湖北比较优势产业的竞争优势--基于品牌影响力的分析

比较优势是一个地区的潜在优势,湖北省在七大产业中具有比较优势.但是比较优势并不等于竞争优势,竞争优势是现实优势,而品牌影响力是一个地区竞争优势的集中体现.从湖北省七大比较优势产业中脱颖而出的知名品牌的影响力有限,为更好地将比较优势转化为竞争优势,湖北省可以通过建设产业集群、创建区域品牌、提升品牌影响力,进而增强竞争优势.     

民主:目标还是手段? --毛泽东晚年一个政治思想散议

通过分析社会主义改造完成以后毛泽东对民主问题的认识,揭示了毛泽东把民主看做是一种手段而不是目的在思想上造成矛盾困惑以及实践中带来的危害.民主既是目的又是手段,建设社会主义民主的任务任重道远.     

产品责任之构成要件的比较研究——兼评我国产品责任相关立法

产品责任之构成要件是指具备哪些条件时产品制造商才必须承担责任。目前我国尚没有一个完整的产品责任法律体系,探究产品责任之构成要件,重新审视我国现行立法,构建一个具有中国特色同时与国际接轨的中国产品责任法律框架,已成为摆在我们面前的一个亟待解决的任务。     

On the Nature of Tolerance: Dichotomous or Continuous?*

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the claim made recently by Mondak and Sanders that political tolerance ought to be thought to be a dichotomous rather than continuous variable. Using data from both Russia and the United States, I demonstrate that those Mondak and Sanders regard as uniquely tolerant are most likely no more than people who were given insufficient opportunity to express their intolerance. Even if such a phenomenon of “absolute tolerance” exists (all ideas expressed in all ways are to be tolerated), it is sufficiently rare that few practical implications are indicated for those doing empirical work on political tolerance and intolerance. * I appreciate the valuable comments of Jeffcry Mondak on an earlier version of this paper.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Robert Tollison and operationalizing public choice

In this tribute to Robert Tollison, I will outline his contributions to the development of public choice. I focus on Tollison’s work on rent-seeking, the political economy of reform, and the rules level of analysis in sports economics. Throughout his career, Tollison brilliantly figured out ways to take insights from price theory and public choice theory and operationalize them using multiple methods of empirical analysis, including historical interpretation and statistical testing.     

A Different Carbon Tax: The Sustainable Green Tariff

Two heated current political arguments focus on carbon taxes and tariffs. This essay will develop an argument for linking carbon emissions with tariffs, through a tax on goods entering a country based on the method of transport and distance traveled, rather than based on the country of origin or category of the product. The result would be to encourage more sustainable local production, to reduce currently externalized costs of carbon emissions, to generate new tax revenues to fund reductions in regressive social insurance taxes, and to provide benefits for those adversely affected by carbon emissions.     

Appeal rate and caseload: evidence from civil litigation in Korea

Courts of modern democratic societies have generally implemented appeal procedures to correct potential errors in ruling. However, considering the time and effort that both litigants spend, availability of an appeal cannot be better than reaching the correct judgment in the original case. This difficulty raises the policy issue of how to reduce the rate of appeals and improve welfare of litigants. In this paper, we assert that lower caseloads allow judges to expend more time and effort on each case, contributing to lower appeal rates. Analysis of court-level data from Korea corroborates our inference.