be substantial.     

福厦泉自创区科技创新政策评价与对策研究

以2016—2021年福厦泉国家自主创新示范区发布的科技创新政策为实证研究对象，基于数量发展、区域分布和文种结构3个维度开展定性分析，构建PMC指数模型对福厦泉自创区科技创新政策进行政策量化评价与分析，研究提出经费投入、协同创新和创新网络3个方面的对策建议。     

Issues in New Political Economy: An Overview

A brief overview of the historical background, nature, and rapid growth in volume and scope of new political economy since the early 1980s is provided. the paper continues with some general reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the new political economy approach, illustrated by the other contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Economic Surveys . The final Section summarises these contributions.     

Economic policy with bounded controls

When investigating optimal policies for macroeconomic models, it is common practice to modify the objective function so that the resulting optimal control trajectories become acceptable from a practical point of view. In this paper we argue that the sole purpose of the objective function should be to express the preference of the decision makers, and that explicit bounds on the controls should be used to ensure that the optimal controls will be practical. Using a piece-wise quadratic objective function involving only the unemployment and inflation rates, which are state (endogenous) variables, we first develop a discrete minimum principle, giving necessary and sufficient optimality conditions. Then we perform various bounded control experiments with the 35-equation quarterly CLEAR model of the Canadian economy, which is very briefly described. The empirical results which were obtained using a version of the GRG algorithm are discussed in view of the conclusions that might be drawn for a real-world practical policy analysis.     

试论公共政策执行中的问题及其对策

公共政策的目的在于调整和规范社会利益结构,以促进社会、经济健康、快速发展,从根本上有利于实现最广大人民群众的根本利益。在公共政策执行的过程中,出现了各种各样的问题,因此,有必要在探析公共政策执行出现的各种问题原因的基础上寻求解决问题的对策,从而保证公共政策的顺利实施。     

How useful is the concept of the natural real rate of interest for monetary policy?

The natural rate of interest plays a key role in Wicksell's‘cumulative process’ as well as in modern monetaryequilibrium models of the business cycle. It constitutes a usefulconcept for the theoretical analysis of the interdependenceof monetary policy and economic fluctuations. However, the usefulnessof this concept for the practice of monetary policy is limited—especiallyowing to the fact that the natural real rate of interest andits law of motion cannot be measured with satisfying precision.     

Inflation persistence: Alternative interpretations and policy implications

In this paper, I consider the policy implications of two alternative structural interpretations of observed inflation persistence, which correspond to two alternative specifications of the new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC). The first specification allows for some degree of intrinsic persistence by way of a lagged inflation term in the NKPC. The second is a purely forward-looking model, in which expectations farther into the future matter and coefficients are time-varying. In this specification, most of the observed inflation persistence is attributed to fluctuations in the underlying inflation trend, which are a consequence of monetary policy rather than a structural feature of the economy. With a simple quantitative exercise, I illustrate the consequences of implementing monetary policy, assuming a degree of intrinsic persistence that differs from the true one. The results suggest that the costs of implementing a stabilization policy when the policymaker overestimates the degree of intrinsic persistence are potentially higher than the costs of ignoring actual structural persistence; the result is more clear-cut when the policymaker minimizes a welfare-based loss function.