如何提高巧实力和整体外交能力——基于机会成本和边际效应的视角

国际政治中对于权力内涵的认识是一个不断演进的过程,从国家实力到硬实力、软实力,再到巧实力。这不仅反映了国际体系的变化和发展,也意味着一国整体外交能力建设应该不断纳入新的因素。但如何优化组合这些因素,以提升一国的巧实力和整体外交能力,目前尚缺乏明确的原则。经济学中的机会成本和边际效应,包括消费的边际效用递减效应和生产要素投入边际产出递减效应等视角,可以在确定外部挑战和机遇、加强整体外交能力的软硬实力基础,以及提升巧实力方面发挥重要指导作用。     

对城市生活垃圾回收的质疑与思考

随着工业化和城市化的快速发展,城市生活垃圾问题作为影响城市可持续发展的重要制约因素日趋突出。大多数国家和地区都把垃圾回收作为减轻垃圾处理负担及保护自然资源和环境的有效模式而大力推广。但国内外大量的实证研究发现,垃圾回收是一种成本高昂的垃圾治理模式,不具有成本有效性。垃圾治理应从源头上减少垃圾的数量和提高产品的重复使用率,政府应减少强制性的垃圾回收,而将政策转向征收适度的垃圾填埋税(费)。     

人力资源会计理论与方法的探讨

随着知识经济时代的到来,人力资源已经成为包括会计在内的众多学科关注的焦点。在我国,越来越多的学者已经加入到人力资源会计研究的队伍中来。本文主要从人力资源会计模式和人力资源的确认与计量进行分析和探讨。     

Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator

Digital transformation and the reorganization of the firm have given rise to new forms of work that diverge significantly from the standard employment relationship. Advocates of digital disruption suggest that the existing legal framework cannot accommodate “innovative” working templates and business models. This article, however, argues that labour regulation can continue to facilitate innovation, presenting the employment relationship as a flexible instrument, and standard forms of employment as the means of achieving efficiencies and cost advantages. First, they allow for the full exercise of managerial prerogative and attendant internal flexibility in workforce deployment, and, second, they constitute an effective device to deliver training and develop skills.     

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely “extra‐situational” in much talk/text‐directed scholarship. I propose we think more geographically by properly engaging spatiality à la Harvey (1990) and especially the radical politics of simultaneity (Massey, 2005)—the literal, “right‐now” connectedness of places and people. To this end, and allied with deepening interest in political economy, I combine the principles of articulation theory with the procedures of commodity chain analysis for picking apart an epitomic, contemporary manifestation of extreme privilege: the business‐class meal. The proposed discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis offers an ecumenical but systematic framework for tracking how commodity fetishism is actually and discursively accomplished (or not) across dispersed voices, stories, and social meanings.     

Importance sampling type estimators based on approximate marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo

We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically operates on the hyperparameters, and the subsequent weighting may be based on IS or sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), but allows for multilevel techniques as well. The IS approach provides a natural alternative to delayed acceptance (DA) pseudo-marginal/particle MCMC, and has many advantages over DA, including a straightforward parallelization and additional flexibility in MCMC implementation. We detail minimal conditions which ensure strong consistency of the suggested estimators, and provide central limit theorems with expressions for asymptotic variances. We demonstrate how our method can make use of SMC in the state space models context, using Laplace approximations and time-discretized diffusions. Our experimental results are promising and show that the IS-type approach can provide substantial gains relative to an analogous DA scheme, and is often competitive even without parallelization.     

A Bayesian mixture of experts approach to covariate misclassification

This article considers misclassification of categorical covariates in the context of regression analysis; if unaccounted for, such errors usually result in mis-estimation of model parameters. With the presence of additional covariates, we exploit the fact that explicitly modelling non-differential misclassification with respect to the response leads to a mixture regression representation. Under the framework of mixture of experts, we enable the reclassification probabilities to vary with other covariates, a situation commonly caused by misclassification that is differential on certain covariates and/or by dependence between the misclassified and additional covariates. Using Bayesian inference, the mixture approach combines learning from data with external information on the magnitude of errors when it is available. In addition to proving the theoretical identifiability of the mixture of experts approach, we study the amount of efficiency loss resulting from covariate misclassification and the usefulness of external information in mitigating such loss. The method is applied to adjust for misclassification on self-reported cocaine use in the Longitudinal Studies of HIV-Associated Lung Infections and Complications.     

Water cycle algorithm for solving the reliability-redundancy allocation problem with a choice of redundancy strategies

Abstract

This paper proposes a new mathematical model for the reliability-redundancy allocation problem (RRAP) with a choice of redundancy strategies. To maximize the reliability of a system, this model chooses the best redundancy strategy from among both active and standby ones for each subsystem. For those with a standby strategy, a continuous time Markov chain model is used to calculate the exact reliability values. In order to solve the proposed mixed-integer non-linear programing model, a powerful evolutionary algorithm, called water cycle algorithm (WCA), is developed and implemented on three famous benchmark problems. Finally, the results of different benchmark problems are compared with those previously reported to show the superiority of the proposed model and the efficiency of WCA.     

Pension scheme fees and charge ratios in 44 countries: A comparative study

Based on data received from pension supervisory authorities, the article reviews 85 different pension schemes in 44 jurisdictions by looking at fees and charges as well as their legal ceilings and their development since 2014. A key finding is the observed decrease in fees and caps. The article presents jurisdictions according to clusters, i.e. by groups of countries with identical or very similar items already covered by pension fees, and analyses the extent to which various cost and fee elements are covered by fees charged to members. Finally, we calculate charge ratios for each cluster to quantify the impact of fees and charges on pension savings. Occupational defined contribution pension schemes and personal plans linked to employment tend to be much more cost effective than personal schemes that have no direct employment link.