新型贸易业态的现状、问题与对策

新型贸易业态如电子商务贸易商、贸易中间商、供应链管理商等的发展与上海建设国际贸易中心、发展服务经济的战略目标高度契合,能够提高上海参与经济全球化的层次与能级。当前,新型贸易业态发展还存在不少瓶颈,如制度建设相对滞后,不适应刚性的政府行业管理体制,与其他相关行业（如物流、金融等）的对接还不够顺畅等。上海发展新型贸易业态,要完善制度环境,推进与贸易便利化相关的税收、市场准入、监管、法律法规等制度建设;健全管理体制,按照新型贸易业态发展的趋势,打破部门分割的局面,形成适应时代要求的管理框架;抓好与金融、物流等产业的对接,促进产业融合发展。     

Business strategy and the social norm of tipping

Tipping is an important economic phenomenon, involving about $47 billion a year in the US food industry alone, and trillions of dollars across different occupations and countries over the years. Moreover, tipping is a major source of income for millions of workers. This article discusses the implications of tipping for business strategy in the relevant industries. For example, firms can choose to impose a compulsory service charge in lieu of tipping - what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so? How does tipping change the profit-maximizing level of investing in screening job applicants, training workers, monitoring them, and providing performance-based incentives by the firm? Can industries such as the music industry use tips (i.e., prices being voluntary and determined by the customers) as an alternative business model?     

A theory and verities of market place behaviour

This study questions traditional notions of competitive economic behaviour from a theoretical perspective of social psychology and systems theory. Inter alia these approaches suggest, firstly, that economic relationships are simply an aspect of broader social relationships and are likely to be characterised by cooperation rather than competitiveness and the likelihood of conflict. Secondly, it is suggested that the conditions required for market participants to he “fully informed” would not he evident because of the potential instability of such a communications network or system.These broad hypotheses are examined by measuring aspects of communications and business behaviour in a wholesale agricultural market. The data. which are analysed by network and correlational procedures, support the hypotheses.     

IMPERFECT COMPETITION and BUSINESS CYCLES: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

Does imperfect competition increase the magnitude of business cycles? If so, the variability of an industry's employment and output should be positively related to the market power of firms in that industry. This paper demonstrates that the opposite is true: U.S. manufacturing industries with high price-cost margins display less employment variability than do low-markup industries. These high-markup industries display less price variability as well. Highly concentrated industries, however, do display more employment variability. To some degree, markups may reflect labor hoarding rather than market power; this may account for part, but not all, of the negative correlation between markups and variability.     

Defining the co-operative difference

The paper argues that co-operative firms play a set of roles in market economies, based on the co-operative values and principles that are rarely noted in economic literature. Among other, those roles are to internalize market externalities, to serve as laboratories for social innovation, to espouse social entrepreneurship, to promote ethical business practices, and to aid in development. While economic literature has been focused primarily on the ownership and control structure as a source of the difference, we argue that this focus paints an incomplete picture. The principles of co-operation may supply additional insights in addressing questions why co-operatives may thrive in areas of low labour mobility, prevalent market failures, oligopoly markets, and labour intensive industries. They may also offer insights into strategies and survival in global markets of successful co-operative firms.     

LABOR MARKETS, INDUSTRIAL MONOPOLIZATION, WELFARE, AND IMPRISONMENT:

Various theorists posit that the rate of unemployment is linked to the rates of both welfare and imprisonment. This assumes a competitive labor market tied to specific controls of surplus populations. This article argues that contemporary labor markets lie on a continuum between competitive (secondary) and relatively non-competitive (primary) structures which creates a pattern of labor market segmentation. Such segmentation is linked with specific policies of incarceration or welfare, depending on the competitiveness of the labor market. Data from a cross-section of urban, industrial U.S. counties test the relationship between labor market segmentation, monopolization of industries, and the rates of welfare and imprisonment, controlling for a variety of other relevant variables. Regression analyses results suggest that as labor market structures become less competitive (i.e., move from predominantly secondary toward predominantly primary labor market characteristics), rates of welfare recipients and welfare benefits rise and rates of imprisonment fall. They also suggest that increasing industrial monopolization raises rates of imprisonment and lowers rates of welfare benefits. These findings indicate that the two major dimensions of economic segmentation (industrial competition and labor market competition) oppositely affect levels of welfare benefits and rates of imprisonment.     

BUSINESS CYCLE FLUCTUATIONS WITH THE DIVISION OF PERMANENT AND TEMPORARY EMPLOYMENT

In the mainstream real business cycle (RBC) model, labor can be viewed as temporary employment since the firm's demand for labor behaves directly in response to stochastic productivity shocks in each period. This paper provides a tractable way of analyzing fluctuations in permanent and temporary employment over the business cycle, as well as the underlying driving forces. This inclusion of heterogeneity helps reconcile the RBC model with the U.S. data given that temporary employees in general only account for a small proportion of total private‐sector employment (about 2%–3%). We draw an explicit division between permanent and temporary employment and resort to this separation to account for stylized facts that characterize a two‐tier labor market. In particular, with regard to the U.S. labor market, our benchmark model can well explain the motivating facts: (1) temporary employment is much more volatile than permanent employment, (2) the share of temporary employment (the ratio of temporary to aggregate employment) exhibits strong pro‐cyclicality, (3) permanent employment lags by two quarters on average, and (4) the correlation between temporary employment and output is stronger than that involving the permanent counterpart. The quantitative analysis suggests that our proposed channels explain the main facts well and the model further provides plausible reasoning for a firm's labor hoarding. (JEL E24, E32)     

La restructuration des PMI à Saint-Étienne après la crise : traces du passé et limites de l'intégration horizontale

On the basis of a survey conducted in Saint-Étienne, France, as part of a comparative European project on “modes of governance” in local economies (which, thus, takes into account the level of small and medium-sized industry and the middle level of the territory), questions are raised about the goods and services that enable these industries to be competitive with big firms or holdings. For these industries, solutions developed two decades ago for the machine tool industry, mechanics and metal-working are still significant resources. The momentum detected in a small number of fields can lead to an increasing specialization and horizontal integration that favor a more competitive growth. How to know whether this momentum results from still (temporarily) active remnants of the past or whether it is evidence of a collective impetus that can stimulate new economic growth?     

Social Learning and Innovation at Retail Farmers' Markets*

Abstract Retail farmers' markets are seen as key institutions in a more “civic agriculture,” but little is known about how they promote small business entrepreneurship. Drawing on research in economic sociology and economic geography, this paper examines the role of social learning in vendor innovation. Data from a 1999 mail survey of farmers' market vendors in California, New York and Iowa show that business innovation, as represented by intensity of vendors' innovative marketing practices and vendors' successful enterprise expansion, was modest. Social learning through engagement with customers contributed to more innovative marketing by vendors, while social learning through engagement with customers and fellow vendors increased the likelihood of vendors diversifying to additional markets beyond the farmers' market. Certain individual and enterprise characteristics also influenced vendor innovation. This suggests that, although important, the beneficial effects of social learning for vendors at farmers' markets remain moderated by human capital and structural factors.     

新型城市化下广州推进产业融合发展研究

产业融合代表着当代世界科技经济发展的重要趋势,是国际企业界和经济界开出的重要战略管理菜单。在经济全球化形势下,推进产业融合发展能够促进广州集聚全球高端资源、促进经济发展方式转型,从而有利于升华广州低碳、智慧、幸福三位一体的新型城市化发展水平。在新型城市化进程中,广州必须重视三次产业的宏观融合、产业内部的微观融合和产业之间的空间融合。为此需要针对产业融合过程中存在的制度性障碍和非制度性障碍,强化战略统筹,形成符合新型城市化方向的产业融合发展思路,优化产业融合制度环境,鼓励企业制定商业战略,使产业融合成为广州新型城市化发展的经济竞争基础。     

Business Collaboration within the Nazi War Machine: Corporations and the State in the Austrian Semiperiphery

The military strength of German National Socialism was based on the collaboration of large corporations with the Nazi state. Business provided capital, loans, taxes, managerial expertise and production for war industries. I elaborate four ideal‐typical modes of business collaboration. Each mode is illustrated by a case study of a German corporation that acquires an Austrian firm: Krupp (traditional mode); the Reichswerke state conglomerate (coercive); Deutsche Bank (managerial nationalist); and IG Farben (competitive investment mode). The first and the last modes occurred when the state was highly dependent on large businesses for the economic requisites of war. The acquired firms in the Austrian semiperiphery contributed to Nazi war mobilization, as they exploited labor and resources from the peripheral regions of southeastern Europe. Patterns of the state's resource dependency on business led to bargaining interactions between state and business, over time shaping the mix between state and private ownership of war industry.     

国学引领文化产业繁荣论

中华国学是民族智慧结晶,是文化创意火种,重视它才能认识并开发广州龙文化、羊文化、节庆文化的底蕴,以龙舟竞渡精神,将南海神庙、黄埔古港、南沙天后宫串联成线,利用广东文化强省的政策优势、传媒优势、智力优势、制造业、文化产业优势、商都消费优势等,建好广州棋都以及国际会展集团、名城旅游集团、海上丝绸之路、越秀中华文化城、南粤演艺大观园、羊城国艺创意园等,以中华国学创意促进广州文化产业大繁荣。     

INDUSTRIAL DYNAMICS AND THE NEOCLASSICAL GROWTH MODEL

This paper studies industry-level dynamics and demonstrates the ability of a modified neoclassical growth model to capture a range of empirical facts. The paper begins by using U.S. data to document skilled and unskilled labor trends within industry sector classifications as well as industry sector output trends. Using Current Population Survey data from 1968 to 2004, it is shown that the ratio of skilled workers to unskilled workers employed has risen in all industries. The absolute increase in this ratio was larger in the more skilled industries, while the growth rate was larger in the less skilled industries. Furthermore, using national income account data, it is shown that relatively high-skilled industries have accounted for an increasing share of output over time. A version of the neoclassical growth model is then constructed to match these observations. One important feature of this model is a structure that introduces new goods into the economy at each moment of time. The model is able to capture a rich set of labor market movements between sectors and between skill levels as well as changes in the relative output shares across industries, yet preserves many nice features of the neoclassical growth model. ( JEL E13, J20, 030)     

Firms,directors and time in the directorate tie market

Continuing the structural analysis of corporate profits and cooptive interorganizational ties through boards of directors, I summarize results obtained from research proposed several years ago in this journal. As expected, ties through directorates occurred in the 1967 American economy where market constraints on profits in manufacturing industries were most severe. Moreover. types of ties were coordinated as multiplex cooptive relations to sources of market constraint.The results led me to believe that there was a directorate tie market in the economy during the late 1960s — a social network composed of directorate ties providing a nonmarket context for the most competitive buying and selling between business establishments.Acting on this speculation, I propose lines of research into processes by which individual firms and individual persons would have had an incentive to maintain such a market. The research includes an analysis of the etiology of successful cooptation at the level of individual firms and assesses the impact of this success on corporate profitability and growth. The research includes an analysis of the etiology of an individual director's participation in successful cooptation and assesses the impact of this participation on his ability to obtain positions on the boards of large, profitable firms. The research includes analyses of the association between market constraints and directorate ties over a twenty year interval, 1960 through 1980, so that inferences made from the cross-sectional analysis in 1967 can be generalized with evidence on stability and change in the association between market constraint and directorate ties.     

Transformations of employment and occupation patterns in Taiwan's transition to an information society

This study investigates the employment and occupation patterns that have emerged as Taiwan has evolved into an information society. The study shows that the unemployment problem that arose after Taiwan's transformation to an information society is closely related to the inability of information-intensive industries (particularly information-intensive manufacturing) to absorb the labor released from labor-intensive industries. Second, the changing trends in occupation structure under the transformation to an information economy have made Taiwan's labor market unbalanced, benefiting workers who are more highly skilled in information, are more professional, and have higher levels of education. This state of unbalance negatively affects inequality and bias in the labor market.     

From Cowboys to Diplomats: Challenges for Social Entrepreneurship in The Netherlands

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude.     

Product selection and costs in a partially unionized industry

This paper examines differences in costs among union and nonunion firms operating in the multiple and competitive lumber markets; develops a model of output and product selection decisions; and then estimates the cost function implied by the model for a sample of sawmills that produce green and dry lumber. Overall, the average variable costs for the green technology are about 67 percent higher for union mills and, for the dry technology, costs are about 30 percent higher. However, differences inminimum average variable costs are negligible in the dry market but are significant in the green market. The results suggest that some union mills may be able to coexist with nonunion mills in a competitive industry by specializing in market niches determined by comparative cost advantages. The authors gratefully acknowledge comments from James Bennett, Jo Anna Gray, Chris Ellis, Stephen Haynes, Joe Kerkvliet, and an anonymous referee.     

Explaining Asian economic organization

Conclusion Social theorists are challenged to explain an increasingly complex economic order. It is clear that old theories that posited a developmental sequence from undeveloped to industrialized cannot explain the diverse patterns of industrialization that exist. Certainly, Japan is as developed as Western nations but its patterns of development, its economic norms, and its industrial practices are substantially different from the United States and even its Asian neighbors in Taiwan and South Korea. For example, the fact that Japan has the largest banks in the world, and Taiwan relatively few and weak ones (despite the world's largest per capita foreign reserve holdings), cannot be explained only by recourse to market or state factors, although each play a role. Both countries were literally awash in money in the 1980s, and both countries are clearly capitalist societies where banking institutions are assumed to be critical to economic development, as they have been in the West. But more than market and political economy factors are at work here.In Japan, historically developed institutional factors, dating from before the Meiji Restoration and industrial revolution, created conditions for business group self-financing. Modern-day keiretsu, such as Sumitomo and Mitsui, with their huge banks as centerpieces, trace their origins to pre-industrial merchant houses under family ownership. Inheritance practices in Japan are based on primogeniture, inheritance of the entire fortune by the eldest son. This practice allowed merchant family fortunes to remain intact under the stewardship of the heir. Successful families thus had huge sums of money available to finance the businesses of affiliated branches operating under the badge of the mother house. The descendents of the zaibatsu merchant houses, the keiretsu, continue to rely on their own sources of finance, now institutionalized in banks that serve their credit and other financial needs. To see large banks encapsulated within business networks as only the outcome of distorted market conditions, or as only the result of a powerful business class, misses the institutional origins and overlooks the contemporary institutional underpinnings of the Japanese banking system. Ironically, the weakness of Taiwanese banks can also be traced to a strong family system. Chinese societies practice partible inheritance, that is, division of a family estate equally among all sons. As a result, families divide their fortunes every generation, mitigating against the development of large sums of money. Instead, there is great pressure within families to develop multiple businesses so that at the death of the family head, each son can claim an independent enterprise. Because all Chinese families face the problem of setting up children in business (being an employee is not a desirable status in Taiwan as it is in Japan), a range of informal lending arrangements have arisen within families and among friends to generate investment capital. Strong social norms dictate that one assist financially a kin member or close friend. Banks play a relatively minor role in Taiwan because alternative institutional arrangements, also with preindustrial origins, have obviated the need for banks for some financial functions. Again, market factors are important to understanding the strong curb market and weak formal banking system in Taiwan, and political economy factors, notably the absence of a strong central bank, are also significant. But an institutional explanation integrates these factors into an explanation that begins with the character of the society being explained. We need theories that can account for difference without reducing cases to unique instances, that do not presume the individualistic character of Western social orders, and that are sensitive to an array of ideal as well as material factors operating in different locations. Although political economy, market, and culture theories each have contributions to make, an institutional perspective of the type I outline may be especially suited to the comparative analysis of emerging world economic organization. I think, ironically, that a sensitivity to institutional factors may yield better theories of the West. Rather than assume that the United States and Europe are the exemplars of advanced capitalism, the closest empirical instances of the idealized competitive market, Japan and other Asian nations are suggesting that the West is simply one form of capitalist economic development, an expression no doubt, of the West's own institutional heritage. When we relinquish ethnocentric perspectives we can begin to look at ourselves and our own institutional heritage more clearly.     

Culture, state and varieties of capitalism: a comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan

This article examines the interplay between local culture, the state, and economic actors' agency in producing variation across markets. I adopt a political-cultural approach to examining why life insurance has been far more popular in Taiwan than Hong Kong, despite the presence of a cultural taboo on the topic of premature death in both societies. Based on interview data and documentary references, the findings reveal that as an independent state, the Taiwanese government heavily protected domestic insurance firms during their emergence. These domestic firms adopted a market-share approach by re-defining the concept of life insurance to accommodate the local cultural taboo. The colonial Hong Kong government, on the other hand, adopted laissez-faire policies that essentially favoured foreign insurance firms. When faced with the tension between local adaptation and the profitability of the business, these foreign firms chose the latter. Their reluctance to accommodate local cultures, however, resulted in a smaller market. I argue that state actions mediate who the dominant economic players are and that the nature of the dominant players affects the extent of localization. Specifically, the presence of competitive domestic players alongside transnational corporations is more likely to produce varieties of capitalism.     

Community Economic Development Strategies in Rural Washington: Toward a Synthesis of Natural and Social Capital*

Abstract Routes to economic development attract considerable attention in community and rural sociology. Social scientists draw increasingly on studies of social capital and environmental surroundings as they examine the factors that facilitate and inhibit economic development. However, few empirical analyses exist that analyze the impact of the combination of social infrastructure and natural capital on different forms of economic development such as on industrial recruitment and self‐development. Using data collected from six communities in Washington State, the interaction of a community's social infrastructure and natural capital on industrial recruitment and self‐development efforts is examined. Results suggest that while natural capital positively impacts a community's successful recruitment of outside industries, it is not significant for a community's level of self‐development. However, a community's social infrastructure, measured by the existence of active civic organizations, local businesses that support local community projects, community‐wide fund‐raising capacity, and extra‐local linkages to nearby communities, state, and national agencies, positively affects both industrial recruitment and self‐development. These findings illustrate the need for communities and local activists to carefully weigh their advantages and potential shortcomings when deciding on an economic development strategy.