世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

机构投资者作为证券市场中的重要力量,越来越受到理论界和实务界的关注。论文对宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院会计学教授布赖恩-布希（Brian Bushee）的论文＂The influence of institutional investors on myopic R＆D investment behavior＂（机构投资者对企业短视研发投资行为的影响,以下简称Bushee（1998））进行评价并提出相关的建议和研究方向。

《The influence of institutional investors on myopic R＆D investment behavior》述评

dismantling the welfare state reagan thatcher and politics of retrenchment are a good way to achieve details about operating certainproducts. Many products that you buy can be obtained using instruction manuals. These user guides are clearlybuilt to give step-by-step information about how you ought to go ahead in operating certain equipments. Ahandbook is really a user's guide to operating the equipments. Should you loose your best guide or even the productwould not provide an instructions, you can easily obtain one on the net. You can search for the manual of yourchoice online. Here, it is possible to work with google to browse through the available user guide and find the mainone you'll need. On the net, you'll be able to discover the manual that you might want with great ease andsimplicity

Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment

This paper investigates the effect of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative on China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) using a dataset of all host countries for the period of 2010–2015 The employed econometric technique combines a difference-in-differences estimator with matching techniques The results show that China’s OFDI in OBOR countries is about 40% higher than in non-OBOR countries After the initiative, the OFDI from China increases by 462% in OBOR countries However, after controlling for the heterogeneity across OBOR and non-OBOR countries using the matching approach, the significance of the increasing effect caused by the OBOR initiative disappears We also find the OBOR initiative diminishes the resource-seeking motivation and improves the market-seeking motivation of China’s OFDI Our results cast doubts on the infrastructure-led and institution-based strategy of the OBOR initiative, but support the boosting effect of the OBOR initiative on institutional cooperation and cultural convergence Thus, the OBOR initiative is a sustainable continuation and development of the long tradition of economic, institutional, and cultural convergence with the OBOR countries, rather than a temporary policy shock

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Harmony in Diversity: Can the One Belt One Road Initiative Promote China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment?

In this study, using fixed-effects models based on the manufacturing sector for 18 European Union countries for the period 1995–2008, we find that the employment share of service occupations is significantly and positively related to the output share of producer services in manufacturing In particular, the increase in the output share of services accounts for an average of 13% of the increase in the share of service occupations When service occupations are disaggregated by different categories, we find that the output share of services is significantly and positively related to the share of managers, professionals, and technicians In contrast, the remaining service occupations do not benefit from the increase in service revenues Finally, professionals and technicians are complementary to purchased services (from either domestic or foreign suppliers)

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The increasing service intensity of European manufacturing

This paper analyses the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Italy, distinguishing between North and Centre-South, using the European Community Household Panel 1994–2001. We separate job stayers (remaining in the same job), from within- and between-company job movers. Stayers are the large majority. We find stayers in the North to have high procyclicality of real wages, higher in fact than the USA and the UK. Procyclicality is highest in small firms and the private sector, as expected. In contrast, we find that real wages in the Centre-South exhibit little cyclicality, responding rather to Northern than to local unemployment conditions.

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Real Wage Cyclicality in Italy

This paper compares the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Germany and the UK using the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2002 and the British Household Panel Survey 1991-2004. We distinguish between job stayers (remaining in the same job), and within- and between-company job movers. Stayers are the large majority in both countries. Using changes in the unemployment rate as the cyclical measure, we find real wages of stayers in the private sector in West Germany – but not East Germany – to be procyclical, and quite sensitive to unemployment, comparable to the US and the UK. We find cyclicality in the public sector in neither country. Thus real wage flexibility is similar in the two countries, apart from East Germany, despite apparent differences in wage-setting institutions.

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Real Wage Cyclicality in Germany and the UK: New Results Using Panel Data *

The literature on international migration has repeatedly emphasized that the extent and structure of migration has an important impact on the competitiveness of regions and countries. This report provides an overview of the extent and the potential effects of high-skill migration to the EU27. It shows how many high-skilled migrants live in the EU, where these migrants come from, and how the European Union is positioned in the international competition for talent. Second, we examine how high-skilled migrants fare in European labour markets. Finally we address the issue of the effects of high-skill migration on multifactor productivity, gross value added and GDP per capita growth as well as patenting activities at the sectoral and regional levels. We find that - despite substantial heterogeneity among individual EU countries - high-skilled foreign-born are an important source for high-skilled labour in the EU27. There was some evidence that - on average - EU OECD economies (EU) had a lower share of highly qualified migrants than the (arithmetic) average of the (high migration) non-EU OECD economies. However, our results also suggest that this increasing selectivity of immigration regimes is countered by a relatively low qualification structure of short-term migrants in the EU. A second important policy relevant finding of this study is that high-skilled migrants in the EU face a number of challenges when entering the European labour market, that make them distinct from other migrant groups such as less skilled migrants. In particular the high-skilled migrants - in contrast to less skilled migrants - have lower labour market participation rates, higher unemployment rates and lower employment rates than comparable natives and face substantially higher risks of being employed in jobs that do not fit their skill structure. Our analysis regarding the impact of migration and of high-skilled migration in particular on sectoral productivity and gross value added (levels and growth) yielded a number of interesting results though still being preliminary. Particularly interesting was the difference of the impact of the share of migrants in levels and growth specifications, as well as the importance of a break-down by different groups of migrants (from EU and RoW). There was also a relatively robust result of a positive impact of the share of high-skill migrants and of an interactive effect of high-skill migrant share and ICT technology. As regards the analysis of migrants and regional growth and regional technological development (proxied by patents per capita) we found a positive relationship between the share of high-skilled employed persons and of high-skilled migrants and the growth rate of regional GDP per capita.

Fei Peng

Papers

Harmony in Diversity: Can the One Belt One Road Initiative Promote China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment?

The increasing service intensity of European manufacturing

Real Wage Cyclicality in Italy

Real Wage Cyclicality in Germany and the UK: New Results Using Panel Data *

Migration, Skills and Productivity