互联网金融快速发展对银行经营的影响探析

互联网金融以其便捷、高效、低成本等优势对银行传统金融业务不断进行渗透,对银行经营造成了一定的影响。一方面,迅速发展的互联网金融业务在我国金融市场上发挥了"鲶鱼效应",成为我国金融体系的有益补充,填补了银行等正规金融机构的服务盲区。另一方面,互联网金融业务的迅速发展也给银行经营带来了不小的竞争压力,造成了银行存款流失、资金成本上升、小微企业贷款客户流失、代理支付结算业务利润下降等一系列问题。     

对"省直管县"体制的反思

"省直管县"已经成为行政体制改革的大趋势,但是我们并不主张全国范围内统一实施省直管县。中国与西方国家有很大的区别,西方国家的体制并不一定适应中国的具体情况,不应一切西化。政府层级变化是一个自然的发育过程,只可顺势而为,不可强力推行。在"省直管县"改革过程中各省可因地制宜,自主选择;应该注意把握改革的方式、节奏和速度,切忌操之过急,搞一刀切。     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

Global poverty and inequality: are the revised estimates open to an alternative interpretation?

The level of, and trends in, global inequality and global poverty are indicative assessments of who has benefited from economic growth. The revision of price data has led to a reassessment of those estimates. Through an extensive overview of the implications, we argue that the data can be read in different ways. Official estimates show global extreme poverty and global inequality are considerably lower than previously thought. We argue that these changes are much less significant than they at first appear, and we present a more nuanced alternative interpretation by exploring changes across the entire global distribution.     

The Conservatives' Grassroots 'Revival'

Healthy party grassroots constituency organisations play an important part in modern electoral campaigning, especially in marginal seats, and political parties try to concentrate their efforts on those closely contested constituencies. Recent evidence on party fund-raising at a local level shows that the Conservatives have taken considerable strides in supporting their campaign organisations in marginals, and have done so in a way which enhances their long-term campaigning potential there. The party's grassroots organisations are increasingly well-resourced, especially in the seats the Conservatives need to win back if they are to win the next General Election. However, while fund-raising suggests a healthy grassroots where it is needed, party membership data highlights continued problems for the party.     

Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-Class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis

This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled 'responsible mortgage borrowers' by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to protect banks' balance sheets from the consequences of their own failed investments in mortgage-backed securities. The ensuing arrangements immunised banks from the implications of market self-regulation in the first-phase response to the sub-prime crisis while simultaneously allowing them to continue to impose the experience of market self-regulation on their customers. An increasingly asymmetric approach to banking regulation has arisen analogous to that which Karl Polanyi associated with the contradictory co-existence of market and non-market forms.     

金融危机中避免失业减少裁员之策——德国的对策

金融危机席卷全球,各国面临着同样的问题:经济萎缩,产量下滑,就业困难。德国劳动法框架内避免或者减少裁员的做法主要是:在工作量减少时,采取放弃加班,减少使用劳务派遣工,消耗时间账户的盈余,预支年休假,实行短时工作制或者减时减薪等措施。在无法避免裁员时,通过制定"社会计划",给予失业金救济金,以减少对员工的不利影响。     

关于中国财政分权制度的思考

财政分权是财税体制的关键.随着经济发展,我国分税制财政体制的问题逐渐凸现.这与我国非制度化的中央集权,"职责同构"的行政体制密切相关.财政体制改革应当从创新行政管理体制,实现中央和地方关系的法治化、制度化两方面着手.     

Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains

This article draws upon existing literature to document and describe the rise of finance in food provisioning. It queries the role of financialization in the contemporary food crisis and analyzes its impacts upon the distribution of power and wealth within and along the generalized agro-food supply chain. A systematic treatment of key nodes in the supply chain reveals four key insights: (1) the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises becoming increasingly involved in financial activities; (2) financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-food system, though they are largely subject to the dictates of finance capital and face renewed competition from financialized commodity traders; (3) financialization has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions, and (4) small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets, they have become weaker vis-à-vis other actors in the agro-food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. The paper concludes by identifying themes for future research and asking readers to reimagine the role of finance in food provisioning.     

The Catalytic Effect of IMF Lending: Evidence from Sectoral FDI Data

Our study contributes to the search for the elusive catalytic effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Recent scholarship has found that the catalytic effect is conditional on political regime and program stringency. We contribute to this literature by developing and testing a theory which describes how the catalytic effect also varies by economic sector. This is a departure from existing studies, which have tended to focus on aggregate FDI flows after crises. Our findings corroborate previous research, which finds that in general IMF lending has a substantial and negative effect on FDI. However, we find that the negative effect is concentrated in sectors that are highly dependent on external capital and have low sunk costs in the host country. Our findings are robust to several alternative explanations common in IMF literature, namely the importance of IMF program design and the ability of governments to make credible commitments to reform. Substantively, our findings suggest that investors are more likely to use IMF lending as an escape hatch in countries where FDI is dependent on external capital and has low sunk costs.