基于制度变迁理论的政府投资项目管理模式探讨

运用制度变迁理论，分析了我国政府投资项目管理模式的制度需求、中央政府和地方政府在政府投资项目管理模式制度变迁中的主体地位、强制性和诱导性两种制度变迁方式，强调在制度创新过程中应当注意制度变迁效率。     

New Technology in Unionized Firms: Advantages of Mandatory Bargaining

U.S. Labor Law currently allows employers whose work forces are unionized to introduce new technologies without bargaining over the decision to do so. This forces unions to adopt inefficient strategies when negotiating collective bargaining agreements in an effort to minimize the impact of technological change on their members. Allowing unions to bargain over the decision to introduce new technologies would obviate their having to resort to these inefficient strategies. In addition, it might increase the likelihood of employees suggesting alterations in production processes that would increase the rate of technological change. For these reasons, this article advocates amending U.S. labor law to require employers to bargain over the introduction of new technologies.     

农民工的社会网络变迁

采用系统模式研究了进城农民工的社会网络重构过程,指出随着谋生方式由农业生产向非农产业的转移,进城农民工正在逐步建立起以业缘关系为基础的新的社会纽带,并使之成为其社会网络的重要组成部分.这些由进城农民工一手构建的社会关系网络正在成为他们在城市生活中赖以生存和发展的重要资本.     

论制度变迁的成本约束

制度变迁的关键是成本约束，这是制度本身产生的根本性要求。制度变迁是成本和收益相权衡和比较的产物，制度设计和安排必须充分考虑到制度变迁的成本和收益，减少制度变迁的阻力，提高制度运行的效率。     

中国航空货运顾客价值动因的实证研究

通过考察中国航空货运,建立航空顾客价值的决定因素与动态性理论模型,运用结构方程方法对其检验,结果表明:时间因素和便捷性因素是影响货运顾客价值的核心要素,价格因素已退之其次,而且来自竞争者、服务商、顾客、宏观环境的变化都对顾客价值动态性有显著影响。     

Implementation of land and ecosystem accounts at the European Environment Agency

The European Environment Agency has started the implementation of a programme of land use and ecosystem accounts, following the System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) guidelines of the United Nations. The purpose is to integrate information across the various ecosystem components and to support further assessments and modelling of these components and their interactions with economic and social developments. This programme reflects the increasing demand for environmental policy integration in Europe, both vertically through thematic policies as well as horizontally across policies in those sectors that contribute most to environmental impacts. The construction of land and ecosystem accounts is now feasible due to continuous improvements in monitoring, collecting and processing data and progress with the development of statistical methods that facilitate data assimilation and integration. The accounts are based on explicit spatial patterns provided by comprehensive land cover accounts that can be scaled up and down using a 1 km² grid to any type of administrative region or ecosystem zone (e.g., river basin catchments, coastal zones or bio-geographic areas). Land cover accounts have been produced for 24 countries in Europe and first results published in the European Environment State and Outlook2005 report of the EEA.¹     

Important Intermediate Transactions and Multi-sectoral Modelling

For the maintenance and development of a disaggregated econometric model, the present paper deals with some aspects related to the identification of important intermediate transactions. First, some methodological aspects related to earlier works are discussed. By comparing the properties of different selection methods based on the recent West German input–output table, the calculations confirm the common finding that the necessary level of endogenization can be bounded meaningfully by an a priori investiga tion of the intersectoral transactions. This is also valid if the selection method considers restrictions that deal with the consistence of input–output tables and if some broader error criteria are applied. The main result of the empirical applications seems to be that some attention should be paid to temporal changes of important coefficients.     

Multinational firms, international trade and international telecommunications

The study analyses the determinants of international telephone, telex, telegram and leased lines communication between the United States and 46 countries. It focusses on the role of multinational firms, international trading firms and new information technologies within the framework of the theory of transaction costs.Results of the econometric estimates suggest that: (a) technological conditions of telecommunication infrastructure, i.e., international diffusion lags of new information technologies, play an important role in the explanation of international telephone and telex telecommunication flows but not in the demand for telegraph and leased lines, (b) multinational firms use international telecommunication to reduce the coordination costs and are strong customers of leased lines and telephones, but less so of telex and telegrams, (c) international trading firms exhibit less clear preferences in the use of the different media to reduce transaction costs.     

Climate Change Taxes and Energy Efficiency in Japan

In 2003 Japan proposed a Climate Change Tax to reduce its CO₂ emissions to the level required by the Kyoto Protocol. If implemented, the tax would be levied on fossil fuel use and the revenue distributed to encourage the purchase of energy efficient equipment. Analysis using the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model shows that this policy is unlikely to bring Japan into compliance with its Kyoto target unless the subsidy encourages improvement in energy intensity well beyond Japan’s recent historical experience. Similar demand-management programs in the US, where there has been extensive experience, have not been nearly as effective as they would need to be to achieve energy efficiency goals of the proposal. The Tax proposal also calls for limits on international emission trading. We find that this limit substantially affects costs of compliance. The welfare loss with full emissions trading is 1/6 that when Japan meets its target though domestic actions only, the carbon price is lower, and there is a smaller loss of energy-intensive exports. Japan can achieve substantial savings from emissions trading even under cases where, for example, the full amount of the Russian allowance is not available in international markets.     

Making green discourses matter in policy-making: Learning from discursive power struggles within the policy area of car taxation

This paper is about stability and change in the policy-making discourse of a traditional neoclassical policy area, the area of car taxation. Stability is here related to the unquestioned continuation of a traditional neoclassical economics perspective in policy-making, whereas change is related to the introduction and impact of environmental concerns. The aim of the paper is to investigate, what makes green discourses matter in traditional policy-making. It is based on an in-depth study of policy-making processes related to car taxation in two environmental front-runner countries, Sweden and Denmark.Making green discourses matter in policy-making is an important contemporary environmental challenge. Therefore, as Tian Shi argues, we need more research into the institutional setting of the policy-making process. Ecological economics as a policy science has to have a broad understanding of the political economic nature of the policy process. Taking this standpoint as the point of departure, the paper seeks to uncover questions such as, what is the policy-making reality in which Swedish and Danish green discourses have to make a difference? How do existing neoclassical regimes react, when green actors attempt to influence policy-making from an environmental point of view? And to what extent can green discourses actually have an impact on the policy world within the area of car taxation?The paper concludes that the traditional neoclassical economic discourse is particularly robust and resistant against alternative green discourses. Stability rather than change is the dominating picture. This does not imply that environmental concerns will not be taken into account in the future. Rather it implies that only the changes, which keep up the existing order, or enhance the narrow power-related interests of the dominating actors, will materialise more or less easily. The rest is a power struggle in which timing, coalition-building, persistence and thorough knowledge about the field in question is of importance. In this struggle change agents will also benefit from the ability to rethink dominating ways of thinking and doing in an environmentally benign way. A rethinking that is based on environmental values while at the same time holding positive visions that are ‘compatible’ with the existing dominating discourse.