WTO体制下环境与贸易问题的协调

1992年全球环境与发展大会召开和乌拉圭回合结束后,各种环保意识、法律、规章和措施,越来越多地涉及到自然资源、人类和动植物生命及与健康有关的商品国际间流动,甚至扩展到服务贸易、技术贸易等领域,“贸易与环境”问题成为国际社会共同关注的焦点。如何推动环境保护与贸易自由化的相互协调发展,是WTO面临的重要问题。本文考察了环境保护和贸易自由的关系,对WTO的环保贸易条款进行了深入分析,并探讨了协调环境与贸易的途径。     

‘The Assembly Line and Cars Come First’: Labor Relations and the Demise of Nissan Car Manufacturing in Australia

This article examines the fate of Nissan's plant in Melbourne, Australia, which the company closed in 1992. Studies of Japanese car plants that were set up in overseas markets have generally been positive, outlining how these firms were able to thrive by setting up flexible or lean production methods. In Australia, however, the company was unable to establish lean production and executives complained bitterly about union resistance to non-traditional production methods. The plant was also dogged by poor worker morale and high turnover. This is the first study of Nissan's Australian plant and it shows that not all Japanese transplants were successful.     

Compliance costs,regulation, and environmental performance: Controlling truck emissions in the US

When explaining regulatory policymaking and the behavior of regulated business firms, scholars have supplemented economic models by emphasizing the role of public‐regarding entrepreneurial politics and of normative pressures on firms. This article explores the limits of such entrepreneurial politics and “social license” pressures by examining regulation of emissions from diesel powered trucks in the US. We find that the economic cost of obtaining the best available control technology – new model lower emissions engines – has: (i) limited the stringency and coerciveness of direct regulation of vehicle owners and operators; (ii) dwarfed the reach and effectiveness of the governmental programs that subsidize the purchase of new less polluting vehicles; and (iii) elevated the importance of each company’s “economic license”– as opposed to its “social license”– in shaping its environmental performance. The prominence of this “regulatory compliance cost” variable in shaping both regulation and firm behavior, we conclude, is likely to recur in highly competitive markets, like trucking, that include many small firms that cannot readily either afford or pass on the cost of best available compliance technologies.     

交易费用与出租汽车政府规制模式选择--基于Q市个案的分析

作为共享经济在出租汽车领域的代表,网约车给人们带来了极大的便利,也给传统的政府规制模式带来了挑战。本文以Q市出租汽车规制为个案,剖析出租汽车政府规制不同模式的差异及其内在机制。基于规制的标准制定、控制机制及执法方式等要素上的差异,本文将Q市巡游车与网约车规制分别概括为科层规制与合作规制模式。通过对规制空间中不同行动者的交易费用分析,研究发现Q市传统巡游车规制存在高昂的市场型与管理型交易费用,所以采用科层规制模式;而面对新业态的网约车规制,政府对共享经济的倡导降低了政治型交易费用,信息技术的充分应用减少了市场型与管理型交易费用,因此选择了合作规制模式。但随之产生的政府与平台公司之间高昂的管理型交易费用,是出租汽车政府规制实践中需要重点关注的内容。     

集体建设用地制度改革的征税与征收模式辨析

我国集体建设用地制度改革正面临"征收+出让"抑或"入市+征税"的模式选择难题。由于在公共基础设施成本与收益的测算、土地自然增值与非自然增值的区分以及土地增值税的税基、税率确定上存在诸多困难,征税模式在回收公共基础设施投资和实现地利共享的目标上不占优势。而且,集体经营性建设用地入市还面临后续经营上的不确定性,从而会对公共基础设施投资的回收和地利共享目标的实现带来更大风险。实际上,征税和征收绝非截然对立,土地增值税在性质、功能和效果上与土地征收有相似性,人为拔高征税地位,认为其比征收更文明的观点并不科学。因而,我们尚不能断定征税必然优于征收,故集体建设用地制度的改革仍需因地制宜,让"征收+出让"与"入市+征税"两种模式相互竞争、借鉴,并在地尽其利、地利共享的目标下获得融贯发展。     

Municipal Service Delivery: The Role of Transaction Costs in the Choice between Alternative Governance Mechanisms

Service provision by local governments can be delivered using in-house bureaucracies, private firms, and partnerships with other governments or the not-for-profit sector. This production decision has been a major focus of discussion among scholars, practitioners and political agents for the last quarter of a century. The transaction costs framework is an important tool to analyse decisions regarding the production of local services. In this paper, the authors employ this framework to analyse service delivery in Portugal and find that service characteristics and the local political environment play a key role in local officials' choice among the three governance mechanisms to deliver public services.     

论企业女职工生育成本的分配——职业过程性别歧视现象分析

职业过程中性别歧视现象存在主要是因为女职工在孕产期产生的总成本在个人、企业和国家三者之间进行分配的过程中,女职工无力抗衡而承担了大量成本所致。为解决这个问题,应当建立起生育成本分担的社会化体系。     

Program Awareness,Administrative Burden,and Non-Take-Up of Québec’s Supplement to the Work Premium

ABSTRACT

Program take-up is a necessary condition for program effectiveness. Yet, non-take-up is a significant challenge for many social programs, including Québec’s Supplement to the Work Premium (SWP), a refundable tax credit targeted toward long-term welfare clients. Based on interviews with 21 public actors and 46 program participants and nonparticipants, this study explains how low program awareness, the low value of the benefit and the significant administrative burden borne by potential and actual participants contribute to the non-take-up of the SWP in this sample. Moreover, four policy implications and recommendations that can inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of social programs, are derived from this study.     

Improving access to voting with optimized matchings

Research on political representation has traditionally focused on the design of electoral systems. Yet there is evidence that voting costs result in lower turnout and undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Election administrators can selectively manipulate participation costs for different individuals and groups, leading to biased electoral outcomes. Quantifying the costs of voting and designing fair, transparent and efficient rules for voter assignment to polling stations are important for theoretical and practical reasons. Using analytical models, we quantify the differential costs of participation faced by voters, which we measure in terms of distance to polling stations and wait times to cast a vote. To estimate the model parameters, we use real-world data on the 2013 midterm elections in Argentina. The assignment produced by our model cut average voting time by more than 27%, underscoring the inefficiencies of the current method of alphabetical assignment. Our strategy generates better estimates of the role of geographical and temporal conditions on electoral outcomes.