Книги

Экономическая деятельность людей состоит в производстве и рациональном использовании недостаточных для полного удовлетворения потребностей благ. Результативность этой деятельности определяется, с одной стороны, количеством и качеством имеющихся факторов производства – труда, природных ресурсов, производственных фондов и уровня научно-технических знаний, с другой – общественным разделением труда.
После того, как А.Смит доказательно включил общественное разделение труда в число основных источников богатства наций, экономика стала наукой о функционировании национального хозяйства, представляющего собой строго скоординированную деятельность большого числа участников по удовлетворению личных и коллективных потребностей.
Если в пределах фирмы согласованность работы ее сотрудников обеспечивается штатом менеджеров, то как координируются действия значительно большего числа людей в пределах национальной или даже мировой экономики? Это один из основных вопросов, на которые отвечает экономическая наука. И микроэкономике как составной ее части в этом принадлежит решающая роль.
В национальных и мировом хозяйствах вопросы – что, как и для кого производить? – решается в ходе взаимного приспособления множества частных интересов конкурирующих и сотрудничающих между собой субъектов. Основным средством такого приспособления является торг. Совокупность условий и средств, обеспечивающих возможность осуществления торговых сделок, называется рынком. В этом смысле рынок определяет степень использования производственного потенциала, объемы и ассортимент производимых благ и их распределение между участниками национального и мирового хозяйств. Государство в лице национального правительства может оказывать существенное влияние на ход и результаты экономической деятельности в стране. Но при этом оно тоже использует механизмы рынка, устанавливая и гарантируя основные правила его функционирования и выступая в качестве участника сделок при размещении своих заказов частному сектору.
В XX в. в ряде стран так называемого “реального социализма” была предпринята попытка существенно ограничить роль рынка и расширить роль государства в решении вопросов – что, как и для кого производить? В результате эти страны по уровню экономического развития оказались намного позади сопоставимых с ними по экономическому потенциалу стран с рыночной экономикой.
Преимущества рыночного механизма при координации хозяйственной деятельности множества экономических агентов, преследующих собственные цели, основаны на том, что он наиболее оперативно снабжает всех участников национального хозяйства необходимой информацией о структуре потребностей и степени ограниченности возможностей их удовлетворения. Носителями такой информации являются цены.
Процесс установления рыночной цены и ее роль в координации общественного хозяйства находятся в центре внимания микроэкономического анализа. Поскольку рыночное ценообразование есть одновременно и результат, и средство взаимного приспособления экономических целей участников рыночного хозяйства, то микроэкономика лежит в основе современного учения о функционировании национальной и мировой экономики.

Научное издание представляет материалы международной конференции, проведённой АПЭ в Голицыно 1-2 октября 1999 года. Рассматриваются результаты приватизации земли и реорганизации сельскохозяйственных предприятий в ходе российских аграрных реформ.

Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. In the United States and the United Kingdom competitive markets dominate the financial landscape, whereas in France, Germany, and Japan banks have traditionally played the most important role. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. For example, financial markets may be bad for risk sharing; competition in banking may be inefficient; financial crises can be good as well as bad; and separation of ownership and control can be optimal. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.

What causes a financial crisis? Can financial crises be anticipated or even avoided? What can be done to lessen their impact? Should governments and international institutions intervene? Or should financial crises be left to run their course? In the aftermath of the recent Asian financial crisis, many blamed international institutions, corruption, governments, and flawed macro and microeconomic policies not only for causing the crisis but also unnecessarily lengthening and deepening it. Based on ten years of research, the authors develop a theoretical approach to analyzing financial crises. Beginning with a review of the history of financial crises and providing readers with the basic economic tools needed to understand the literature, the authors construct a series of increasingly sophisticated models. Throughout, the authors guide the reader through the existing theoretical and empirical literature while also building on their own theoretical approach. The text presents the modern theory of intermediation, introduces asset markets and the causes of asset price volatility, and discusses the interaction of banks and markets. The book also deals with more specialized topics, including optimal financial regulation, bubbles, and financial contagion.

Many policy makers and businesses erroneously believe that rural populations, particularly in Africa, have no margin for savings over consumption needs. This study examines the potential for financial savings in rural Mozambican households by looking at the determinants of savings behavior. An econometric model for a household.s saving behavior was estimated using data from 113 rural households from Nampula province in Mozambique. Results indicate that income, physical wealth, household size, and years of schooling affect a household.s savings behavior. The study also finds that Mozambican rural households use their own grassroots associations for many financial services due to the lack of access to formal financial intermediaries.

This book provides a new approach to the identification and the estimation of structural VAR models. The role of deterministic variables and the connection with the concept of cointegration is discussed at length. The book also provides criteria to select among alternative structures. In addition, the asymptotic distributions of the structural estimates of impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition coefficients are obtained and used to construct asymptotically based confidence intervals around the maximum likelihood estimates. Moreover, the book contains a critical evaluation of the problem of non-fundamental representations and of their relevance on the interpretability of the results of structural VAR analysis. Finally, the book contains applied examples.

This collection provides new insights into British household economic behavior by exploring the frontier between economics and sociology. Drawing on data from the groundbreaking Social Change and Economic Life Initiative, the contributors present a comprehensive analysis of six representative towns to illuminate the ways in which households sustain themselves over time and the role of gender in modern society. The authors examine the variety of ways in which households organize their economic behaviour; how that behaviour varies between sections of the population; and how it changes over the household's life-time, as well as in the longer term. The book defines economic behaviour widely, including in its scope many vital activities which involve no direct cash transactions. At the centre of the analysis is the notion of choice. Individually and collectively, members of households make choices. In this book, economists and sociologists address their opportunities to do so, the circumstances in which they do so, and how and why their choices differ. The book illuminates the ways in which households sustain themselves over time by accumulating and maintaining both material and human resources, which are then deployed in pursuit of individual and collective ends. At the same time, it casts new light on the role of gender in modern society.

In this paper, the Spanish demand for food away from home is analysed. A panel data set is built and appropriate techniques for estimating limited dependent variable models have been applied. Results indicate that where there are zero expenditures, these are largely due to infrequency of purchase rather than to abstention or to economic reasons. Furthermore, important differences appear among households. On the one hand, those households whose head is a highly-educated person, male, young and living on a salary in a large town are more likely to purchase food away from home. On the other hand, increases in income only provokes more than proportional increases in expenditure for those households headed by an unschooled person, a female or a person older than 55 and also for those households with more than half of its members older than 60 years.

This study compares the predictive performance of several mathematical programming models. Using the cropping patterns, yields and crop gross margins of eighteen farms over a period of five years we compare the models’ optimum solutions with observed crop distributions after the Reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy of 1992. The results show that the best prediction corresponds to a model that includes expected profit and a qualitative measure of crop riskiness. The results suggest that, in order to obtain reliable predictions, the modelling of farmers’ responses to policy changes must consider the risk associated with any given cropping pattern. Finally, we test the ability of the proposed model to reproduce the farmers’ observed behaviour with equally good performance under conditions of limited data availability.

In Honduras, traditional coffee processing is the cause of two major problems: poor coffee quality and contaminated water. In this paper we present a method that determines the trade-off between economic efficiency and contamination in a Honduran sub-watershed. The method is a bioeconomic model based on mathematical programming that simulates the functioning of the interlinked economic and ecological processes in the sub-watershed. We compare various scenarii where the model is given the possibility of replacing traditional coffee processing plants with a network of improved ecological plants. For different levels of contamination the model determines the optimal location and size of new coffee processing plants along river streams by minimizing transport, variable and fixed costs. The restrictions of the system are the volume of wet coffee to be processed, the available stream water, and in the alternative scenarii, investment capital and contaminant concentration in the river. We apply the method to a typical sub-watershed in the hillsides of western Honduras and show that coffee quality can be improved and contamination can be reduced substantially at a relatively low cost.

Recent food scares in the food market has caused a reduction in consumer’s confidence in the food system that it has induced a significant reduction in consumption in a sector, the beef sector that was already characterized by a saturated trend in quantity terms. In this context, all participants in the beef production system are facing to a greatchallenge, to retrieve consumer’s confidence in the food chain and to mitigate the reduction in beef consumption. The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of consumer’s confidence in the food system as well as other factors on the explanation of food consumption reduction. A structural modelling approach has been used to analyse factors affecting the reduction in beef consumption in two different regions characterised by different production systems and different marketing strategies (PGI beef label). Results indicate that main factor explaining the reduction in beef consumption is the confidence in the beef and a positive relation has been found. Moreover, confidence in a product is directly related to the perceived quality offered by farmers and other decision makers on the beef chain, and to the consumer involvement with the product. Therefore, the main implication is that participants in the food chain has to develop adequate communication strategies such as quality labelling in order to increase consumers perceive quality because, higher quality perception will recover consumers’ confidence in beef, and therefore, it will mitigate beef consumption reduction.

This major macroeconomics text by Robert Barro and Vittorio Grilli is written from a European perspective. It adopts an open-economy approach and incorporates full treatment of European labour and financial institutions and markets. The authors cover in a rigorous and stimulating fashion the main macroeconomic theories and policy in relation to the components of the macroeconomic environment, including the household, the monetary system, the production process, the government and business cycles, and address the major economic problems of the world today.

The first edition of Managing Across Borders was hailed as a landmark book, widely praised for its pioneering insights into the management of companies operating in an international environment. With the introduction of an entirely new organizational form--the transnational--Bartlett and Ghoshal showed how the nature of the competitive game had fundamentally changed, requiring that companies simultaneously capture global-scale efficiency, respond to national markets, and cultivate a worldwide learning capability for driving continuous innovation across borders. In this newly revised edition, the authors revisit their breakthrough concepts, updating the material with fresh, timely examples drawn from today's leading global enterprises. The insightful profiles of global middle managers and the real-world case studies paint a complete picture of the issues, problems, and opportunities encountered on the road to becoming a transnational. Included with this edition is a new application workbook, a highly practical tool for translating the book's ideas into action.

This book brings together six years of research and writing by two leading thinkers on global organization. Drawing on their detailed knowledge of major corporations, including ABB, Canon, 3M, and McKinsey, Ghoshal and Bartlett argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a new and radically different organizational form. The philosophy that underpins this form focuses on the power of the individual as the driver of value creation in the company and on the importance of individuality in management. Stressing the significance of purpose, process and people, their analysis pays particular attention to creating and leveraging knowledge, building organizational capabilities as well as developing individual competence. Readers may already be familiar with some of Ghoshal and Bartlett's ideas that have been published elsewhere-but by bringing them together here, they become at once more accessible and more challenging.

The objective of the paper is to develop a methodology for supporting the evaluation and design of agri-environmental schemes. The methodology is based on a combination of mathematical programming, contract theory and multicriteria analysis and is tested on a case study in Northern Italy. The methodology proposed can add insights into the policy design process, by taking consistently into account three issues often overlooked: the adaptation of cropping systems to the measures proposed; the diversity of compliance costs among farmers; the multidimensionality of the decision problem.