中国经济预测和主权评级

中国政府已表示将继续现行的宏观调控措施,防止投资过热.石油和燃料价格的猛涨将最终影响未来的消费者价格,但很多行业过度投资所产生的供应过剩问题将显现,因此,整体商品价格的未来涨幅将有所缓解.尽管经常账户将继续盈余,但是盈余额开始减少.外资将持续流入,并增加人民币的升值压力.预计2006年,人民币将在2005年汇改之前的基础上升值5%,2009年之前平均每年升值3%.     

区域间的不对称与制衡行为——以欧盟与东盟关系为例

在现有国际体系中,不对称性是国际关系的主要特征之一,它与单位行为体的制衡行为直接相关联。随着全球化和区域主义的发展,不对称性已从国家层面扩展到地区层面,其原有内涵和制衡逻辑也发生了转移。以地区性作为比较区域间不对称的参考点,作者探讨了地区层面的制衡行为,分析了不对称性、地区性与制衡行为之间的关系,认为在不对称的国际关系中,弱势国家出于维护现状或提高讨价还价能力的需要,它们倾向于选择地区层次的制衡行为。由于地区层次的制衡行为伴随着一定的制度化风险,因此地区层次制衡行为的发生需有一定的条件。通过选取欧盟与东盟关系作为考察对象,作者认为,在不对称的国际关系中,地区性能够反映区域间的不对称关系,也代表了地区层次的制衡能力;地区层次的制衡行为没有特定目标,但主要以平衡大国或发达国家的地区性国家集团为主;当弱势国家的内部制衡无法在短期内得到质的提升时,它们会更倾向选择通过外部制衡,即利用区域间关系来平衡不对称关系。尤其在无政府状态下的单极体系中,当国际结构对霸权国的约束力被严重削弱时,地区层次的制衡作用便显得更加突出。     

Methods for Environmental and Economic Accounting for the Exploitation of Wild Fish Stocks and their Applications to the Case of Icelandic Fisheries

The paper discusses methods for estimating the value of commercially exploited fish stocks and the cost of exploiting them. Methods which are recommended in the System of National Accounting (SNA) satellite system and the System for Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) and relevant for this task are discussed. The paper questions the relevance of some of these methods. It argues for the integration of economic accounting for wild fish stocks with estimation of efficient management of them. Using biological and economic data makes it possible to produce consistent estimates of the value of fish stocks and the cost of exploiting them. These estimates are useful for national accounting and for guiding management of fisheries. This method allows estimation of the cost of inefficiency of fisheries management besides estimation of the cost of depletion. The different methods are illustrated using data on commercial fisheries in Iceland and the fish stocks that they exploit. It is shown that even if all methods are based on market valuation and use only objective data they lead to very different outcomes.     

Monetary policy regime change and regional inflation dynamics: looking through the lens of sector‐level data for Korea

This paper explores the impact of the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) on the dynamics of city‐level inflation in Korea using both aggregate and sector‐level data. When looking at aggregate regional inflation, we find that the mean, volatility and persistence fell in all cities in the wake of the monetary policy regime change, consistent with other evidence in the literature. Delving more deeply into the disaggregate data reveals additional insights however. For most of the changes we observe in the dynamics of regional inflation, we find that the aggregate effects are being driven primarily by sectors that fall into the ‘Services’ category. We posit that the impact of better anchored inflationary expectations is primarily on the less‐traded services sectors of the economy, where the domestic monetary policy framework has a relatively larger influence. When it comes to the increased co‐movement observed across regions under an IT regime, however, it is the ‘Commodities’ sectors rather than ‘Services’ that are responsible, probably because services inflation becomes relatively more influenced by local factors once it has stabilized within the target range. Therefore, adoption of IT may not necessarily increase all measures of regional synchronization even when the goal of better‐anchored inflationary expectations is achieved.     

Development and Pricing of a New Participating Contract

Abstract

This article designs and prices a new type of participating life insurance contract. Participating contracts are popular in the United States and European countries. They present many different covenants and depend on national regulations. In the present article we design a new type of participating contract very similar to the one considered in other studies, but with the guaranteed rate matching the return of a government bond. We prove that this new type of contract can be valued in closed form when interest rates are stochastic and when the company can default.     

New development: Between politics and strategic planning—the management of government priorities in Lithuania

ABSTRACT

How do political agendas impact on strategic planning practices? This article shows that recent changes to the framework for managing government priorities have made Lithuania’s strategic planning system more politically responsive by mobilizing political attention, leadership and state funding to major government commitments. However, these changes have not yet translated into any longer term outcomes because policy implementation practices did not change very much.     

亚洲的“根”与“翼”一种非本质主义的表述

没有亚洲,只有亚洲人。——2003年6月的旅行日志,伊斯法罕今天我们称之为"理论"的东西,在古希腊人那里并不存在。希腊语中的Theorein,指的是一种旅行中的观察和游历。如詹姆斯·克里福德所说,"‘理论'是一种置换和比较的产物,是某种距     

Predicting direct marketing response in banking: comparison of class imbalance methods

Customers’ response is an important topic in direct marketing. This study proposes a data mining response model supported by random forests to support the definition of target customers for banking campaigns. Class imbalance is a typical problem in telemarketing that can affect the performance of the data mining techniques. This study also contributes to the literature by exploring the use of class imbalance methods in the banking context. The performance of an undersampling method (the EasyEnsemble algorithm) is compared with that of an oversampling method (the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) in order to determine the most appropriate specification. The importance of the attribute features included in the response model is also explored. In particular, discriminative performance was enhanced by the inclusion of demographic information, contact details and socio-economic features. Random forests, supported by an undersampling algorithm, presented very high prediction performance, outperforming the other techniques explored.     

新商品开发中的VE和创造性

价值工程所指的价值通常限定于“使用价值”,其使用价值又由功能价值和美学价值构成.以往价值工程主要围绕商品的功能价值的设计与改进而展开,本文拟在价值工程应用领域以美学价值为主的新商品开发方面作一些理论性的研究与探索.     

Loss of economic rents in the global fishery

Most of the world’s ocean fisheries are severely lacking in private property rights in the underlying natural resources or their close complements (e.g. harvesting volume). Therefore, according to standard property rights theory, these fisheries should be highly wasteful of potential economic rents from these resources. The question is whether this economic loss can be empirically verified and, if so, how large it is. This paper explains the concept and develops the analytical theory of economic and natural rents. Building on this and utilizing global fisheries data, the paper proceeds to estimate a global fisheries model, obtain numerical estimates of the rent loss in the world’s ocean capture fisheries and provide reasonable confidence bounds for this loss. It is found that the global fisheries rent loss constitutes almost certainly a large fraction of the landed value of the global landings. The mean estimate of this loss is well over 50% of the value of landings.