金融危机与竞争政策:经济学的视角

这次全球金融危机对英国来说,是个体系性问题,不仅有资金流动性问题,还有偿付能力问题.重树人们的信心已经不足以解决问题,需要对金融体制进行彻底地修复.为此,英国政府采取了一系列的银行业拯救计划,这些计划和措施是行之有效并且与竞争法原则是相契合的,对竞争并没有构成重大威胁.国务秘书以维护金融稳定这一所谓的公共利益为由,用干预的形式允许劳埃德银行收购苏格兰哈里法克斯银行,是一个政策错误.并且,这种合并将会实质性减少竞争,造成经营的高成本,从经济学角度看也是错误的.     

Values,norms and policies

Norms are defined as specific but tacit standards of what is socially and individually acceptable; values as explicit but general statements of principle, of which the content is continually changing through changing norms, changing circumstances, changing policies and the accompanying ethical debate. The relation of norms, values and policies is shown by an historical example. The inherent conflict within both norms and values is discussed and the role of the policymaker is defined, both as an artist in conceiving and devising one among many possible but always partial realizations of contemporary norms and values, and as a partially conscious agent in reshaping the norms and values of his time. The psychological implications of this are briefly indicated.     

Systems analysis: A tool subject or judgment demystified?

The article distinguishes between professional schools and academic disciplines; traces six academic constituents which contribute to the study of the profession of human governance; and criticizes the tendency of systems analysis to become identified with mathematical modeling and thus to obscure both the area in which verbal expression transcends mathematical expression and also the difference between systems modeling as a technique and systems thinking as a conceptual orientation.     

Towards a new aid paradigm: South Africa as African development partner

As the largest African economy and the leading African aid-provider, with plans to establish an aid agency, South Africa is often ranked among the developing world's ‘emerging donors’. However, the country's development cooperation commitments are smaller in scope, scale and ambition than the aid regimes of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) or Gulf state donors. Given its limited resources and domestic socioeconomic challenges, South Africa prefers the role of ‘development partner’. In this role, South Africa's development cooperation in Africa has ranged from peacekeeping, electoral reform and post-conflict reconstruction to support for strengthening regional and continental institutions, implementing the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and improving bilateral political and economic relations through dialogue and cooperation. This article seeks to determine whether Pretoria's development cooperation offers an alternative perspective to the aid policies and practices of the traditional and large rising donors. We conclude that South Africa does not fit neatly the ‘donor’ category of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and neither is Pretoria's aid-spending typically ‘ODA’ (official development assistance). Instead, with its new aid agency, South Africa occupies a unique space in Africa's development cooperation landscape. With fewer aid resources, but a ‘comparative advantage’ in understanding Africa's security/governance/development nexus, South Africa can play an instrumental role in facilitating trilateral partnerships, especially in Southern Africa.