Capital Flows to Latin America (2003–17): A Critical Survey from Prebisch’s Business Cycle Theory

ABSTRACT

The economic literature on capital flows to developing countries has shared two important commonalities since the 1990s. Published works (whether they focus on the external situation or stress the domestic determinants of capital flows) tend to assume a beneficial effect of capital inflows, which leads to an improvement of peripheral institutions, whose deficiencies are ostensibly the main cause of economic turmoil and/or failure in attracting capital flows, in continuity with New Institutional Economics. In doing so, mainstream economists deliberately overlook the asymmetric characteristics of the international monetary system and the persisting hegemony of dollar. Raul Prebisch’s pioneering work on business cycles in Latin America provide an alternative view, one capable of amending the existing mainstream literature. On the one hand, Prebisch stressed the destabilizing role of capital inflows on Latin American economies, particularly short-term speculative capital. On the other hand, Prebisch designed a set of counter cyclical monetary policies in order to contrast capital volatility, particularly during downturns. An analysis of stylized facts shows that, when correctly updated, Prebisch’s theory has remarkable explanatory potential when applied to Latin America’s current economic and financial situation.     

Increasing linkages among European regions. The role of sectoral composition

This paper analyses changes in economic regional interlinkages in Europe over time and investigates the factors that could explain the dynamics of these changes. Our four main findings are the following: (i) we detect a significant surge in regional synchronisation after the Great Recession; (ii) we identify the regions most interrelated with the rest of Europe, namely, Ile de France, Inner London and Lombardia; (iii) we find that sectoral composition explains regional synchronisation in Europe, mainly after the Great Recession and (iv) we document that sectoral composition has important implications for aggregate economic fluctuations, in particular, that similarities in services-related sectors across regions explain a nonlinear relationship between sectoral composition and regional business cycle synchronisation. We also propose a new method to measure time-varying synchronisation in small samples that combines regime-switching models and dynamic model averaging.     

生命周期评价方法及其应用

介绍了生命周期评价的目的、意义和基本方法，并运用该方法对燃煤发电、废纸造纸、废旧塑料气化发电等几种不同工业过程的环境影响进行了分析。     

考虑供给与需求波动性的安全库存定量研究

本文以商业企业和MTS模式下生产企业的安全库存为研究对象,将供给与需求的变动程度作为两个动态指标研究四种不同战略与运营环境下的安全库存模型,并进一步分析了降低安全库存所需的管理杠杆.     

西汉初期“与民休息”政策述论

西汉初期是我国农业经济迅速恢复并达到空前繁荣的时期,这与西汉初期统治集团采取了比较符合实际的"与民休息"的经济政策紧密相关。其时代背景主要是鉴于秦朝实行严刑峻法、横征暴敛政策而亡的历史教训,以及汉初经济崩溃、民生凋敝的实际状况。"与民休息"政策内容丰富,主要包括调整土地关系、赋予军功贵族免役特权、免部分官私奴婢为庶人、减免田税口算徭戍、崇尚节俭和轻刑慎罚等六个方面。"与民休息"的经济政策,将为我们今天解决"三农"问题,发展农业经济,建设社会主义新农村提供有益的借鉴。     

Replacement Investment: Optimal Economic Life Under Uncertainty

Replacement investment is essentially a regenerative optimal stopping problem; that is, the key decision concerns when to terminate the life of existing plant – and hence when to start over again. This paper examines this optimisation problem within a continuous time framework and studies the qualitative and quantitative impact of uncertainty on the timing of new investment (and the criteria that should be used for terminating the life of existing plant).     

中国寿险需求实证分析

本文对国内外的寿险需求分析研究进行了简单综述，在此基础上抽取全目30省市1998—2003年的数据．采取面板数据模型就收入、通货膨胀、社会保障、银行利率、死亡率等寿险需求影响因素与保费收入相关性作了Granger因果性检验分析。     

Multiple generation product life cycle predictions using a novel two-stage fuzzy piecewise regression analysis method

Product life cycle (PLC) prediction plays a crucial role in strategic planning and policy definition for high-technology products. Forecast methodologies which can predict PLCs accurately can help to achieve successful strategic decision-making, forecasting, and foresight activities in high-technology firms, research institutes, governments, and universities. Over the past few decades, even though analytic framework strategies have been proposed for production, marketing, R&D (research and development), and finance, aiming at each stage of PLCs, forecast methodologies with which to predict PLCs are few. The purpose of this research is to develop a novel forecast methodology to allow for predictions of product life time (PLT) and the annual shipment of products during the entire PLC of multiple generation products. A novel two-stage fuzzy piecewise regression analysis method is proposed in this paper. In the first stage, the product life-time of the specific generation to be analyzed will be predicted by the fuzzy piecewise regression line that is derived based upon the product life-time of earlier generations. In the second stage of the forecast methodology, the annual shipment of products of the specified generation will be predicted by deriving annual fuzzy regression lines for each generation, based upon the historical data on the earlier generations' products. An empirical study predicting the life-time and the annual shipment of the 16 Mb (Mega bit) DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) PLC is illustrated to validate the analytical process. The results demonstrate that two-stage fuzzy piecewise regression analysis can predict multiple generation PLT and PLC precisely, thereby serving as a foundation for future strategic planning, policy definitions and foresights.     

THE CHANGING VOLATILITY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY

During the last decade economic literature explored the presence of and reasons for what became known as “the great moderation” in the US and other G7 countries. “The great moderation” describes the decrease in economic volatility experienced in many of the G7 countries. This paper finds that in South Africa volatility is also not constant (it even finds that there are autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic effects present) and that volatility also decreased, particularly since 1994. Following the literature, the paper explores several reasons for this decrease and finds that smaller shocks, better monetary policy and improvements in the financial sector that place less liquidity constraints on individuals and allow them to manage their debt better are some of the main reasons for the reduction in the volatility of the South African economy. The literature on the G7 also suggests that better inventory management contributed to the lower volatility. However, this seems not to be true for South Africa.     

Understanding the Large Negative Impact of Oil Shocks

This paper offers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s. Although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature, standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are used to simulate the models. In particular, standard models cannot explain the depth of the recession in 1974–75 and the strong revival in 1976–78 based on the oil price movements in that period. This paper argues that a missing multiplier-accelerator mechanism from standard models may hold the key.