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The paper examines the value‐generating strategies used in some of New Zealand's primary activities in a rapidly changing trading context in which the countries of East Asia increasingly figure. These strategies range from scaling up volume, with a consequent conspicuous impact on rural landscapes, to innovative value‐enhancing relationships linking producers, processors and consumers in processes which value landscapes for the contribution they make to provenance stories. Our argument is that higher‐value strategies are necessarily more intensely collaborative and involve a pursuit of engaged relationships, especially between onshore producers and manufacturers and consumers at a distance. We term this collaborative form of strategising as ‘the relationships economy’. We illustrate our argument using two case studies, dairying and merino. While there are great differences in scale between them, and dairying focuses significantly on volume‐generating capacity, there are players in dairying who are adopting higher‐value relationships‐based approaches similar to those developed in the merino industry. The common thread connecting the case studies is that of intentional enactment, which echoes earlier periods in New Zealand's trading history when considerable work was undertaken by industry participants to create new markets for primary products.

Many people believe that the abortion debate will end when at some point in the future it will be possible for fetuses to develop outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, would make possible to reconcile pro‐life and pro‐choice positions. That is because it is commonly believed that there is no right to the death of the fetus if it can be detached alive and gestated in an artificial womb. Recently Eric Mathison and Jeremy Davis defended this position, by arguing against three common arguments for a right to the death of the fetus. I claim that their arguments are mistaken. I argue that there is a right to the death of the fetus because gestating a fetus in an artificial womb when genetic parents refuse it violates their rights not to become a biological parent, their rights to genetic privacy and their property rights. The right to the death of the fetus, however, is not a woman's right but genetic parents’ collective right which only can be used together.

Literature examining WTO+ commitments in services trade agreements (STAs) has not considered the role of services regulation. We bridge this gap using a sample of 15 South/South‐East Asian countries, given the burgeoning trend of Asian economies towards services preferentialism and the largely WTO+ nature of their preferential services commitments. Our empirical findings suggest that Asian trading dyads with regulatory frameworks that are more similar and more trade restrictive tend to undertake higher levels of WTO+ commitments in their STAs. There is also evidence in our results, including by modes of supply, for WTO+ commitments in Asian STAs being driven by goods trade complementarities, alluding to supply chain dynamics in the region. Such results support the hypothesis that the heightened “servicification” of production generates a demand to lower services input costs arising from regulatory incidence and heterogeneity.

With cointegration tests often being oversized under time‐varying error variance, it is possible, if not likely, to confuse error variance non‐stationarity with cointegration. This paper takes an instrumental variable (IV) approach to establish individual‐unit test statistics for no cointegration that are robust to variance non‐stationarity. The sign of a fitted departure from long‐run equilibrium is used as an instrument when estimating an error‐correction model. The resulting IV‐based test is shown to follow a chi‐square limiting null distribution irrespective of the variance pattern of the data‐generating process. In spite of this, the test proposed here has, unlike previous work relying on instrumental variables, competitive local power against sequences of local alternatives in 1/T‐neighbourhoods of the null. The standard limiting null distribution motivates, using the single‐unit tests in a multiple testing approach for cointegration in multi‐country data sets by combining P‐values from individual units. Simulations suggest good performance of the single‐unit and multiple testing procedures under various plausible designs of cross‐sectional correlation and cross‐unit cointegration in the data. An application to the equilibrium relationship between short‐ and long‐term interest rates illustrates the dramatic differences between results of robust and non‐robust tests.

We propose imposing data‐driven identification constraints to alleviate the multimodality problem arising in the estimation of poorly identified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models under non‐informative prior distributions. We also devise an iterative procedure based on the posterior density of the parameters for finding these constraints. An empirical application to the Smets and Wouters () model demonstrates the properties of the estimation method, and shows how the problem of multimodal posterior distributions caused by parameter redundancy is eliminated by identification constraints. Out‐of‐sample forecast comparisons as well as Bayes factors lend support to the constrained model.

In this paper, we show theoretically and empirically that the US quantitative easing (QE) policy results in lower exchange rate pass‐through into the destination prices of Chinese exporters. In addition, the more the exchange rate in the export destination appreciates than the Chinese yuan, the stronger this effect becomes. Our model combines various marginal effects of QE policy on the destinations of Chinese exporters and variable markups of export firms due to strategic complementarities. The model predicts that the impact of US QE policy on the pass‐through of Chinese exporters depends on its spillover on the exchange rate between China and the export destination of different firms. We provide strong support for the model predictions using Chinese firm‐product‐level data with information on export destinations. The baseline result and the heterogeneity we find in the response of exchange rate pass‐through of Chinese exporters to US QE policy remain robust to alternative measures of samples and controls.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

This study investigates whether the European Union's funding of civil society organizations (CSOs) can foster equal access to existing channels of participation. This is analyzed by using data from 7,889 CSOs that are registered in the EU Transparency Register. Two criteria should be met for funding to combat inequalities among CSOs: the funding must support underrepresented interests, and it must increase their participation in the policy process. The results of a logistic regression analysis show that the Commission's funding scheme does support underrepresented interests but makes participation more unequal by also supporting already overrepresented groups. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the probability of a CSO having access to formal channels of participation significantly increases if it has received funding. The conclusion is that funding could be used more efficiently if the Commission were to consistently support underrepresented interests.

Using quarterly data from 1995 until 2014, we investigate whether Euro Area (EA) membership influences the probability of a European Union Member State going through an episode of sudden stop or through an episode of bonanza, after controlling for a number of push and pull factors. Overall, our results do not support the claim that EA membership constituted a weakness during the recent financial crisis. On the contrary, we find that EA membership decreases the probability of a sudden stop, all else equal. We find no evidence that being part of the EA has a direct effect on the probability of bonanza. When allowing for interaction effects, our results suggest that EA membership might have mitigated the risk perception arising from higher government debt in the case of bonanzas.

This study investigates the sourcing patterns of Japanese export‐platform foreign affiliates in Mexico, which mainly export to the United States and Canada. We propose a novel approach to estimate intermediate input elasticities of exports by sourcing country. We find that, on average, Japanese export‐platform foreign affiliates in Mexico source intermediate inputs from third countries, including the United States and Canada, rather than from Japan and Mexico, suggesting that Japanese export‐platform foreign affiliates in Mexico are mainly integrated into the vertical production networks back and forth between Mexico, the United States and Canada. In turn, Japanese foreign affiliates selling domestically in Mexico source intermediate inputs not only within the North American Free Trade Agreement countries but also from Japan. In addition, we find that export‐platform foreign affiliates in Mexico use more labour‐intensive production than do foreign affiliates selling domestically in Mexico. This suggests that saving labour costs is one of the motives for export‐platform foreign direct investment in Mexico.

The asylum system faces problems on two fronts. States undermine it with populist politics, and migrants use it to satisfy their migration preferences. To address these problems, asylum services should be commodified. States should be able to pay other states to provide determination and protection‐elsewhere. In this article, I aim to identify a way of implementing this idea that is both feasible and desirable. First, I sketch a policy proposal for a commodification of asylum services. Then, I argue that this policy proposal is not only compatible with the right to asylum, but also supported by moral considerations. Despite some undesirable moral features, a market in asylum facilitates the provision of asylum to those who need it.

In this article, I ask whether a principle analogous to the principle of clinical equipoise should govern the design and conduct of RCTs evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions. I answer this question affirmatively, and introduce and defend the principle of policy equipoise. According to this principle, all arms of a policy RCT must be, at minimum, in a state of equipoise with the best proven policy that is also morally and practically attainable and sustainable. For all arms of a policy RCT, policy experts must either (1) reasonably disagree about whether the trial arms are more effective than this policy, or (2) know that they are.

This article starts with discussing principles for a globally just system of refugee protection to which states contribute either by admitting refugees for resettlement or by supporting refugee integration in other states. Such a system requires relatively strong assurances of compliance by the states involved, which are absent in the international arena. In the European Union, however, the Member States form a predetermined set with prior commitments and supranational institutions that facilitate effective burden sharing. The article traces the failure of the EU's relocation scheme to meet this expectation to misconceptions how to determine fair shares, to incomplete prior harmonization of normative standards, and to contradictions between the Dublin Regulation's principle of assigning responsibility to first countries of entry, on the one hand, and the Schengen principle of open internal borders, on the other hand.

This article analyzes how Member States have used the opportunities and avoided the constraints of the EU's multilevel governance architecture to return unwanted migrants. Drawing on sociological approaches to the EU and a broad understanding of return policies, we investigate the ways in which the northern Member States, notably Germany and Austria, have increasingly relied upon the EU's operational and financial resources to achieve their goal of pursuing a bold return policy. A key ‘usage’ of Europe has been the pooling of political and financial power to externalize and informalize its return policy. At the same time, the northern Member States' deliberate – yet widely under‐researched – ‘non‐use’ of Europe, such as using and maximizing national leeway, has been an equally important strategy to reduce migratory pressure and achieve higher return rates.

Crowdsourcing has attracted increasing attention as a means to enlist online participants in organisational activities. In this paper, we examine crowdsourcing from the perspective of its ethical use in the support of open innovation taking a broader system view of its use. Crowdsourcing has the potential to improve access to knowledge, skills, and creativity in a cost‐effective manner but raises a number of ethical dilemmas. The paper discusses the ethical issues related to knowledge exchange, economics, and relational aspects of crowdsourcing. A guiding framework drawn from the ethics literature is proposed to guide the ethical use of crowdsourcing. A major problem is that crowdsourcing is viewed in a piecemeal fashion and separate from other organisational processes. The trend for organisations to be more digitally collaborative is explored in relation to the need for greater awareness of crowdsourcing implications.

Given the comprehensive influence of mindfulness on human thought and behavior, and the importance of moral reasoning in business decisions, we examine the role of mindfulness as an antecedent to moral reasoning through two studies. In Study 1, we propose and test a theoretically derived model that links mindfulness and moral reasoning, mediated by compassion and egocentric bias using a survey design. In Study 2, we examine whether mindfulness training enhances moral reasoning using an experimental design with graduate students of business management. The findings of Study 1 substantiate the positive association of mindfulness with moral reasoning. We found that this relationship is fully mediated by compassion and egocentric bias. The results of Study 2 suggest that mindfulness meditation training has a positive impact on individuals' states of mindfulness, compassion, and moral reasoning, and decreases egocentric bias. We relate the findings of the study with contemporary neurological research and discuss the theoretical, pedagogical, and managerial implications.

The Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, if were it to be successfully implemented, would be one of the largest regional agreements ever seen. It is the only exemplar to date of a “mega‐regional” FTA for which negotiations have been successfully concluded, and a landmark in evolving approaches to Asia–Pacific integration. As such, quantitative assessments of its potential effects are of considerable interest. One of the most widely used techniques for evaluating the economic impact of regional trading agreements is numerical simulation with computable general equilibrium, or CGE, models. There have now been a large number of papers written that use CGE methods to analyse the potential economic impact of the TPP agreement under varying theoretical and policy assumptions. In this paper we provide a synthesis of the key results that have emerged from the literature, and introduce some new simulation results of our own to anchor the discussion.

In April 2005, Lucio Gutiérrez was removed from office in the context of a fast‐growing economy. With no economic hardship to fuel social outrage, the failure of Gutiérrez illustrates how political and institutional factors can be the most important forces determining presidential survival. In this article, we qualitatively analyse the path toward confrontation between Gutiérrez and the congressional opposition which led to his political demise. We find that Ecuador's weak democratic tradition working through more proximate causes – radicalism, normative preference for democratic institutions and a negative institutional equilibrium – coupled with other institutional and political variables accelerated Lucio Gutiérrez's fall from power.

This article examines the role of non‐financial interest groups in EU financial regulatory decision‐making. While regulatory capture theories clearly helped identify the causes for the incrementality in spite of the major shock the 2008 crisis had caused, this article will consider a range of regulatory policy initiatives that do not neatly conform with this theory. I examine the extent to which non‐financial groups are able to have their preferences met in the making of three different consumer policies: the Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD), stricter regulations of retail investment products (PRIPs/KID) and the reform of EU level supervisory structures. By employing a process‐tracing approach based on qualitative interviews to analyze political responses to the 2008 financial crisis, the article demonstrates that newly mobilized groups could translate key advocacy goals into policy by deploying counter‐expertise and co‐operating with policy‐makers in some cases but not in others.

First embodied by the European Supervisory Authorities in 2010, agency governance in the financial sector has gained momentum with the creation of the Single Resolution Board (SRB) – an EU agency with considerable competencies in banking prudential policy. Within a short period, backed by the ‘ESMA‐Short Selling case’ judgment, agencies have progressed from supporting the European Commission with their quasi‐rule making, to a more prominent role in the decision‐making process, potentially influencing policy‐makers' agenda. By engaging in a qualitative analysis of legal documents, official texts and relevant scholarship, this research note examines the formal framework and practical aspects of SRB's governance, in order to substantiate whether its establishment presents a ‘qualitative increase’ in financial sector agencification. At the same time, the research note highlights problematic issues arising because of the limitations set by the Meroni doctrine arguing that the Board's wide powers ‘on paper’ may prove challenging to implement in practice.

Does corruption influence trust in national institutions in the same way as trust in international institutions? Did this influence change over the economic crisis 2008? Using data from the European Social Survey, we examined the association between corruption and trust in national and European parliaments before and after the start of the Great Recession 2008. We found that over the Crisis, the effect of corruption on trust in national parliament became more negative than it was before 2008. We also discovered a positive association between corruption and trust in the EU before the Crisis. That is, states with a higher level of national corruption seem to have more trust in international institutions, such as the EU. However, this relationship disappears after 2008. Our findings contribute to the debates on the impact of corruption on trust in national and international institutions, and on the consequences of the Great Recession.

Whereas most research focuses on non‐compliant implementation, we lack understanding of implementers' incentives and abilities to outperform national legislation. This study investigates a largely under‐researched question: to what extent practical implementation exceeds levels of legislative compliance with EU requirements? To explain this phenomenon, we focus on the responsiveness of implementing actors to external (participation in transnational networks) and domestic pressures (national societal attitudes) for compliance with EU requirements and the availability of additional expertise at the implementation stage (bottom‐up). Moreover, implementing actors are unlikely to respond in the same way to different types of national legislative problems (top‐down). The findings suggest that implementers often outperform the transposition of EU laws. Practical outperformance depends on the level of societal support for external policies and is a response to incomplete or ambiguous domestic formal rules.

Sociologists of science emphasize the crucial role of the day‐to‐day practices of scholars in defining academic disciplines and epistemological schools. Taking the case of EU Studies (EUS), this article examines the key practice of normative writing. I analyze the degree to which 70 highly‐cited journal articles of political science writing in EUS explicitly or implicitly suggest that European integration or its institutions or policies are bad or good, flourishing or declining. I use this discourse analysis, plus biographical data on the authors of texts, to explain a major temporal pattern. Degrees of normativity in EUS articles progressively declined from the 1970s until the millennium, but then subsequently recovered. Factors ‘external’ to scholarship, such as the progressive intensification of European integration and crises faced by the EU help explain this pattern. However they interacted in complex ways with ‘internal’ academic factors, such as generational replacement, ‘mainstreaming’ and rivalries between sub‐disciplinary and theoretical camps.

This paper provides a feasible approach to estimation and forecasting of multiple structural breaks for vector autoregressions and other multivariate models. Owing to conjugate prior assumptions we obtain a very efficient sampler for the regime allocation variable. A new hierarchical prior is introduced to allow for learning over different structural breaks. The model is extended to independent breaks in regression coefficients and the volatility parameters. Two empirical applications show the improvements the model has over benchmarks. In a macro application with seven variables we empirically demonstrate the benefits from moving from a multivariate structural break model to a set of univariate structural break models to account for heterogeneous break patterns across data series.

We use multivariate unobserved components models to estimate trend and cyclical components in gross domestic product (GDP), credit volumes, and house prices for the USA and the five largest European economies. With the exception of Germany, we find large and long cycles in credit and house prices, which are highly correlated with a medium‐term component in GDP cycles. Differences across countries in the length and size of cycles appear to be related to the properties of national housing markets. The precision of pseudo real‐time estimates of credit and house price cycles is roughly comparable to that of GDP cycles.

This paper proposes a class of models that jointly model returns and ex post variance measures under a Markov switching framework. Both univariate and multivariate return versions of the model are introduced. Estimation can be conducted under a fixed dimension state space or an infinite one. The proposed models can be seen as nonlinear common factor models subject to Markov switching and are able to exploit the information content in both returns and ex post volatility measures. Applications to equity returns compare the proposed models to existing alternatives. The empirical results show that the joint models improve density forecasts for returns and point predictions of return variance. Using the information in ex post volatility measures can increase the precision of parameter estimates, sharpen the inference on the latent state variable, and improve portfolio decisions.

There is a growing phenomenon of brand advocacy, where brands pressure a producer country government to take pro‐worker actions such as respecting the rights of activists and raising minimum wages. This article examines the potential and limits of brand advocacy by developing a conceptual framework and analysing three recent cases of brand advocacy in Cambodia's garment industry. The study shows that brands' action and influence are shaped by issue salience, mobilization structures, political opportunities/contexts, and resource dependency. This article makes both empirical and theoretical contributions. This is one of the first studies delving into the advocacy role of brands in promoting labour rights and conditions vis‐à‐vis government. Moreover, the article develops a testable framework specifying the conditions under which brands are likely to respond, act collectively, and influence government for pro‐worker change. It also offers novel insights by applying social movement lenses and casting brands as social movement actors.

The paper investigates the spatial interdependence of US MNE investments in the MENA region. Given the variations in resource endowments, governance structures and degree of infrastructure availability in MENA countries, one would expect these variables to affect an MNE's choice of FDI location. We do find that domestic non‐spatial factors such as own country inflation and governance measured by bureaucratic quality as well as infrastructure affect a host country's inward FDI. We also found that only one measure of natural resource endowment; that is, oil and gas exports were instrumental in attracting FDI. This non‐spatial result is generally robust and invariant to the two methodologies employed in this study, that is the spatially autoregressive (SAR) model and the spatial Durbin model (SDM). We found that neighbouring countries’ infrastructure availability measured either by “electricity used” or “energy used” affected FDI inflows in a host country. However, this spatial impact was found only in the SDM model. The spatial effects of neighbouring countries’ economic and political conditions and resource endowments were, however, not observed on a host country's inward FDI. The insignificance of both the surrounding market potential and the spatially weighted FDI suggests a purely horizontal motive of MNE investments in the MENA region.

This paper examines the relationship between China's exports, export tax rebates and exchange rate policy. It offers an explanation for why China's exports continued to rise under RMB real appreciations during the Asian financial crisis. Based on a traditional export demand model, we test our hypothesis that the counteracting effects of China's export tax rebate policy have diminished the effectiveness of real exchange rates in facilitating the resolution of trade imbalances under the current pegged exchange rate regime. We find evidence that RMB real appreciations during the crisis negatively affected China's exports, but the negative effects were mitigated by the positive effects of export tax rebates. We also find evidence of a long‐run relationship between China's exports and the other explanatory variables. The empirical evidence suggests that under the pegged exchange rate regime with limited adjustments, real exchange rate movements alone cannot resolve China's external imbalances. The policy implication of this study is that China needs to redirect its decades‐long export‐oriented development strategy to one that emphasises domestic demand‐oriented development and to replace the current pegged exchange rate regime with a market‐oriented more flexible exchange rate regime.

This article aims to explore whether – and if so, how – the EU is perceived as a normative power (NPE) in Turkey in the context of deteriorating Turkey–EU relations. By adopting the Habermasian understanding that legitimacy is a prerequisite for NPE and through employing a focus group methodology novel to NPE research, the article finds that a certain segment of the Turkish public views the EU as a normative power, suggesting that claims for the existence of NPE need to be qualified both by the level of analysis and by the local context which comprises socio‐cultural factors as well as government/opposition dynamics. The article also shows that contestation of the EU's actorness takes place over moral and ethical‐political arguments rather than utility‐based debates, demonstrating that polarization is noticeably present as far as the EU's normativity is concerned, and not on the perceived costs and benefits of EU accession.

The Schengen Agreement is an important milestone in the European integration process. The purpose is to facilitate the flow of goods, services, and persons across intra‐European borders. How successful is it in achieving this goal? We apply an econometric gravity analysis to bilateral trade. Unlike earlier analysis, we acknowledge that Schengen treats different country pairs differently, depending on their relative geographical location. Moreover, we find it crucial to carefully control for other elements of European integration such as membership in the customs union, the single market or the currency union, and to factor in countries' trade with themselves. Schengen has boosted trade by about 2.81 per cent on average, on top of the EU's trade effects (equivalent to a drop in tariffs between 0.46 and 1.02 percentage points). Trade creation effects for services are stronger than for goods, but estimates feature larger parameter uncertainty. Peripheral countries benefit more than central ones. Other aspects of EU integration matter much more for trade than Schengen.

We develop a theory of parent‐child relations that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind, 1967). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by influencing children's preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children's welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality.

A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi‐experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness. Yet the question of how best to separate the lottery‐generated randomization integral to such designs from non‐random preferences and priorities remains open. This paper develops easily‐implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms, while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another. We use these methods to evaluate charter schools in Denver, one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system. The resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance. Our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods, such as those that focus on schools ranked first, while also identifying a more representative average causal effect. We also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors.

We explore the set of preferences defined over temporal lotteries in an infinite horizon setting. We provide utility representations for all preferences that are both recursive and monotone. Our results indicate that the class of monotone recursive preferences includes Uzawa–Epstein preferences and risk‐sensitive preferences, but leaves aside several of the recursive models suggested by Epstein and Zin (1989) and Weil (1990). Our representation result is derived in great generality using Lundberg's (1982, 1985) work on functional equations.

In this paper, we prove the existence of recursive equilibria in a dynamic stochastic model with infinitely lived heterogeneous agents, several commodities, and general inter‐ and intratemporal production. We illustrate the usefulness of our result by providing sufficient conditions for the existence of recursive equilibria in heterogeneous agent versions of both the Lucas asset pricing model and the neoclassical stochastic growth model.

Stochastic discount factor (SDF) processes in dynamic economies admit a permanent‐transitory decomposition in which the permanent component characterizes pricing over long investment horizons. This paper introduces an empirical framework to analyze the permanent‐transitory decomposition of SDF processes. Specifically, we show how to estimate nonparametrically the solution to the Perron–Frobenius eigenfunction problem of Hansen and Scheinkman, 2009. Our empirical framework allows researchers to (i) construct time series of the estimated permanent and transitory components and (ii) estimate the yield and the change of measure which characterize pricing over long investment horizons. We also introduce nonparametric estimators of the continuation value function in a class of models with recursive preferences by reinterpreting the value function recursion as a nonlinear Perron–Frobenius problem. We establish consistency and convergence rates of the eigenfunction estimators and asymptotic normality of the eigenvalue estimator and estimators of related functionals. As an application, we study an economy where the representative agent is endowed with recursive preferences, allowing for general (nonlinear) consumption and earnings growth dynamics.

We develop a theory that rationalizes the use of a dominant unit of account in an economy. Agents enter into non‐contingent contracts with a variety of business partners. Trade unfolds sequentially in credit chains and is subject to random matching. By using a dominant unit of account, agents can lower their exposure to relative price risk, avoid costly default, and create more total surplus. We discuss conditions under which it is optimal to adopt circulating government paper as the dominant unit of account, and the optimal choice of “currency areas” when there is variation in the intensity of trade within and across regions.

We present a flexible and scalable method for computing global solutions of high‐dimensional stochastic dynamic models. Within a time iteration or value function iteration setup, we interpolate functions using an adaptive sparse grid algorithm. With increasing dimensions, sparse grids grow much more slowly than standard tensor product grids. Moreover, adaptivity adds a second layer of sparsity, as grid points are added only where they are most needed, for instance, in regions with steep gradients or at nondifferentiabilities. To further speed up the solution process, our implementation is fully hybrid parallel, combining distributed and shared memory parallelization paradigms, and thus permits an efficient use of high‐performance computing architectures. To demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, we solve two very different types of dynamic models: first, high‐dimensional international real business cycle models with capital adjustment costs and irreversible investment; second, multiproduct menu‐cost models with temporary sales and economies of scope in price setting.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

Empirical studies have now established that many patients make clinical decisions based on models other than Anglo American model of truth‐telling and patient autonomy. Some scholars also add that current medical ethics frameworks and recent proposals for enhancing communication in health professional‐patient relationship have not adequately accommodated these models. In certain clinical contexts where health professional and patients are motivated by significant cultural and religious values, these current frameworks cannot prevent communication breakdown, which can, in turn, jeopardize patient care, cause undue distress to a patient in certain clinical contexts or negatively impact his/her relationship with the community. These empirical studies have now recommended that additional frameworks developed around other models of truth‐telling; and which take very seriously significant value‐differences which sometimes exist between health professional and patients, as well as patient's cultural/religious values or relational capacities, must be developed. This paper contributes towards the development of one. Specifically, this study proposes a framework for truth‐telling developed around African model of truth‐telling by drawing insights from the communitarian concept of ootọ́ amongst the Yoruba people of south west Nigeria. I am optimistic that if this model is incorporated into current medical ethics codes and curricula, it will significantly enhance health professional‐patient communication.

On the basis of development accounting techniques and a factor misallocation framework, we use panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2013 to assess how factor allocation affects economic growth and unbalanced regional development in China. In particular, we decompose economic growth into three parts, namely sector productivity (SP), factor market efficiency (FME) and factor endowment (FE). We then conduct counterfactual analyses to investigate the short and long‐run roles of factor allocation in the income distribution across provinces. The results show that SP, FME and FE can explain 23%, 8.5% and 68.5% of economic growth, while labour, capital and energy reallocation account for aggregate productivity growth of about 47%, −4.8% and −0.1%. Furthermore, when the factors are efficiently allocated, transferring labour (capital, energy) from agriculture (service, industry) to the other sectors will increase the income per capita by 29.5% and 42.5% in the short and long term. Meanwhile, efficient factor allocation accounts for 32% and 29.7% of aggregate productivity and reduces the income variation across provinces by 25.5% and 23% in the short and long run, respectively.

Shelly Kagan argues in his ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’ for four provocative claims: 1. speciesism is not necessarily a mere prejudice; 2. most people are not speciesists; 3. ‘modal personism’ more closely reflects what most people believe, and 4. modal personism might be true. In this article, I object to Kagan's account of what constitutes a ‘mere prejudice’, and I object to the sort of argument he uses to show that most people are not speciesist. I then attempt to motivate, and defend what I take to be the best version of modal personism; answer several problems for the view; and raise other problems that I think are harder to answer.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

This paper has evaluated the WTO trade policy review, and added more information and recent data to examine more closely China's economy and trade. Major trade policies during 2014–16 were summarised as the Belt and Road Initiative, policies facilitating trade and new adjustments to support and promote cross‐border e‐commence. After evaluating data on China's trade and economic performance, it discussed three challenges the Chinese government needs to deal with in the near future.

There is no abstract available for this paper.

This article explores how utopian visions are articulated by chavista activists in Venezuela through the practice of “revolutionary self‐making”. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the city of Valencia between 2008 and 2012, it aims to demonstrate how close attention to the formation of new moral and spiritual selves is an integral part of the way that chavistas enact and experience political protagonism. In doing so, the article seeks to provide a ground level view of utopian visions as they are manifested discursively and practically in everyday life.