Capitalist profit calculation and inflation accounting

How are profits calculated under capitalism? This paper discusses the forms of profit calculation that have been put forward by the accounting profession to deal with the problem of inflation. In so doing it also raises the issue of the disjuncture between the calculation of profit made by the capitalist enterprise/ firm and that generally associated with Marx and subsequent Marxist writings. Finally, the paper addresses the wider issue opened up by the debate about ‘inflation accounting’; in particular the question of the legal constitution of corporate trading bodies and the control of the flow of investible money- capital within the economy.     

Poverty and profit in Central American forest policies

The failure of forestry to contribute to poverty reduction in Central America is due to public policies which inhibit its profitability. Absence of public regulation of harvesting and competing subsidies to agriculture keep forestry stumpage prices artificially low. This encourages destruction of the forest resource, which damages both the environment and the potential to reduce poverty. A comparison of Costa Rica and Honduras reveals two dissimilar approaches toward forest policy. While Costa Rica attempts to raise producer and grower stumpage prices by tax credits, soft loans and differential species fees, Honduras enforces price ceilings and uses centralized authority to control forest production and export. Both countries exhibit weaknesses in the management control cycle of programming, budgeting, implementing and evaluating their forest policies. Yet the Costa Rican approach has increased stumpage prices already, which bodes well for their forest sector. By contrast, the major beneficiary of Honduran forest policy has been COHDEFOR, the state enterprise responsible for forestry management, controlling production, and running its national system of agroforestry cooperatives. Despite greater public authority and resources than the Costa Rican forest service (DGF), the Honduran forest policy is not likely to increase producer profitability or reduce poverty in the near future.     

Economic integration and the relationship between profit and wage taxes

This paper analyzes the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with workers and capitalists that own internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate, relative to the wage tax, when preferences for public goods increase, or when the share of capital employed in multinational firms is rising. We further show how an increase in the wage share changes both the relative size of tax bases and the political influence of different income groups. The predicted relationships are tested using panel data for 23 OECD countries for the period 1980 through 2004. The results of the empirical analysis support our main hypotheses.     

Reaching for profit in the welfare state: Patrimonial economic voting in Denmark

Economic voting has been well-studied in a number of advanced industrial democracies, including Denmark. However, that work has been almost entirely on the valence dimension, i.e., rewarding or punishing government according to whether the overall economy prospers. Recent work has looked at other economic voting dimensions, including patrimony, i.e., the impact of property ownership on the vote. A patrimonial effect has been found in the UK, the US, and France. However, it seems to differ somewhat depending on the welfare-character of the state, with the US at one end and France at the other. Here we examine patrimonial economic voting in a still more extreme welfare state - Denmark. In our analysis of voting in the 2011 parliamentary election, we establish two new findings: 1. patrimonial economic voting exists in Denmark and, 2. its effect is stronger than that for other countries studied thus far.     

Morality without Intention

Abstract

An examination of how, in literature, silence and veiling are related to moral significance. The paper emphasizes Walter Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affiniites and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and poses the question of how the literary can possess moral meaning or effect when, as in these two works, silence and veiling appear as a means of refusing or denying intention. Benjamin’s and Hawthorne’s different critiques of the symbol are presented as the central issue around which the possibility of moral meaning is decided as an intentionless act. Benjamin’s preservation of the moral is interpreted as the cause of the paradoxical and contradictory sources of the expressionless and its critical violence as well as the veiling and secrecy he identifies as forming the true work of art. Against this account, Hawthorne’s story is read as the refusal of any preceding secret as the basis of a moral claim and thus as the defining category of the work of art.     

论非生产劳动、剩余价值与金融利润的关系

马克思关于生产劳动与非生产劳动的划分是从产业资本和商业资本的角度出发的,对于金融领域雇佣劳动的性质问题需要另做说明。金融领域的雇佣劳动属于非生产劳动,但同样为金融资本家创造剩余价值,但金融利润却不是直接来自于金融领域雇佣工人的剩余劳动,而是来自于生产领域中形成的剩余价值的再分配,金融领域中工人所创造的剩余价值部分抵消了金融领域活动的资本所产生的费用。     

Regression without a model

Frequently in public policy analysis, researchers and decisionmakers confront the problems of building, testing, and interpreting a regression equation. This paper examines these general problems in the context of the efficiency of secondary schools in Karachi, Pakistan. It displays some of the tools of exploratory data analysis in constructing a regression model in the absence of a convincing, a priori specification. A simple and useful technique is presented for testing, after numerous statistical explorations, the model one has constructed. Finally, the paper takes seriously the differences between the policymaker's questions and the statistician's, providing some guidelines of general relevance for the interpretation of regression-based studies of public policy.