卫生投入结构、健康发展与经济增长

卫生投入通过促进健康发展进而影响经济增长,而这种影响既有数量效应,更有结构效应,本文侧重分析了卫生投入结构因素对健康发展及经济增长影响的理论机制;在此基础上运用1993—2007年中国30个省级行政单位(以下简称省份)面板数据协整模型进行实证研究。结果表明:当前中国卫生投入主体存在结构失衡问题,个人比例过高,而公共比例偏低,这不仅短期内直接降低了民众健康保障能力和福利水平,构成了对区域经济增长的负效应,而且对长期经济增长能力和增长方式转型也构成深远影响。所以,基于改善民生健康福利与实施人力资本发展战略的双重目标要求,新医改应重视卫生投入结构的优化发展,当前特别要减轻过重的个人医疗负担。     

中国区域经济发展的理论与实践——基于四代领导人区域经济思想的分析

促进区域经济协调发展是当前和今后较长一个时期内中国经济社会发展的重要任务和战略选择。经过毛泽东、邓小平、江泽民、胡锦涛四代领导集俸的努力与探索,我国区域经济先后经历了平衡发展、不平衡发展和区域经济协调发展的伟大实践与战略转变。本文通过解读国民经济的十一个五年计划,全面总结了中央四代领导集体对中国区域经济发展的贡献,为新时期真正落实科学发展观、构建和谐社会提供理论和实践基础。     

Shocks and oscillations: The political economy of Hungary

While economic voting studies exist for the new democracies in post-communist Europe, time-series vote functions are scarce. Here, we fill this void by testing how public support for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) responds to political shocks and economic oscillations, using monthly data from 2002 to 2009 (N = 83). As the economy fluctuates, on both objective and subjective measures, Hungarians reward or punish the Prime Minister’s party in the traditional manner. Political shocks, including the change to an MSZP minority government, the 2006 riots, and the IMF bailout, induced increased support for the party while troops in Iraq and the election campaign led Hungarians to be less supportive of the party. Clearly, government support in Hungary can be explained in political economic terms, despite the newness of democracy and the severe economic uncertainties of the times.     

Fundamental models for forecasting elections at the state level

This paper develops new fundamental models for forecasting presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections at the state level using fundamental data. Despite the fact that our models can be used to make forecasts of elections earlier than existing models and they do not use data from polls on voting intentions, our models have lower out-of-sample forecasting errors than existing models. Our models also provide early and accurate probabilities of victory. We obtain this accuracy by constructing new methods of incorporating various economic and political indicators into forecasting models. We also obtain new results about the relative importance of approval ratings, economic indicators, and midterm effects in the different types of races, how economic data can be most meaningfully incorporated in forecasting models, the effects of different types of candidate experience on election outcomes, and that second quarter data is as predictive of election outcomes as third quarter data.     

Reaching Out or Pulling Back: Macroeconomic Conditions and Public Support for Social Welfare Spending

In economic hard-times, do Americans call for increases in governmental assistance, or do they clamor for declines in government assistance? We address this question by identifying the impact of state-level macroeconomic conditions on public support for social welfare spending. We analyze individual-level data from the 1984–2000 National Election Studies, combined with state-level macroeconomic indicators of inflation, unemployment, and productivity. We find that state-level inflation, not state-level unemployment nor state-level productivity, consistently and consequentially shapes citizens’ support for social welfare. With rising inflation, Americans become more supportive of means-tested social welfare spending. Our analyses generally reaffirm the value Americans place on the social welfare safety net, especially during times of economic duress. When the going gets tough, Americans reach out, rather than pull back.     

Keeping Up with the Joneses: The Interplay of Personal and Collective Evaluations in Voter Turnout

Do citizens turnout to vote because of changes in their personal financial situation or are they influenced by the nation’s economic performance? Previous research on this question is far from united. We attempt to unify the disparate literature on the effects of pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations on voter turnout in midterm and presidential elections. Our analysis of ANES data from 1978 to 2004, based on a reference-dependent model of voter turnout, indicates that both pocketbook and sociotropic considerations affect individuals’ decision of whether to vote in midterm elections. Those who perceive that over the last year their own financial situation has improved relative to the economy are less likely to vote than those who view the economy as outperforming their own financial situation.     

环渤海经济区发展中的陆海统筹策略探析

陆海统筹的本质和目标是区域统筹。文章分析了环渤海经济区海洋经济和陆海统筹发展现状,表明环渤海经济区陆海统筹存在区域差异;在借鉴国外发达国家陆海统筹经验基础上,本文从制度、空间、产业、设施、生态等方面提出了环渤海经济区陆海统筹的战略重点和内容,并指出要充分发挥北京在环渤海经济区陆海统筹中的作用。     

Reconsidering individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting

This paper proposes a general theory of individual-level heterogeneity in economic voting based on the perspective that the strength of the relationship varies with factors that influence the relevance of the economic evaluation to the vote choice. We posit that the electoral relevance of the economic evaluation increases with the strength of partisanship as well as political sophistication. Given the strong correlation between partisanship and sophistication, this theoretical perspective casts doubt on extant evidence that more sophisticated voters are more likely to hold the incumbent party electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance since this result might be an artifact of failing to control for the economic evaluation being more relevant to the vote choice of stronger partisans. Our statistical investigation of this question finds no significant evidence that sophistication conditions the economic voting relationship once the conditioning effect of partisanship is included in the model. This finding suggests that individual-level heterogeneity in the strength of the economic voting relationship is largely due to stronger partisans voting more consistently with their national economic evaluation than to more sophisticated voters being more policy-oriented by holding the incumbent party more electorally accountable for macroeconomic performance.     

Patrimonial voting: Refining the measures

Several studies have shown the importance of patrimony on voting for the right in French, British, and American national elections. However, these studies have only taken into account the diversity of patrimony and not their value. We propose to fill this gap in the literature with the “Mode de vie des Français” dataset that contains information on the savings and patrimony of French voters and was collected before the May 2007 presidential election. The results show that including measures that take into account the value of survey respondents' patrimony does not change the conclusions of previous studies that have demonstrated the existence of a strong relationship between holding a risky patrimony and support for the right.     

Hard choices in hard times: Valence voting in Germany (2009)

Recent studies of voting behavior in Anglo-American elections have demonstrated the clear superiority of the valence model over its rivals for explaining how people cast their ballots. In this paper we test the portability of the valence model in a particularly challenging setting the 2009 German Parliamentary elections. Although there are reasons to think that a spatial model might outperform the valence model, we find that the valence model outperforms it with results similar to previous findings in other political settings.