Democracy,Economic Wealth and Social Capital: Sorting Out the Causal Connections

There is widespread agreement that democracy, economic wealth and culture are causally linked, but there is sharp disagreement about the degree to which each of the factors influences the others. We contend that a society's culture, in the form of social capital, remains largely unchanged for long periods of time and that it leaves an indelible mark on the society's politics and economics. Using the 1990 World Values Surveys (WVS), we develop national-level social capital scores for the populations of 11 countries. We also use the cumulative General Social Surveys (GSS) to develop social capital scores for Americans who claim to have ancestral ties to these 11 nations. The WVS and GSS scores are strongly correlated, suggesting that social capital is durable and portable. Moreover, the GSS scores, which serve, in effect, as instrumental measures of 19th-century social capital, prove to be better predictors of contemporary politics and economics in the 11 WVS nations than commonly used 19th-century measures of politics and economics.     

社会信用与经济增长

一、良好的信用能促进经济增长和社会发展诚信对经济发展有重要影响。最近我国一位经济学家算了一笔帐,由于欠款、赖帐;假冒伪劣;不能按时交货,或者交货不付款;三角债等,直接造成的损失6000亿,间接损失更大。因为“不信用”造成的各种法律纠纷、人事纠纷也都是花钱的,我估计整个损失加起来至少8000～9000亿,相当于我国国民生     

Efficiency in Politics: Competing Economic Approaches

The article reviews four recent economic books on efficiency in democracy. Special emphasis is given to two ambitious competing approaches: Mancur Olson's theory of encompassing interests and Donald Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failure . It is argued that the thesis that democracy should generally be presumed to be efficient is problematic in several respects. Sweeping conclusions are reached by virtue of a superficial application of economic analogies, which abstracts away many crucial characteristics of democratic politics, such as information imperfections, weak incentive structures, and collective action failures. The basic explanation for efficient outcomes may have more to do with the size of rulers' stakes in the economy than with voluntary Coasean bargaining.     

发展消费信贷促进经济增长

发展消费信贷有利于扩大消费需求,有利于提高消费层次,促进消费结构的优化和升级,有利于扩大金融资本的运营空间.要倡导鼓励消费信贷,增加消费信贷品种、空间,完善消费信贷法律;完善和加强消费信贷风险管理,改善我国消费信贷的环境,以推动我国消费信贷的长期稳步发展.     

Health not Wealth: Enlarging the EMU

Economic health not wealth should be the decisive criterion when considering the prospects of the Central and East European (CEE) candidates for EU membership and the capacity of the EU to enlarge. Viewed this way the outlook is promising. The CEE countries are still very poor, compared to most of the existing EU members, but they are also much more dynamic. Growth rates are generally expected to remain around 4-5 per cent in CEE for the foreseeable future, compared to about 2-3 per cent for the EU. This still implies that full catch-up in terms of GDP per capita will take decades, rather than years, but full catch-up is not the relevant criterion if one is concerned about enlargement. Experience in the EU has shown that problems are much more likely to arise from established rich member countries with stagnant economies (Belgium in the 1980s and Germany today) than poor, but more dynamic states (such as Portugal and Ireland today). The fact that most of the so-called 'periphery' is now growing more strongly than the 'core' confirms that EU integration benefits poorer countries even more.     

Spreading the Wealth

The new American president promoted the value of “spreading the wealth around” as an election theme, providing low-income families with tax breaks, rebates, and credits. The practice of using federal income taxes to re-distribute wealth, which sometimes reflects the noblest of goals, frequently generates significant unintended harm. Prominent among those unplanned casualties is a reduction in charitable giving: American voluntary wealth transfers (e.g., charitable contributions) are in danger of being crowded out by mandatory transfers (e.g., federal taxes) used to redistribute wealth. This paper considers the social and economic costs of raising taxes that crowd out charity.     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

公安机关办理经济犯罪案件如何把握好量与度

依法打击经济犯罪 ,为改革开放和经济发展创造良好的环境 ,要准确把握好经济犯罪的量和度的关系。具体而言 :必须全力维护国家经济安全和社会政治稳定 ;必须注重打击的社会效应 ,摆正政策与法律的关系 ;严禁插手经济纠纷 ;积极办好行政执法机关移送的案件     

经济全球化背景下如何增强民族凝聚力

在经济全球化的背景下,要增强中华民族的凝聚力,有必要把握如下相互关联的几个方面:1、保持民族文化的独立性与开放性;2、核心价值观的导向与民族共同理想的认同;3、爱国情怀与民族自豪感的培育;4、扩大执政党的阶级基础和群众基础以增加其社会影响力;5、以经济的竞争力提升文明的说服力和民族的影响力;6、充分发挥互联网对增强民族凝聚力的积极效应。     

Preferences for International Redistribution: The Divide over the Eurozone Bailouts

Why do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries? Despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoing debate over the eurozone bailouts, voters' preferences on the topic are poorly understood. We conduct the first systematic analysis of this issue using observational and experimental survey data from Germany, the country shouldering the largest share of the EU's financial rescue fund. Testing a range of theoretical explanations, we find that individuals' own economic standing has limited explanatory power in accounting for their position on the bailouts. In contrast, social dispositions such as altruism and cosmopolitanism robustly correlate with support for the bailouts. The results indicate that the divide in public opinion over the bailouts does not reflect distributive lines separating domestic winners and losers. Instead, the bailout debate is better understood as a foreign policy issue that pits economic nationalist sentiments versus greater cosmopolitan affinity and other‐regarding concerns.     

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre-right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis-à-vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.     

低碳经济——新的财富之源

低碳经济在全球蓬勃发展,正在创造出新的产业、新的增长点.文章采集全球最新的资料数据,展示了低碳经济在产业建设、战略投资、产值就业、新能源开发和碳金融市场等方面的发展情况与趋势.     

Redistribution and the income of the median voter

The income of the median voter has been measured by median income. This measure fails to consider the income distribution of both voters and number of adults per family. Proper measures of the income of the median voter change standard results. This income is no longer less than mean income; its ratio to mean income is only slightly related to the ratio of median to mean income.     

制度环境、技术效率与区域经济增长差异

将影响技术效率的制度因素纳入效率评价模型,运用构造的DEA三阶段模型测算了1995-2007年中国29个省级行政单位(文中简称省市区或省份)经制度环境变量调整前后的技术效率水平,并对制度环境与地区间技术效率水平及相应的增长差异进行了分析。研究结果表明:第一,中国技术效率整体上呈波动型增长趋势,但与经济周期的波动趋势并不吻合,效率改善并非经济高速增长的主要原因;第二,制度环境影响各地区技术效率水平,技术效率的不同又是造成区域经济增长差异的重要原因。所有制改革、对外开放、财税体制改革等制度变迁均有利于技术效率的改善,而城镇化、科技体制改革对技术效率的影响并不显著;第三,东、中、西部地区纯技术效率呈收敛增长趋势,且西部地区技术效率低下的主要原因在于规模非效率;第四,制度环境变量调整后各地区技术效率差异逐步增加,制度因素在区域经济平衡发展方面具有重要作用。     

提高土地使用效率 促进园区经济可持续发展

发展园区经济是促进土地资源的合理调整和集约利用，有利于城市可持续发展的一条重要途径。因此，要按照国家对建设用地的政策，将经过审批确定的园区纳入城市总体规划和土地利用总体规划，树立建设用地的紧凑度发展理念，重新修订园区的布局规划，进一步清理整顿各类园区的建设用地，并实施二次开发，促进园区的可持续发展。