Water accounting for the Orange River Basin: An economic perspective on managing a transboundary resource

The framework for water accounting is applied to an international river basin, the Orange River Basin, which is shared among Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and South Africa. Each of the riparian states faces water constraints and relies increasingly on shared international water resources. The countries have adopted the principle of an economic approach to water management, once basin human needs are met, and all but Lesotho have constructed national water accounts to assist in water management. The water accounts for the Orange River Basin bring an economic perspective to water management at the regional level. The accounts include supply and use tables, which are used to compare the contribution to water supply from each riparian state to the amount used. The water accounts are then linked to economic data for each country to calculate water use and productivity by industry and country. There are considerable disparities in water productivity among the countries, which should be taken into account in future decisions about water allocation, pricing and infrastructure development.     

中国船舶工业绿色全要素生产率及影响因素分析——基于ML生产率视角对“波特假说”的再检验

选用船舶工业宏观数据和资源环境约束等作为基础数据,运用方向性距离函数和ML指数测算了中国船舶工业绿色全要素生产率(Total Factor Productivity),通过面板模型系统考察了环境规制、技术进步对中国船舶工业绿色全要素生产率的作用。发现从长远来看,绿色全要素生产率呈增长趋势且具有明显的收敛特征,技术进步和技术效率共同推动船舶工业绿色全要素生产率的增长,但整体上绿色全要素生产率低于传统全要素生产率。运用动态面板模型分析中国船舶工业绿色全要素生产率的影响因素,结论表明:较高的技术水平能显著提高绿色全要素生产率,而对国际市场的过度依赖阻碍了船舶工业绿色全要素生产率的增长。环境规制对船舶工业绿色全要素的增长已经带来"补偿效应"从而提高了中国船舶工业的国际竞争力,为考察船舶工业绿色竞争力提供了新的视角。     

Building the Knowledge Stock: Lags,Depreciation, and Uncertainty in R&D Investment and Link with Productivity Growth

The search for an appropriate methodology to investigate the relation between R&D investment, knowledge stock and productivity growth is the main purpose of the paper. In analogy with physical assets, we present a model of knowledge capital formation which allows the calculation of the relevant user cost, as well. The proposed model accumulates R&D investment based on a stochastic gestation lag and a geometric depreciation of the stock. The basic parameters underlying the lag structure differ according to the types of research expenditure. The approach is applied to public R&D investment in Italian agriculture; the results provide interesting information about the economic structure of public research effort in Italian agriculture and plausible estimates of its internal rate of return.     

Government Consumption and Industrial Productivity: Scale and Compositional Effects

Within a production function framework in which government spending produces public goods which enter firms production functions, empirical tests using time series data spanning eleven countries and thirty industries find both the scale and the composition of government consumption spending to affect the level and the rate of growth of total factor productivity at the industry level.Jel Classification: H50, D24     

Learning for Innovation and the Skill Premium

The computer revolution took very long to pay off in productivity growth in the computer-using sectors. The relative wage of skilled workers, however, has risen sharply from the early days of the computer revolution onward. As skilled workers wages reflect their productivity, the two observations together pose a puzzle.This paper provides a micro-based explanation for the long diffusion period of the computer revolution. The general equilibrium model of growth zooms in on the research process and provides an explanation for sluggish growth with booming relative wages of the skilled. Technological progress in firms is driven by research aimed at improving the production technology (innovation) and by assimilation of ideas or principles present outside the firm (learning). A new General Purpose Technology (GPT) like the computer revolution generates an initial slowdown in economic growth and an increase in the skill premium.Acknowledgement I am indebted to Theo van de Klundert for suggestions and encouragement. Suggestions by Jan Boone, Bas Jacobs, Patrick Francois, Henri de Groot, Lex Meijdam, Niek Nahuis Sjak Smulders, Harald Uhlig and anonymous referees have contributed to the paper.     

新农村建设:一个政治经济学视角的解析

新农村建设是对城乡经济社会发展不平衡的一个积极回应,它包含经济增长和社会发展两个层面.从政治经济学视角出发,在经济增长方面,户籍、土地、保障等制度性因素制约到农村劳动力的有效流转,从而对劳动生产率提升和农业发展产生负面影响;在社会福利方面,农民的数量优势没有转化为谈判优势,对市场价格和政策制定的影响力较小,其社会福利获取以及发展程度处于不利地位.据此,新农村建设必须对相关制度性、组织性因素进行完善和改革,部分农民的真正流转和留守农民的自发组织将尤其重要.     

International Comparisons of Australia's Infrastructure Performance

International benchmarking has played a key role in the reform of Australia's infrastructure industries by promoting indirect or yardstick competition, in highlighting the need for further reform and building a consensus for implementing necessary changes. The international benchmarking of infrastructure performance by the Bureau of Industry Economics (BIE) between 1991 and 1996 did much to focus attention on the need for change. The BIE examined the performance of eight infrastructure industries relative to international best practice: electricity, rail freight, telecommunications, the waterfront, road freight, coastal shipping, aviation and gas supply. Performance comparisons concentrated on indicators of price, service quality, labour productivity and capital productivity. This paper reviews and summarises the performance comparisons the BIE undertook over the last three years of its infrastructure benchmarking program. The BIE international benchmarking program provides a useful role model for other countries wanting to seriously pursue reform of their infrastructure industries.     

Distinguishing external from internal scale effects: The case of public infrastructure

The recent applied production theory literature focusing on the economic performance of firms has increasingly recognized the importance of scale effects on costs and therefore efficiency. These scale effects may include short run returns due to fixity of privately demanded inputs (i.e., capital, long run internal returns to scale, and external factors affecting costs. Since these different types of scale effects can be thought of as shifts in and movements along cost curves, the different cost effects of such factors can be identified in a framework which explicitly takes them into account in the definition ofscale.In this article we formalize such a framework, and then use it to measure short run, long run (internal) and external scale effects from fixity of private capital, nonconstant returns to scale and public infrastructure. We then use these measures to identify the impacts of these different scale factors on productivity growth. The focus on public infrastructure as an important external scale factor is motivated by the current theoretical and policy interest in this issue; we show how a structural production theory model provides a rich basis for the analysis of the cost effects of infrastructure investment.     

基础设施在中国农业全要素生产率中的作用

This paper uses the Malmquist index to examine the sources of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in Chinese agriculture. The overall goal of this study is to create a framework for assessing the trend of China’s agricultural infrastructure and to measure its impact on Total Factor Productivity. The main methodological contribution is to provide more contributive measure of crop-specific technologies. Based on the province-level panel data set during 1988–2002, the primary finding is that infrastructure has positively and statistically significant association with the estimated coefficient on Total Factor Productivity for rice, wheat, maize, and bean. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Valuing ecosystem services: A shadow price for net primary production

We analyze the contribution of ecosystem services to GDP and use this contribution to calculate an empirical price for ecosystem services. Net primary production is used as a proxy for ecosystem services and, along with capital and labor, is used to estimate a Cobb Douglas production function from an international panel. A positive output elasticity for net primary production probably measures both marketed and nonmarketed contributions of ecosystems services. The production function is used to calculate the marginal product of net primary production, which is the shadow price for ecosystem services. The shadow price generally is greatest for developed nations, which have larger technical scalars and use less net primary production per unit output. The rate of technical substitution indicates that the quantity of capital needed to replace a unit of net primary production tends to increase with economic development, and this rate of replacement may ultimately constrain economic growth.