Economic Competition,Policy Interdependence,and Labour Rights

Extant scholarship treats national policies concerning labour rights as a function of economic factors and yet neglects influences of policies among economically competing states. Relying on the policy interdependence theory, this study argues that labour rights policy in a state is dependent on its economic competitors’ labour policy decisions. It specifically maintains that the intensifying competition for foreign direct investment and exports as well as against imports channels negative externalities of deteriorating labour protection in competing states which drives expansive downward policy mimicking and leads to a global decline in labour rights – a race to the bottom. Utilising spatial econometric technique to analyse a new data on labour rights for the period 1994–2009, it finds that labour rights practices are interdependent among economic competitors and experience global deteriorations; whereas labour rights laws remain largely independent due to high policy and reputational costs of lowering them and show more fluctuations.     

ECONOMIC TRANSITION AND LABOUR MARKET DYNAMICS IN CHINA: AN INTERPRETATIVE SURVEY OF THE ‘TURNING POINT’ DEBATE

Has the Chinese economy approached the ‘Lewisian turning point’ that marks the ending of the initial phase of industrial transformation fuelled by surplus labour? In this paper we undertake an interpretative survey of the literature on this issue, in the context of China's labour market conditions prior to the reforms and structural change of the past three decades. The available evidence is mixed, and our assessment makes a strong case for probing institutional constraints to labour mobility from an economy‐wide perspective, going beyond the confines of the rural economy.     

Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

Internal labour markets in the Australian banking industry: their nature prior to the Second World War and their recent decline

This paper uses evidence from late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century personnel records of two Australian banks to examine the nature of internal labour markets prior to the Second World War. It is argued that the industry possessed all the classic features of internal labour markets: limited ports of entry, internal promotion, long careers, and assignment of wages by well-defined rules. The paper then examines the reasons why banks adopted internal labour markets. Finally, the paper examines the recent decline of internal labour markets and examines the role of technological and social changes in this decline.     

中国农村金融组织生存、变迁及发展

由于农业的弱质性及在国民经济发展中的基础地位，农村金融组织在农村经济及整个国民经济稳定发展中发挥着不可或缺的作用。中国农村金融组织也有一个生存、发展的制度变迁过程。本文在研究了合作经济及农村金融组织在农村经济发展中的作用的基础上，重点研究了法国的农村金融体系在法国国民经济中的作用，并进一步探讨了中国农村金融组织的生存条件、制度变迁及发展。     

社会主义核心价值体系的文化内涵分析

在社会体制与社会结构深刻变动、思想观念深刻变化的新形势下，在思想大活跃、观念大碰撞、文化大交融的时代背景下，建设社会主义核心价值体系，具有极强的现实针对性。准确地把握社会主义核心价值体系的科学内涵及其精神实质，是建设社会主义核心价值体系的前提。对于倡导和谐理念，培育和谐精神，打牢全党全国各族人民团结奋斗的思想道德基础，具有极为重要而又深远的理论意义和实践意义。社会主义核心价值体系可以从文化内涵方面展开发掘，具体包括政治文化、思想文化、精神文化和道德文化四个层面以及与和谐文化构建的关系方面，这是研究社会主义核心价值体系的一个新视角。     

An Important Field： Environmental Accounting

With the environmental crisis, the government has issued many regulations, and the importance of environmental accounting also become more and more attached. This paper will focus on the standards and information of environmental accounting.     

铅锌冶炼企业的购并决策

文章重点讨论铅锌冶炼企业的购并决策问题。购并决策是一个过程,它包括对企业自身特点的了解,目标企业的选择、决策等问题。     

Reporting Performance: Comprehensive Income and its Components

The underlying question raised in this article is: why is the accounting profession's conceptual framework (CF) so authoritative when it is conceptually incoherent? A supplementary question is how can ‘conceptually robust’ accounting standards be derived from an incoherent framework? This article draws on Page and Spira's (1999) contrasting framework metaphors to suggest that the appearance of conceptual robustness is more important than the reality, and illustrates the point with the International Accounting Standards Board's (IASB’s) progress report on its reporting performance project. Some inherent weaknesses in the move towards internationally enforceable financial regulations have been acknowledged, but this article suggests the IASB's project demonstrates two additional weaknesses: internal incoherence, and the potential for political ends to drive supposedly technical regulations.     

Average Monotonic Cooperative Games

A subclass of monotonic transferable utility (T.U.) games is studied: average monotonic games. These games are totally balanced. We prove that the core coincides with both the bargaining set à la Davis and Maschler and the bargaining set à la Mas-Colell. To obtain this result a technique based on reduced games is used. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C71