financial intermediation reserve requirements and inside money a general equilibrium analysis abstract reserve requirements are examined in a general equilibrium context the paper develops a simple general equilibrium model that includes diverse opportunities for investment and a role for financial intermediaries two versions of the model are considered one is a thought experiment in which currency serves purely to satisfy legal reserve requirements the other is more realistic the model is used to analyze the comparative static effects of changes in reserve requirements the effects of changes in other parameters of the economy in the presence of reserve requirements and some qualitative issues raised by reserve requirements

ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty strong sustainability according to the common definition requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately yet in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed to therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner we propose to use the concept of viability viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability we develop a unifying and general ecological economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases it provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under a mild form of uncertainty and for medium spatial and temporal scales we illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi arid rangelands publication ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty available from https www researchgate net publication 46490456 ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty accessed apr 3 2017

economic viability and small scale fisheries a review abstract globally over 90 of all fishing vessels and about 22 million fishers are considered small scale despite their high numbers small scale fisheries are often understudied they are usually economically and politically marginalized and therefore vulnerable to large scale threats e g globalized markets to support this sector and contribute to its sustainability we argue that it is fundamental to understand how economically viable small scale fisheries are hence the main objective of this article is to critically review and describe the current discourse on the economic viability of small scale fisheries we find that currently economic viability is mainly equated with financial viability where profitability is the goal in consideration of socio economic aspects the maintenance of nonnegative net benefits to society is often not considered in current notions of economic viability while these shortcomings have been acknowledged in some of the existing literature our review shows that they have not yet been addressed comprehensively we therefore conclude that it is necessary to develop or expand current methods to better take into account social aspects when assessing the economic viability of small scale fisheries this would help find solutions to make these fisheries less vulnerable and better equipped to face large scale processes of change

the optimal structure of liquidity provided by a self financed central bank self financed central banks without capital and taxes cannot pay the return on capital to both money and national debt the gaps between the returns on capital and public securities are implicit taxes which are shifted forward to commodities that people finance with these securities because taxes on investment are less efficient than taxes on consumption the national debt should earn interest if people use it to finance expenditures that are investment intensive also because money provides short term liquidity raising the return on national debt delays expenditure to the future hence paying interest on national debt brings a resource windfall during transitions

economic growth and productivity a case study of south korea the economic performance that south korea has achieved over the past quarter century is often likened to a miracle recently much interest has been expressed in the driving forces behind the korean economic transformation using the valueadded measure of output christiansen and cummings have shown that technology measured by tfp accounts for about 43 of korean economic growth between 1960 and 1973 this figure is considerably high compared with recent major studies on japanese and singaporean economic growth we found that the value added framework is not appropriate for the description of the structure of the korean economy and re examined the sources of korean economic growth using the gross output framework surprisingly it has been discovered that only 7 of real output growth in the manufacturing sector during the 1962 1981 period is attributable to technological progress these findings parallel those for the japanese and singapore economies

the incompatibility of valued money and equilibrium policy abstract in an overlapping generations economy an equilibrium is defined such that at each date the young agent determines values for that period s monetary and fiscal instruments a proposition showing money cannot have value in any such equilibrium is proved

the optimum quantity of money theory and evidence in this paper we propose a simple and general model for computing the ramsey optimal inflation tax which includes several models from the previous literature as special cases we show that it cannot be claimed that the friedman rule is always optimal or always non optimal on theoretical grounds the friedman rule is optimal or not depending on conditions related to the shape of various relevant functions one contribution of this paper is to relate these conditions to measurable variables such as the interest rate or the consumption elasticity of money demand we find that it tends to be optimal to tax money when there are economies of scale in the demand for money the scale elasticity is smaller than one and or when money is required for the payment of consumption or wage taxes we find that it tends to be optimal to tax money more heavily when the interest elasticity of money demand is small we present empirical evidence on the parameters that determine the optimal inflation tax calibrating the model to a variety of empirical studies yields an optimal nominal interest rate of less than 1 per year although that finding is sensitive to the calibration

equilibrium policy in an overlapping generations economy abstract this paper offers a mechanism for reducing the number of stationary equilibria that arise in a simple two period lived overlapping generations economy since each equilibrium is associated with a different combination of monetary and fiscal policies i assume that at each date the agent in his second period of life determines how that period s monetary and fiscal instruments will be set i show that the set of stationary equilibria where this occurs is a proper and nonempty subset of the set of stationary competitive equilibria and that at least one such equilibrium is a pareto optimum

discretionary inflation in a general equilibrium model this paper extends the barro and gordon 1983 model to a general equilibrium framework in which the costs and benefits to surprise inflation reflect the preferences technology and market structure of the economy the benefit of such an approach is that we can relate the underlying features of the economy to the size of the inflation bias in particular it can be shown that an increase in the source of the monetary authority s incentive to inflate does not necessarily result in a worsened inflation bias due to offsetting changes in the cost of inflation furthermore changes in the real interest rate affect the monetary authority s incentives and hence the discretionary level of inflation lastly we can show that an increase in the labor share of national income worsens the inflation bias the model also indicates the importance of a nominal rigidity lack of policy precommitment and a distortion for optimal monetary policy to be characterized by a level of discretionary inflation that exceeds the friedman 1969 rule

on the complementarity of commercial policy capital controls and inflation tax this paper studies the optimal use of distortive policies aimed at raising a given real revenue in a general equilibrium framework in which lump sum taxes are absent the policies analysed are an inflation tax commercial policy and an implicit tax on capital inflows it is shown that we would tend to avoid activating an inflation tax for small revenue needs if the policy target were allocative we would tend to use only one policy instrument thus each policy has its own comparative advantage and their combined use is justified when the target is raising government revenue

nonoptimality of the friedman rule with capital income taxation this paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons transaction costs technologies and flexible prices second best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a non zero capital income tax when there are restrictions on taxation of production factors or profits rents our cases of nonoptimality of the friedman rule which differ from those of mulligan and sala i martin 1997 and extend substantially those of schmitt grohe and uribe 2004a follow from the violation of the diamond and mirrlees 1971 principle on production efficiency

the triple bottom line meeting ecological economic and social goals with individual transferable quotas this paper deals with the sustainable management of a renewable resource based on individual and transferable quotas itqs when agents differ in terms of harvesting costs or catch capability in a dynamic bio economic model we determine the feasibility conditions under which a fishery manager can achieve sustainability objectives which simultaneously account for stock conservation economic efficiency and maintenance of fishing activity for the agents along time we show how the viability of quota management strategies based on itq depends on the degree of heterogeneity of users in the fishery the current status and the dynamics of the stock together with the selection of tac schedules in particular for a given stock we compute the maximin effort for a given set of agents and we derive the maximal number of active agents for a given guaranteed effort an application to the nephrops fishery in the bay of biscay illustrates the results

storage and viability of a fishery with resource and market dephased seasonalities in this study we analyse the role of the storageregulation in a fishery s production process when theresource exploited and the market to which theproduction is exported are characterized by seasonaldephased oscillations for this purpose we built up adynamic model drawn from the french guyana shrimpfishery example the underlying objective of the modelis not the maximisation of a given criterion as wouldbe in the optimal control approach but merely themaintenance of the fishery s economical viability thefundamental principle is here to try to preserve asmany as possible viable control options theconditions to achieve and maintain this viability arecaptured in a certain number of constraints theanalysis points out periods and situations within theseason where the fishermen must anticipate theevolution of their storage to avoid violating thoseviability constraints the study also indicates howthe fishery s viability can be ensured even if theexploitation costs exceed the commercial value of thelandings for a finite part of the year however whenthe resource s and or market s oscillations are toolarge the fishery may be not viable any longer and itappears that the crisis can not be removed byinvesting in larger storage capacities

a step beside the maximin path can we sustain the economy by following hartwick s investment rule si la durabilite est interpretee comme la necessite de soutenir le niveau de consommation ou d utilite alors l utilisation d un critere maximin est pertinente l economie soutenable est caracterisee par un niveau d investissement optimal qui satisfait la regle d investissement d hartwick cet article examine comment la durabilite d une economie basee sur une ressource non renouvelable est modifiee au voisinage du sentier maximin c est a dire lorsque la consommation ou les prix sont sous optimaux un indicateur de consommation soutenable est propose pour caracteriser la durabilite des sentiers de consommation constante definis comme des deviations au sentier maximin on decrit en particulier comment une sur consommation presente diminue la soutenabilite de l economie pour les generations futures

time consistent collection of optimal seigniorage a unifying framework this paper reviews the existing literature on the time consistency problem of seigniorage collection when monetary policy is determined by optimal taxation considerations it develops a unifying accounting framework and suggests a general measure for seigniorage which encompasses the standard measures employed in the literature in addition the ex ante optimal solution to the optimal taxation problem is derived and interpreted in relation to the ramsey principle we show that the different recommendations of the public finance literature i e the friedman rule of optimal deflation moderately positive inflation and seigniorage maximizing inflation are specific solutions to the optimal taxation problem the paper continues with a formal illustration of the time consistency problem of the ex ante optimal policy and the characterization of the time consistent solution under discretion as possible solutions to the time consistency problem we consider reputational forces institutional reforms that establish central bank independence and specific ways of asset and debt management in particular it is formally shown that a modified version of the asset and debt management scheme suggested by persson persson and svensson is not only necessary but also sufficient for optimality although this did not hold in their model

a viability analysis for a bio economic model abstract this paper presents a simple dynamic model dealing with the management of a marine renewable resource but instead of studying the ecological and economic interactions in terms of equilibrium or optimal control we pay much attention to the viability of the system or in a symmetric way to crisis situations these viability crisis situations are defined by a set of economic and biological state constraints the analytical study focuses on the compatibility between the state constraints and the controlled dynamics using the mathematical concept of viability kernel we reveal the situations and if possible management options to guarantee a perennial system going further we define overexploitation indicators by the time of crisis function in particular we point out irreversible overexploitation configurations related to the resource extinction

monetary and fiscal policies in a general equilibrium model in the short run if price expectations are inelastic the government has full control of the nominal interest rate while the model is purely competitive the conclusions are similar to those of the standard is lm analysis in the long run it is argued that the proper measure of the government deficit is not the usual one the interests lost by the money holders because of the transactions constraint must be included as an additional government income the seignoriage tax

maximum economic yield fishery management in the face of global warming abstract this paper deals with fishery management in the face of the ecological and economic effects of global warming to achieve this a dynamic bioeconomic model and model based scenarios are considered in which the stock s growth function depends on the sea surface temperature the model is empirically calibrated for the french guiana shrimp fishery using time series collected over the period 1993 2009 three fishing effort strategies are then compared under two contrasted ipcc climate scenarios rcp 8 5 and rcp 2 6 a first harvesting strategy maintains the status quo in terms of fishing effort a more ecologically oriented strategy based on the closure of the fishery is also considered a third strategy which relates to maximum economic yield mey is based on the optimisation of the net present value derived from fishing the results first show that status quo fishing intensity combined with global warming leads to the collapse of the fishery in the long run secondly it turns out that the closure strategy preserves stock viability especially under the optimistic climate scenario thirdly the mey strategy makes it possible to satisfy bioeconomic performances requirements with positive stock and profit once again especially under the optimistic warming scenario consequently mey emerges as a relevant bioeconomic strategy in terms of adaptation to climate change but only in connection with climate change mitigation

the optimal inflation tax when money reduces transactions costs abstract it has been argued that if money acts as an intermediate good the optimal inflation tax is zero this paper reexamines such a claim in the context of a model in which money reduces transactions costs it is shown that modeling money as an intermediate good does not necessarily imply that the optimal inflation tax is zero the optimality of a zero inflation tax depends on the properties of the transactions costs technology in particular if the transactions costs technology does not exhibit constant returns to scale it is optimal to resort to the inflation tax

on government deficits and speculation the authors consider a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a representative consumer investor and two producing firms all the assets are real investments of capital into productive processes government expenditures taxes and money financing are explicitly incorporated the holding of money is modeled through a cash in advance constraint fundamental budget deficits generated by flat rate expenditure and income tax rules can be financed by printing money or randomly levying temporary wealth taxes modeled as a poisson process characterization and properties of the balanced budget rational expectations equilibrium are analyzed it is shown that government may promote growth by adjusting the fundamental deficit copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the optimum quantity of money rule in the theory of public finance this paper examines optimal tax policy in a monetary economy in which money serves as an intermediate good that helps facilitate the conversion of scarce resources into tinal consumption goods by enabling consumers to economize on the costs of transacting it is shown that in such an environment even though distorting taxes must be levied for revenue purposes the optimal tax structure calls for abstaining from inflationary finance and adopting the optimum quantity of money rule

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

changes in social welfare and sustainability theoretical issues and empirical evidence abstract we analyze the time derivative of a ramsey koopmans social welfare function r k swf as an indicator of genuine investment and current change in social welfare csw conditions when feedback or arbitrary rules are used for selecting policy variables in non optimizing economies when policy variables are selected arbitrarily their accounting prices should determine current csw in addition to the accounting prices of the economy s assets and genuine investment should be adjusted accordingly we use our theoretical framework to characterize csw conditions for non optimizing economies based on direct estimation of accounting prices we use our theoretical model to provide empirical evidence regarding the csw conditions for the greek economy

intertemporal equity and efficient allocation of resources abstract competitive paths which are efficient are shown to satisfy a terminal cost minimization condition thereby providing a continuous time counterpart to the discrete time result due to malinvaud using this result competitive paths which are equitable and efficient are shown to satisfy hartwick s investment rule which states that the value of net investment is zero at each date our result indicates that hartwick s rule can help to signal inefficiency of competitive equitable paths journal of economic literature classification numbers c61 d90 o41

are there economies of scale in the demand for money by firms some panel data estimates abstract we estimate elasticities of scale in the demand for money by firms using firm level panel data from spain the uk and the us this elasticity is one for spain and the uk but smaller for the us we find that the errors in the money demand equations contain two terms that are correlated with sales firstly a permanent firm effect that captures differences in technological sophistication secondly a measurement error in sales which becomes relevant when relying on changes in sales to account for fixed effects failure to control for these correlated unobservable terms results in important biases in the estimated sales elasticities

reconciling the green accounts in an optimally managed economy green nationalexpenditure is equal to the linearization of the hamiltonian from theproblem of maximizing discounted social utility herein we utilize theadjoint conditions to add to the basis for viewing green nnp as an index ofsocial utility under ideal conditions and to show the equality of netnational income and expenditure the results apply even when returns toscale are increasing or decreasing unpriced net environmental benefitsshould be incorporated into comprehensive nnp in much the same way as thedisutility of labor otherwise current practices of the national accountscan be defended including the treatment of capital gains

characterizing sustainability the converse of hartwick s rule this note offers a general proof of the converse of hartwick s rule namely that in an economy with stationary instantaneous preferences and a stationary technology an efficient constant utility path is characterized by the value of net investments being zero at each point in time in a one consumption economy with two stocks a stock of a natural resource and a stock of man made capital this means that if consumption remains constant at the maximum sustainable level then the accumulation of man made capital always exactly compensates in value for the depletion of the natural resource

an environmental economic measure of sustainable development abstract a central issue in the study of sustainable development is the interplay of growth and sacrifice in a dynamic economy this paper investigates the relationship among current consumption sacrifice and sustainability improvement in a general context and in two canonical stylized economies we argue that the maximin value of utility measures what is sustainable and provides the limit to growth maximin value is interpreted as a dynamic environmental economic carrying capacity and current utility as an environmental economic footprint the time derivative of maximin value is interpreted as net investment in sustainability improvement it is called durable savings to distinguish it from genuine savings usually computed with discounted utilitarian prices

seigniorage old and new policy issues introduction abstract seigniorage is at the crossroad of many avenues of research a summary survey of older and more recent developments from the static allocative approach in the differential taxation framework to policy analyses of the effects of joining the ems for high deficit countries shows that there may be some disorderly traffic and that definite policy conclusions can hardly be drawn from models which so often neglect relevant markets and variables and in particular the financial sectors and financial assets

a comparative analysis of the use of information inputs in the manufacturing sectors of korea and japan abstract the paper examines the use of two information inputs information labor and purchased information services in korean and japanese manufacturing sectors in 1980 marginal products and substitution elasticities are calculated from translog production function estimates for the average manufacturing sector both inputs seem to be relatively more underused in korea second the elasticity estimates suggest several hypotheses about the growth of private bureaucracies in the two economies the results are unlikely to apply to other economies which have not yet attained an advanced industrial structure a simplistic stages theory of economic development based on the growth of the information labor force is rejected

choice of technology in small and large firms grain milling in tanzania abstract it is not uncommon to find many production units in low income labor abundant and capital scarce economies such as tanzania employing sophisticated and capital intensive production techniques in such circumstances a technology choice problem exists in the sense that the technologies in use and more often the products being produced are not compatible with the resource endowment of the economy and the income levels of the majority of the population this paper evaluates the relative performance of small and large scale grain milling techniques in tanzania to identify appropriate ones and explain why some firms select inappropriate techniques and products the consequences of technology choice are then discussed within the context of employment creation output expansion surplus generation skill formation economies of scale and overall resource use

is the friedman rule optimal when money is an intermediate good in contrast to the recent literature on the optimal inflation tax we show that in models where money reduces transactions costs it is optimal to set the inflation tax to zero when seigniorage is replaced by revenue from distortionary taxes the main reasons for this result are that the variable costs of supplying real balances are negligible and the inflation tax is a unit tax we also show that the intermediate good optimal taxation rules in the public finance literature cannot be directly applied both when money is costless and when it requires resources to be produced

optimal fiscal and monetary policy some recent results this paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models in terms of fiscal policy optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average in terms of monetary policy the friedman rule is optimal nominal interest rates are zero and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy

the determinants of the public debt in the united states 1953 1978 barro claims that since the public rationally forecasts and discounts future taxes government debt does not represent net wealth to the public and therefore does not affect any real economic variables then why are there ever deficits barro has presented a theory of optimal deficits based on intertemporal tax smoothing the theory predicts that nominal debt grows in proportion to anticipated inflation varies contracyclically with respect to real income cycles and varies procyclically with respect to war cycles barro tested his theory using annual american data for 1922 76 and found weak support for his theory this paper reexamines barro s tests using quarterly american data for 1953 q1 to 1978 q4 and finds stronger support for barro s theory than barro found using annual data this paper also concludes that state and local governments do not engage in tax smoothing behavior probably due to considerations of migration and that the debt held by the central bank should be included in the definition of public debt

net national product as an indicator of sustainability net national product nnp can potentially serve several objectives among others to measure value added and to be an indicator of welfare in the aftermath of the world commission on environment and development however it also seems important to investigate whether the concept of nnp can serve as an indicator of sustainability my point of departure following hicks 1946 ch 14 is therefore to require that nnp should measure what can be consumed in the present period without reducing future consumption possibilities and in line with this to argue that the nnp should equal the maximum per capita consumption level that can be sustained if sufficiently many facilitating assumptions are made then a concept of nnp that serves as an exact indicator of sustainability can easily be constructed for instance for a closed economy with a constant population a stationary technology and with only one capital good it follows that the present does not reduce future consumption possibilities if and only if it does not decrease the stock of the single capital good hence under the assumption that the one capital good k is identical to the one consumption good x nnp defined as y x k measures the maximal sustainable consumption at time t because then x y is equivalent to k the purpose of this note is to establish that with multiple capital goods it is not in general possible to construct an exact indicator of sustainability on the

international market linkages and optimal monetary policy abstract the interrelation among portfolio choice and labor supply decisions and real balance effects is examined under flexible exchange rates on the asset menu are home currency domestic government bonds and foreign bonds with commodity market linkages the real balance effect is highlighted as the inefficiency of an economy with positive government bonds is demonstrated while the additional linkage of interest rates through covered interest parity may transform an economy where only money is useful into an economy in which both money and government bonds are beneficial

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

value and income abstract this paper argues that income is a flow of value to society therefore an economic modeler s choice of a concept of value imposes a concept of income the argument is used to distinguish three concepts of national income 1 in a discounted utilitarian model which is usually the basis for theoretic discussions of net national income the formulation of value imposes a concept of income that is not observable and hence does not provide income statistics 2 in a perfectly competitive economy national income is in principle observable study of the competitive model provides a theoretic foundation for national accounting with extensions to distorted economies however two unobservable components of ideal income consumers surplus and capital gains are perforce neglected 3 a maximin program is the mathematical representation of another value sustaining an economy it employs a method of intertemporal valuation that does not involve discounting income is sustained value since a maximin program is not expressed for a distorted economy there is no observable indicator of whether an economy is being sustained

inflation employment and welfare in the presence of transactions costs for some time now two issues of primary importance in macroeconomics and monetary theory have been the relation between inflation and unemployment the phillips curve and the optimum rate of inflation the optimum quantity of money in both of these areas the work of friedman and phelps has been influential friedman 1968 and phelps 1970 emphasized the role of inflationary expectations in generating a short run phillips curve like tradeoff but argued that in the long run the phillips curve is vertical that is friedman and phelps claimed that in the long run defined as the time period within which expectations fully adjust to actual circumstances inflation and employment should be uncorrelated more recently friedman 1977 has argued that since the rate of inflation and its variability tend to be positively related inflation and employment may be negatively related in the long run this is the positively sloped phillips curve phenomenon in recent years the link between inflation and employment has continued to receive considerable attention the vast rational expectations literature on the role of monetary policy and the equilibrium approach to the business cycle are in large part an outgrowth of the earlier phillips curve controversy the notion that there is an inverse long run relation between inflation and employment has recently received theoretical support from barro and santomero 1976 stockman 1981 and aschauer and greenwood 1983 related studies concerning the real effects of inflation have been undertaken by jovanovic 1982 stockman 1984 and abel 1985 the common element running through all of these papers is that the real effects of inflation arise from the transactions technology that underlies money demand l

the welfare economic theory of green national accounts this paper takes a critical look at the literature on green national accounts the problem studied is to find a linear index of economic variables that responds to perturbations in the same direction as social well being the thesis of a large literature that net national product which is a flow is that index in closed economies is shown in some interpretations to be simply false and in others to suffer from deep estimation problems it is argued that capital depreciation using shadow prices should certainly be included in national accounts but that the right welfare index is a comprehensive measure of wealth defined as the shadow value of an economy s stock of all capital assets it is shown that comprehensive wealth is usable as a criterion for policy evaluation as well as for determining sustainable economic development

scale economies the value of time and the demand for money longitudinal evidence from firms compustat data on 12 000 firms for the years 1961 92 indicate that large firms hold less cash as a percentage of sale than small ones whether comparisons are made within or across industries the clasticity of cash balance with respect to sales is about 0 8 firms headquartered in counties with high wages hold more money for a given level of sales a finding consistent with the idea that time can substitute for mony in the provision of transactions services the estimates are consistent with both scale economies in the holding of money and secular declines in velocity

characterization of the optimal tax on money when it functions as a medium of exchange abstract this paper compares the relative efficiency of the implicit taxation of money and the explicit taxation of real commodities to finance a given amount of government expenditures in the model used money has the property of reducing transactions costs a sufficient condition for a tax on money to be welfare dominated by a linear tax on consumption expenditures is characterized in terms of a few parameters very familiar in macroeconomics this characterization is especially useful in the cases of heterogeneous consumers and increasing returns to scale in transactions since then the optimal tax on money may in principle be positive

explaining fiscal policies and inflation in developing countries abstract in this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of inflation seigniorage and fiscal deficits in developing countries we first test the optimal taxation theory of inflation for a group of 21 lcds we find that the implications of this theory are rejected for all these countries we then proceed to implement a number of tests based on the new political economy approach to macroeconomic policies we deal with some of the implications of a credibility and reputation model and of a strategic government behavior model we find that the data support the most important predictions of the political economy view of fiscal policy our measures of political instability and political polarization play an important role in explaining cross country differences in seigniorage inflation government borrowing and fiscal deficits we end by discussing directions for future research

sustained development of a society with a renewable resource abstract a maximin program is applied to a policy of sustaining a simple society whose population is dependent on a resource subject to logistic growth regular and non regular paths are characterized there are continua of both regular and non regular solutions the type depending on the initial conditions a non regular path involves an intermediate part in which the sustainment constraint is not effective all solutions are time consistent and pareto optimal because a problem may not be regular it is not valid to assume that sustainment implies constant utility

ces production functions in manufacturing and problems of industrialization in ldcs evidence from korea information about the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is very important in ldcs for several reasons first development policies in many ldcs pursue both rapid industrialization and widespread distribution of its benefits by expanding industrial employment opportunities if the elasticity of substitution is high it is relatively easy to expand employment opportunities without sacrificing output growth by manipulating relative factor prices properly or for that matter by reducing the wage rental ratio since the factor intensities of output depend on relative factor prices second high elasticity of substitution makes possible a flexible response to external changes for example a factor price change in the international market i e an oil price shock can be partially absorbed by adopting laborintensive production processes in this article i am going to discuss ces production functions for two digit industries in korea one of my main purposes in this article is to show empirically that the elasticities of substitution are not zero in almost all of korea s industries regardless of the firm s size 2 furthermore i shall show that production functions differ across different size groups of business firms in a given industry since it is widely acknowledged that wage rental ratios in small and medium firms are lower than in large firms 3 nonzero elasticities of substitution between labor and capital in small medium firms will have an important policy implication that is by encouraging the activities of smalland medium sized firms one can expand employment opportunities in the manufacturing sector and enhance the efficiency of the economy by adjusting the industrial structure to be consistent with domestic factor endowments it is conceivable that the direct importation of production technologies

evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies we are interested in three related questions 1 how should accounting prices be estimated 2 how should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy 3 how can we check whether intergenerational well being will be sustained along a projected economic programme we do not presume that the economy is convex nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens we show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained we also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth computed in terms of the accounting prices can be used as an index for problems 2 and 3 above the remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources transacted in a few well known economic institutions

optimal financing of the government s budget taxes bonds or money financing of the government s budget in particular we consider taxation bond issuance and money creation as alternative means of financing these issues are not new some of them were extensively explored in the public finance literature some of them were explored in the monetary theory literature what we believe to be new however is that our work integrates the relevant elements from both strands of literature into a unified general equilibrium framework with this approach we are able to jointly determine the optimal combination of tax rates the rate of inflation and the interest rate on government bonds this type of analysis enables us to ask whether the rate of inflation should be positive or negative and to provide simple conditions on compensated demand elasticities which determine the answer it also enables us to reconsider milton friedman s optimum quantity of money rule in a public finance framework without lump sum taxes and to show how this rule should be modified in addition we provide insight into the desirability of a social security scheme by showing that such a program is undesirable when social security payments are financed

optimal taxation and inflation in an open economy abstract this paper examines the role of the inflation tax in the optimal revenue raising tax package for a small open economy where money is held because it serves to reduce transacttions costs associated with purchasing goods consumers choose whether domestic money or foreign money will serve as the medium of exchange for various goods purchases so as to minimize such costs results are derived regarding the appropriate role of taxes on domestic and foreign money in the optimal tax structure it is demonstrated that with a sufficiently rich tax structure friedman s rule which calls for a monetary policy that drives the nominal interest rate to zero is a component of the optimal tax policy

maximin viability and sustainability the maximin criterion defines the highest utility level that can be sustained in an intergenerational equity perspective the viability approach makes it possible to characterize all the economic trajectories sustaining a given not necessarily maximal utility level in this paper we exhibit the strong links between maximin and viability we show that the value function of the maximin problem can be obtained in the viability framework and that the maximin path is a particular viable path this result allows us to extend the recommendations of the maximin approach beyond optimality to characterize the sustainability of economic trajectories which differ from the maximin path attention is especially paid to non negative net investment at maximin accounting prices which is shown to be necessary to maintain the productive capacity of the economy whether the development path is optimal or not our results provide a new theoretical ground to account for sustainability in imperfect economies based on maximin prices

sustainability of an economy relying on two reproducible assets evaluating the sustainability of a society requires a system of shadow or accounting values derived from the sustainability objective as a first step toward the derivation of such shadow values for a maximin objective this paper studies an economy composed of two reproducible assets each producing one of two consumption goods the effect of the substitutability between goods in utility is studied by postulating in turn neoclassical diminishing marginal substitutability perfect substitutability and perfect complementarity the degree of substitutability has strong effects on the maximin solution affecting the regularity or non regularity of the program and on the accounting values this has important consequences for the computation of genuine savings and the sustainability prospects of future generations

optimality of the friedman rule in economies with distorting taxes abstract we find conditions for the friedman rule to be optimal in three standard monetary models our main contribution is to shed light on two issues in the literature first the conventional view maintains that when money is a final good its services should be taxed moreover if money demand is interest inelastic its services should be taxed heavily we show that this view is incorrect second there is an ongoing controversy about whether the optimality of the friedman rule is connected to the intermediate goods result from public finance we resolve this controversy by showing a deep connection between these results

the tax treatment of financial intermediation whether and how to tax financial intermediation services is unclear because individual preferences are not defined directly over financial services but only over the goods that are consumed intermediation services facilitate consumption but do not directly provide utility in this paper we show how taxing goods alone but not financial services can be welfare preferred to taxing both goods and financial services on an equal yield basis and at a lower rate in a general equilibrium model with transactions costs this is consistent with foley s 1970 and hahn s 1971 well known treatments of general equilibrium with transactions costs which suggest that the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics may not hold in such circumstances use of more intermediation services yields gains from trade but reduces resources available for provision of other consumption goods we explore the net effect first using a numerical example and then using u s data drawing out implications for policy

on the welfare significance of green accounting as taught by parable abstract green nnp is a national accounting concept that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also depletion of environmental assets for a time autonomous technology green nnp has a rigorous welfare interpretation as an exact measure of the economy s future power to consume the present paper extends the standard framework to cover the case of labor augmenting technological progress for this special case of time dependence a powerful conceptual parable applies it is as if the conclusion from a simple minded welfare story told by the standard neoclassical one sector growth model covers a far more general situation involving any number of different types of capital any convex production possibilities set and fully optimizing behavior implications and applications are discussed

political and monetary institutions and public financial policies in the industrial countries institutions and policies vittorio grilli donato masciandaro and guido tabellini why do countries as similar as the industrialized oecd countries go through such different experience in terms of public deficits and debts or in terms of inflation the answer cannot come from macroeconomic policy responses to different disturbances nor from the principles of optimal taxation but rather from politics this article focuses on the role that particular institutions exert in providing constraints and incentives which shape the actions of policymakers the electoral process and political traditions affect the ability of governments to deal with deficits and mounting debts what seems to matter most it is found is the effect of the durability of governments governments with short horizons act myopically and never quite tackle the hard choices such governments typically exist in countries with an electoral system favouring many small political parties central bank independence promotes low inflation with no apparent costs in terms of real economic performance irrespective of the political institutions in fact there is no link between monetary and fiscal discipline these findings carry powerful implications for countries facing high indebtedness or stubborn inflation but also for the construction of the european economic and monetary union

ecoviability for small scale fisheries in the context of food security constraints this paper applies a stochastic viability approach to a tropical small scale fishery offering a theoretical and empirical example of ecosystem based fishery management approach that accounts for food security the model integrates multi species multi fleet and uncertainty as well as profitability food production and demographic growth it is calibrated over the period 2006 2010 using monthly catch and effort data from the french guiana s coastal fishery involving thirteen species and four fleets using projections at the horizon 2040 different management strategies and scenarios are compared from a viability viewpoint thus accounting for biodiversity preservation fleet profitability and food security the analysis shows that under certain conditions viable options can be identified which allow fishing intensity and production to be increased to respond to food security requirements but with minimum impacts on the marine resources

on sustainability and social welfare abstract this paper proposes to define sustainability in terms of leaving it possible for future generations to sustain certain defined targets it is shown that variants of genuine savings and the ecological footprint can then serve as indicators of sustainability the link between sustainability and intergenerational welfare is examined and it is shown how to incorporate indicators of sustainability into a social welfare measure including risk in the analysis

sustainability constraints versus optimality versus intertemporal concern and axioms versus data sustainable sustained or survivable development are defined here as distinct sustainability constraints on intertemporal distribution in a context which ignores uncertainty environmental and intratemporal concerns such constraints are neither self contradictory nor redundant for they can conflict with maximizing the present value of utility optimality nor inferior since the axioms underlying optimality are ethically arbitrary and refuted by empirical psychological data axiomatic arguments may clarify but cannot resolve debates about intertemporal concerns data suggest that sustainability constraints are not respected and that intertemporal welfare functions containing a preference for sustained improvement may better reflect what bodies politic mean by sustainability

a simple general equilibrium version of the baumol tobin model this paper presents a simple general equilibrium model that includes optimizing choices of the frequency of trips to the bank the model is used to analyze the effect of inflation on the capital stock the interest elasticity of money demand the optimum quantity of money and the welfare costs of inflationary finance

a characterization of sustainability with indicators abstract economists favor the use of criteria to characterize sustainability in practice policy makers use indicators i e measurements based on the current economic state and decisions representing given sustainability issues in this paper i introduce a criterion characterizing sustainability with indicators and thresholds acting as constraints i interpret the thresholds as minimal rights to be guaranteed to all generations and define sustainable trajectories as those satisfying all the constraints at all times the new criterion is a generalized maximin criterion the approach is applied to a simple production consumption economy with non renewable resources to derive some policy recommendations on the use of indicators to deal with sustainability i discuss the implications of such a criterion in terms of trade off between sustainability thresholds efficiency and time consistency in particular the resulting problem is time inconsistent and sustainability thresholds may be revised over time following the time inconsistent policy based on indicators with dynamic revision of the thresholds may however result in a sustained utility path and even in utility growth