Does inflation targeting matter for output growth? Evidence from industrial and emerging economies

This paper examines the effects of inflation targeting (IT) on output growth over the “globalization years” of 1986-2004. Employing static panel data methods that control for traditional growth determinants, trade openness and financial globalization, the paper finds that the adoption of a fully fledged IT regime results in higher output income per capita for industrial and emerging economies. However, under dynamic model specifications, the estimated long-run output impact of inflation targeting for emerging market economies is found to be lower than in the case of static models. We argue that this might be due to the long lags until the full effects of greater credibility are felt in the real economy and the fact that emerging market economies adopted the regime much later than industrial economies.     

What is the (Net) Cost to Government of Homelessness Programs?

Homelessness programs may improve the health, well‐being, financial security, labour market and housing outcomes of clients. This, in turn, may result in decreased utilisation of health and justice services, reduced child residential care costs, lower housing management costs, lower income support payments and higher revenue from increased income tax payments. When costed, such impacts represent whole‐of‐government savings or cost offsets to the provision of homelessness programs. This paper provides indicative estimates of the value of potential savings or cost offsets in two areas, namely, the health and justice fields from homelessness program interventions. Our key finding is that homelessness programs have the potential to save over twice the value of the capital and recurrent funding of homelessness programs on the basis of health and justice cost offsets alone.     

巴菲特战略投资理念研究及在中国证券市场应用研究

巴菲特的战略投资理念主要是由战略投资理论、战略投资原则和投资行为理念构成的。战略投资理论主要包括接近零风险理论、集中投资组合理论和有效市场理论。战略投资原则主要是企业原则、经营原则、财务原则和市场原则。投资行为理念主要是指 5项投资逻辑、1 2项投资要点、8项选股标准和 2项投资方式。借鉴巴菲特的战略投资理念 ,充分考虑中国证券市场的现状 ,中国证券市场应是以中短期投资活动构成战略投资为理念的。     

Societal shifts and changed patterns of poverty

Fritzell J, Ritakallio VM. Societal shifts and changed patterns of poverty Int J Soc Welfare 2010: ??: ??–??© 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. This article uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to analyse cross‐national and cross‐temporal poverty risks in 11 Western countries. We show that poverty risks have tended to increase from the early 1980s to 2000. In line with what we would expect based on the welfare state literature, the Nordic countries tend to have the lowest poverty rates. However, the proportion of the national population with a market income below the poverty threshold has increased in all countries and the cross‐national variation in market income poverty is not apparently related to the type of welfare state regime. We perform a simulation analysis to test whether structural factors, that is, compositional differences in age, family and labour market behaviour, could account for the cross‐national variation found. Our results demonstrate the increasing importance of household labour market attachment for alleviating poverty risks, as well as for explaining the cross‐national variation in these risks.     

政府经济职能定位的新视角--从发展民营经济角度调整政府经济职能

市场经济中的政府具有收入分配、稳定、资源配置三大经济职能.但在具体操作层面上,这三大职能被某些学者加进了过多的政府干预因素,甚至试图用政府干预替代而不是弥补市场机制.这种政府经济职能定位已不适应市场经济条件下民营经济发展的要求,需要进行改革.改革的重点是要从发展民营经济的角度调整政府的三大经济职能.     

The impact of India’s food security policy on domestic and international rice market

Food security policy making in India is at crossroads. India has emerged as a leading rice exporter. The Government of India has introduced the National Food Security Act which requires 33.6 million tons of rice per year for its public food distribution system. In this study, we modeled India’s rice market and analyzed policy implications of the long-term impact of India’s food security act on domestic and international rice market. We developed a structural economic demand and supply model for India’s rice market and further added subsidy equations to trace the consequence of National Food Security Act on domestic rice consumption and on the international market. We specifically focus on three different scenarios: subsidy as price effect, subsidy as inelastic income effect, and subsidy as elastic income effect under the broader framework of National Food Security Act. We found that at the end of the projection period (2024–2025), as a result of rice subsidy program, the consumption of rice increases significantly in the case of price effect while the inelastic income effect has no or less impact on production, consumption, and export of rice. Hence, the policy implication of our study is that if the objective of the National Food Security Act is to increase consumption then it needs to be implemented as price effect.     

我国内部资本市场交叉有效模式的提出

文章在充分讨论国内外内部资本市场的研究现状和实际运行情况基础上,提出我国内部资本市场定义应具有"仿社会主义市场经济"特征,并利用"市场经济"和"计划经济"的功能优势,进一步提出增强内部资本市场效率的交叉有效模式。     

How to Design a "Liberal" Welfare State: A Comparison of Canada and the United States

My aim in this paper is to show how differences in the programmatic design of two otherwise "liberal" welfare regimes have generated substantially different patterns of welfare state retrenchment and distributive outcomes since the 1970s. Welfare regimes are distinguished by the principles and rules that regulate transactions between the three institutional nuclei from which individuals derive their "welfare" in modern capitalist societies—the state, the market, and the family. Liberal regimes are characterized by a preference for market solutions to welfare problems. While Canada and the United States both represent paradigmatic instances of the liberal regime type, there are long-standing differences in methods both of financing and distributing benefits. Differences in programme design led to substantially different retrenchment strategies from the end of the 1970s, which in turn produced dramatically different distributive outcomes: rising inequality and poverty rates in the United States compared to relative stability in the distribution of income among Canadian families.     

A New Kid in Town? Active Inclusion Elements in European Minimum Income Schemes

This article assesses the current variation in activation strategies directed towards able‐bodied persons of working age relying on a minimum income guarantee in 19 EU member states. First, we argue that the active inclusion notion developed by the European Commission in its Recommendation on the active inclusion of persons excluded from the labour market provides a useful tool to categorize current activation strategies towards minimum income protection (MIP) recipients. Consequently, we assess the empirical viability of active inclusion strategies in a fuzzy set ideal type analysis of purpose‐collected institutional data. We find that there are only few countries where the activation discourse has remained a dead letter. Most countries implement policy measures that aim to discourage benefit dependency among MIP recipients. Nevertheless, behind the realities of activation strategies towards MIP recipients seldom lies the notion of active inclusion as defined by the European Commission. Particularly, many countries focus predominantly on incentives to increase labour market participation rates of MIP recipients, rather than enabling measures.     

社会冲突与阶级意识——当代中国社会矛盾研究

如何认识和分析社会主义建设时期的社会矛盾,实际上存在着三 种路径: 第一种是"阶级斗争"的分析方法,它的基本假设和断定是,社会主 义时期的一切社会矛盾,归根结底是无产阶级和资产阶级的阶级斗争 的反映,共同的阶级就意味着共同的社会地位和共同的利益,后者又进 一步意味着共同的社会意愿、共同的社会态度和共同的社会行动。在 这种逻辑推论下,中国在改革开放前的很长一个时期,"以阶级斗争为     

对黑龙江省居民收入增长缓慢问题的分析

改革开放以来 ,黑龙江省的居民收入状况发生了很大的变化 ,居民收入越来越多地受到市场因素的影响 ,收入逐年提高。但目前城乡居民收入增长缓慢 ,与发达省区的差距进一步拉大。究其原因 ,既有经济增长滞后因素的影响 ,也有宏观分配体制不完善的因素     

Pitfalls of tourism development in Ethiopia: the case of Bahir Dar town and its surroundings

The history of tourism is one of the neglected themes in Ethiopian history. In Ethiopia, the development of modern tourism as an important economic sector can be traced back to the imperial regime. This was when the Ethiopian Tourist Organization (ETO) was founded in 1961. From then until the overthrow of the regime in 1974, the development of tourism showed a remarkable and smooth upward trend, as measured by the arrival of tourists. However, shortly after the military government assumed power in 1974, the growth of tourism was subject to adverse political and socioeconomic crises. The sector experienced a downward trend, with the number of annual tourist visits steadily decreasing from 50,220 to 28,984 at the national level. However, the seizure of power by a new government in 1991 brought about an environment relatively conducive to the growth of tourism with the adoption of a free market, relative stability, and infrastructure development. This paper sheds light on the history of tourism and its challenges in the context of the political, economic, and ideological shifts through three consecutive political regimes in Ethiopia: the imperial, Derg, and EPRDF. Information was collected from primary sources through interviews and focus group discussions with tourists, experts, hotel managers, and tour guides. Published and unpublished government reports were also consulted.     

Chinese Workfarism: Logics and Realities of the Work–Welfare Governance Model

Given the fundamental disparities between China and the west in political structures, social values, policy regimes, and problem loads, it is meaningful to use “workfare” as a challenging analytical standpoint and detect that China had created unique workfare regimes to build up the past state‐socialism and the present market‐socialism. In the era of state‐socialism, the dual‐track welfare system, apparently adopting an institutional approach to the city and a residual approach to the countryside, was purposely integrated with the segregated urban‐rural work system, constituting a China‐specific workfare regime in which the whole workforce was included and effectively organized into the socio‐economic order. Under market‐socialism that appears as an awkward hybrid, the work‐welfare governance model is being gradually transformed into a pragmatic, much marketized one, though without idealogical legitimacy as well as a clear‐cut vision. On the one hand, employment differentiation and income disparity resulted from a strategic shift from the “reform‐without‐losers” stage to the “reform‐with‐losers” stage in the labor market, together with a large scale rural‐to‐urban labor migration, are structuring a market‐oriented, stratified employment system. On the other hand, while being a welfare laggard, China's productivist, status‐segregated welfare system is taking shape owing to a set of welfare reforms along the line of marketization and societalization. All these changes would imply that China is converging towards a neo‐liberal regime in which the role of the state is residual to the market.     

职业特征对中国城镇就业人员收入差别的影响(英文)

职业是决定就业人员劳动收入,继而影响居民收入差距程度的重要变量。本文利用国家统计局2005年全国1％人口抽样调查数据中的子样本,对职业与收入差别之间的关系做了经验分析,结果发现职业间收入差距可以解释城镇就业人员收入总体差距的12-17％。造成这种差别的主要原因有二：一是由于各职业对就业人员人力资本上的要求有差异,从而导致了职业间劳动要素报酬上的差异;二是劳动力市场、地区分割所带来的不同职业问人员自由流动的障碍,造成了这种收入差别。前一种原因强调了人力资本的作用,这应当是市场化改革的积极成效;而后一种原因反映的却是现阶段的市场化改革还不彻底。因此,为了缩小职业间不合理的收入差距,我们还应进一步深化改革,尽可能地排除由于市场、地区分割造成的不同职业间人员自由流动的障碍。     

Making Sen’s capability approach operational: a random scale framework

Amartya Sen has developed the so-called capability approach to meet the criticism that income alone may be insufficient as a measure of economic inequality. This is because knowledge about people’s income does not tell us what they are able to acquire with that income. For example, people with the same income may not have the same access to health and transportation services, schools and opportunities in the labor market. Recently, there has been growing interest in empirical studies based on the capability approach. Most of these, however, are only loosely related to quantitative behavioral theory, at least in a concrete and empirically operational way. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the theory of random scale (utility) models offers a powerful theoretical and empirical framework for representing and accounting for key aspects of Sen’s theory.     

A family income distribution model for regional (Massachusetts) policy analysis

An earned family income distribution model for Massachussets is described. This model could be estimated and used for other national or subnational regions for which the micro data required to generate earned family income distribution at working period rates are available. The model is distinguished by its explicit inclusion of male- and female-headed families without earnings and by its attention to employment structure, labor market conditions, and wage acceleration. There is presented a policy simulation that shows the effects on earned family income distribution of cutting the Massachusetts corporate profits tax and offsetting the lost revenue with a luxury goods sales tax.     

汇率制度退出与转型：文献综述

如何退出已有汇率制度安排，向更具弹性的汇率制度转型？这是当前新兴市场和发展中国家面临的一个重要问题。在维持已有制度的边际成本与边际收益一致时退出已有汇率制度是最优的。最佳退出时机的经验判断原则取决于该国的经济结构、经济发展阶段、经济冲击、政治与制度因素等。这些因素同时也决定了该国汇率制度退出和转型的策略选择。汇率制度转型所需的基本条件是：一个具有一定深度和一定流动性的外汇市场，一套连贯的中央银行外汇市场干预的政策措施，一个恰当的名义锚，监测和管理公共部门和私人部门外汇风险暴露的有效机制。     

人力资本、劳动力市场分割与收入分配

关于收入不平等的解释,学界有个人主义和结构主义两种理论取向。笔者整合两种理论解释,同时考虑人力资本和劳动力市场结构,以及两者之间的交互效应,提出一个影响收入分配的基本模型。用“中国综合社会调查”（CGSS2003）数据对这一模型的检验表明,人力资本是决定收入分配的主要因素,但市场部门对劳动力的分割所产生的影响也不可忽视;人力资本和市场部门之间存在交互作用,人力资本越多的劳动力越容易进入国有部门（垄断或非垄断）;同时,国有部门（垄断或非垄断）也能为内部劳动力提供更多提升人力资本的机会。     

A human capital approach to American Indian earnings: the effects of place of residence and migration

This study utilizes a human capital approach to examine the earning differentials between different groups of American Indian couples residing on reservations and urban areas. Specifically, the focus of this paper is the determination of whether human capital effects on earnings are stronger in urban areas relative to reservation areas, and whether or not reservation-to-urban migrants receive higher returns to their human capital endowments than the reservation non-movers. Earnings decompositions are employed to examine whether differences in human capital endowments or differences in the returns to human capital are the most important factor in explaining differences in earnings of AI couples living in these two different areas.Results indicate the American Indian couples living in urban areas do enjoy a greater return for their educational attainment. Forty-eight percent of the $11,261 household earnings gap between reservation couples and urban couples is explained by labor market differences, and 31% is explained by differences in human capital. Although living on a reservation makes it more likely an American Indian couple will change their place of residence, this study finds couples that migrate from the reservation to the urban area do not receive greater returns to their investments in human capital. Couples that migrate from the reservations to urban areas make more income than the reservation stayers primarily because of greater levels of education, work experience and other investments in human capital.