the historical evolution of china s tourism development policies 1949 2013 a quantitative research approach abstract starting from the multi dimensional analysis of the 379 tourism policy documents issued by central government and related departments and ministries from 1949 to 2013 this article analyzes the evolution of china s tourism development policies since the founding of china using a perspective the research results show that 1 tourism policy in china has evolved from being based on the administrative allocation of resources to a market based allocation of resources constrained by administrative powers 2 the targets for tourism policy have always been developed with the strategic objectives of national economic and social development in mind these can be divided into four stages servicing foreign affairs developing the business economy providing a new growth point in the economy and becoming a national strategic pillar industry 3 tourism policy is mainly used for micro supervision tourism policy formulation lacks the ability to macro control the factors of production such as capital land technology and talent 4 increasing numbers of government departments are becoming involved in formulating tourism policy but policy efforts have become more stable recent studies suggest that the effective operation of the tourism economy is highly dependent on the institutional arrangements within the wider social economic system thus when the tourism law was enacted the development of the chinese tourism industry entered a new stage in this new stage technological advances market demand and the competition and cooperative relationships among companies will jointly lead innovation in the tourism industry innovation such as new products and new business models will in turn be the base for tourism industry development furthermore industrial macroeconomic regulation and public service will become the basic elements of government tourism management under the new law

permanent income hedonic prices and demand for housing new evidence abstract housing demand is examined by looking quite specifically at the income and price variables based on individual household data permanent and transitory incomes are computed through instrumental variables related to human and nonhuman wealth a price is constructed by spatially varying hedonic techniques separation of measured income into permanent and transitory components substantially improves the predictive power of the housing demand estimation and leads to demand elasticities of 1 and 1 with respect to permanent income and price the permanent income elasticity is roughly twice the measured income elasticity

imperfect risk adjustment risk preferences and sorting in competitive health insurance markets abstract i develop a model of insurer price setting and consumer welfare under risk adjustment a policy commonly used to combat inefficient sorting due to adverse selection in health insurance markets i use the model to illustrate graphically that risk adjustment causes health plan prices to be based on costs not predicted by the risk adjustment model residual costs rather than total costs either weakening or exacerbating selection problems depending on the correlation between demand and costs predicted by the risk adjustment model i then use a structural model to estimate the welfare consequences of risk adjustment finding a welfare gain of over 600 per person year

factors affecting tourism policy implementation a conceptual framework and a case study in china abstract the understanding of tourism policy making and implementation is important due to the multi faceted nature of tourism and the complexity in inter organizational relations and collaborative policy making this paper aims at contributing to the frameworks and theories regarding the implementation of tourism policy by considering the factors identified in both the top down and bottom up approaches of policy implementation the main purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual framework describing the factors affecting the implementation of tourism policy and illustrate the framework with the experience of tourism policy implementation at the local level in china it was found that four factors including economic and social macro environment institutional arrangements inter organizational relations ior and inter organizational co ordination structures ioc and interest groups were influential in the implementation of tourism policy furthermore the case study in china identified the roles of each factor in terms of constraints and facilitators in the real world context and enriched the conceptual framework by illustrating the relationships among factors this study sheds light on concepts and theories regarding tourism policy implementation it also addresses some solutions which may enrich the tourism policy literature in an asian and developing country context

pricing and welfare in health plan choice premiums in health insurance markets frequently do not reflect individual differences in costs either because consumers have private information or because prices are not risk rated this creates inefficiencies when consumers self select into plans we develop a simple econometric model to study this problem and estimate it using data on small employers we find a welfare loss of 2 11 percent of coverage costs compared to what is feasible with risk rating only about one quarter of this is due to inefficiently chosen uniform contribution levels we also investigate the reclassification risk created by risk rating individual incremental premiums finding only a modest welfare cost

replicative evidence on the demand for owner occupied and rental housing some important results in urban economic theory and policy analysis rest upon housing demand and its associated price and income elasticities the extent to which the affluent choose to live away from the city s center thus increasing their commuting time depends on the relative income elasticities of housing demand and valuation of leisure in a more policy oriented framework the relative efficacies of income as opposed to housing price subsidies for low income households depend on the relative values of income and price elasticities

a cge assessment of singapore s tourism policies abstract the extraordinary performance of the singapore tourism industry is attributed among other factors to the active tourism policies of the singapore government but the effectiveness of singapore tourism policies has never been quantified by building a cge model for the singapore economy with an emphasis on tourism and utilising the recently published singapore input output tables and tourism survey data this study has gauged economic impact of singapore inbound tourism and the effectiveness of singapore tourism policies based on the simulated macroeconomic and sectoral effects the modelling results show that in terms of both real gdp and total tourism expenditure tourism gst deduction is the most effective policy followed by the tourism activity subsidy policy the tourism industry subsidy policy is proven to be the least effective since different tourism policies have different strengths and weaknesses a balanced and focused approach to tourism policy is suggested for policy makers

identifying willingness to pay for heterogeneous goods with factorial survey methods abstract it has been difficult to estimate underlying willingness to pay parameters for attributes of heterogeneous goods such as environmental quality though hedonic price functions this paper links sociological factorial survey analysis with hedonic price analysis vignettes are multidimensional vectors constructed orthogonally differences among vignette ratings allow estimation of individual valuations of the attributes the paper establishes a theoretical framework linking the two analyses vignette and hedonic price functions are then estimated and linked at the margin to provide dollar values for marginal vignette ratings ratios of these ratings are then used to impute willingness to pay for attributes

multiple dimensions of private information evidence from the long term care insurance market we demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long term care insurance market two types of people purchase insurance individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private information that they have strong taste for insurance ex post the former are higher risk than insurance companies expect while the latter are lower risk in aggregate those with more insurance are not higher risk our results demonstrate that insurance markets may suffer from asymmetric information even absent a positive correlation between insurance coverage and risk occurrence the results also suggest a general test for asymmetric information

an econometric model of housing price permanent income tenure choice and housing demand abstract this paper addresses the determination of housing price permanent income tenure choice and housing demand full housing demand elasticities incorporate the interactive effects among the four stages of the model price and income have major effects in the tenure choice equation sociodemographic variables such as age have complex effects that may be lost in simpler forms of estimation

estimating demand for owner occupied housing subject to the income tax the federal income tax code includes several provisions which benefit homeowners first the imputed rent from the ownership of a house is not incorporated into a household s taxable income second mortgage interest and property tax payments are tax deductible finally capital gains go untaxed if they are reinvested these provisions reduce the effective price of housing services by reducing the factor prices for land and structure but they do not reduce the price of operating inputs nor do they necessarily reduce the prices of land and structure proportionately thus they alter the optimum factor input combinations in the production of owner occupant housing services by influencing relative factor prices the homeowner tax provisions also increase effective income if the deductions and exclusions are large enough to shift the households into a lower tax bracket in this case the household receives an effective income transfer in the amount of income saved by not having to pay taxes at a higher rate few attempts at quantifying owner occupant demand behavior have systematically incorporated federal income tax provisions none have considered the effects of these provisions on housing service production behavior maisel et al 121 conducted a study in which income but not price was adjusted for taxes while straszheim 21 using household interview data made an adjustment to the gross price of housing without adjusting income in an analysis of the welfare effects of owner occupant tax benefits laidler l l acknowledges that taxes alter both price and income but uses an estimate of price elasticity which does not incorporate income tax provisions rosen 18 191 however has adjusted both price and income for taxes in a recent estimation of housing demand while rosen s work represents a

towards new tourism policies the importance of environmental and sociocultural factors abstract unrestricted tourism growth could lead to the positive economic effects of tourism being outweighed by significant social and environmental disadvantages which could in turn translate the economic benefits into disadvantages this process derives not only from tourism effects per se but also from changes in the social structure this article calls for not merely economic and technical adjustments in policies but for a fundamental political transformation in the conception of tourism and recreation

estimating welfare in insurance markets using variation in prices we provide a graphical illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection we then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of insurance such variation together with quantity data allows us to estimate the demand for insurance the same variation together with cost data allows us to estimate how insurers costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price the slope of this estimated cost curve provides a direct test for both the existence and the nature of selection and the combination of demand and cost curves can be used to estimate welfare we illustrate our approach by applying it to data on employerprovided health insurance from one specific company we detect adverse selection but estimate that the quantitative welfare implications associated with inefficient pricing in our particular application are small in both absolute and relative terms

product design in selection markets insurers choose plan characteristics to sort for profitable consumers in a model with multidimensional types this sorting incentive is proportional to the covariance among marginal consumers between marginal willingness to pay and cost to the insurer standard forms of cost sharing successfully repel costly consumers but reducing plan comprehensiveness instead alienates the risk averse in a perfectly competitive equilibrium the sorting incentive must vanish market power increases insurance quality and welfare nonetheless a competitive equilibrium with positive insurance is possible when insurance value is suciently negatively correlated with cost however in a calibration to handel hendel and whinston 2013 s data equilibrium still fails to exist

the measurement and trend of housing inequality in the united states 1978 85 inequality in housing services for renters owners and all households in the united states is estimated for 1978 and 1985 hedonic techniques are applied to data from the american housing survey to derive values for housing services that include publicly provided as well as subsidized housing we find significant disparities in housing but substantially less inequality than in incomes in 1978 the top decile garnered 19 2 of housing services while the bottom decile received only 5 1 the trend however is towards greater equality in housing with large and statistically significant shifts across all deciles by 1985 the share of the top decile dropped to 16 3 a percentage decrease in share of 15 3 while that of the bottom decile rose to 5 7 a percentage increase of 11 4

theory and estimation in the economics of housing demand the main purpose of this paper is to review recent theoretical and empirical developments in the economics of housing demand in particular we ask what is known concerning the permanent income elasticity of housing demand vis a vis the current or measured income elasticity what is known concerning price elasticities what is the appropriate functional form for housing demand equations what is the role of demographic variables what is known concerning dynamic aspects of housing demand what appear to be the major sources of bias in existing estimates of demand equations

how does risk selection respond to risk adjustment new evidence from the medicare advantage program to combat adverse selection governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees scores from risk adjustment formulae in 2004 medicare began to risk adjust capitation payments to private medicare advantage ma plans to reduce selection driven overpayments but because the variance of medical costs increases with the predicted mean incentivizing enrollment of individuals with higher scores can increase the scope for enrolling overpriced individuals with costs significantly below the formula s prediction indeed after risk adjustment ma plans enrolled individuals with higher scores but lower costs conditional on their score we find no evidence that overpayments were on net reduced

optimal risk adjustment in markets with adverse selection an application to managed care it is well known that adverse selection causes distortions in contracts in markets with asymmetric information taxing inefficient contracts and subsidizing the efficient ones can improve market outcomes bruce c greenwald and joseph e stiglitz 1986 although regulators rarely seem to implement tax and subsidy schemes with adverse selection motives in mind contracts are often complex and incomplete and it is the inefficient elements of the contract that are difficult to verify and hence tax or subsidize this is precisely the reason that in health insurance markets rather than subsidizing contracts regulators and payers contend with adverse selection by taxing and subsidizing the price paid to insuring health plans on the basis of observable characteristics of the persons joining the plan a practice known as risk adjustment risk adjusted premiums are paid to managed care plans plans that ration care by management rather than by conventional approaches like coinsurance and deductibles and offer a bundle of characteristics quality access for many services that is fundamentally outside the scope of direct regulation selection related incentives threaten the efficiency and fairness of this organization of health insurance markets by inducing plans to distort the quality of the services they offer to discourage high cost persons from joining the plan as managed care becomes the predominant source of health care for residents of the united states and many other countries payers attempt to address this incentive by setting a risk adjusted price that pays more for more expensive enrollees as it is conventionally practiced risk adjustment sets prices for people proportional to their expected cost based on observable characteristics the federal medicare program for example has used age sex welfare status and county of residence adjusters to set prices to managed care plans to convey how what we term conventional risk adjustment works suppose age is the risk adjuster for a medicare population over 65 if it is determined that the 75to 84 year old population costs 20 percent more than the overall average in medicare the assumption in conventional risk adjustment is that the premium paid to plans for someone in this group should be 20 percent above the average we fundamentally disagree that this is the right way to think about and do risk adjustment

costs and benefits of housing subsidies to tenants from voluntary and involuntary rent control a comparison between tenures and income groups this paper estimates the economic subsides to housing for different groups using the 1988 joseph rowntree memorial trust sample survey of households an olsen type model is used to estimate consumber surplus to households from subsidized housing these estimates are compared to costs and housing services in the owner occupier market poorer families receive larger benefits than richer families transfer efficiency is not high but the local authority sector receives the greatest benefits from controlled rents

adverse selection and inertia in health insurance markets when nudging hurts this paper investigates consumer inertia in health insurance markets where adverse selection is a potential concern we leverage a major change to insurance provision that occurred at a large firm to identify substantial inertia and develop and estimate a choice model that also quantifies risk preferences and ex ante health risk we use these estimates to study the impact of policies that nudge consumers toward better decisions by reducing inertia when aggregated these improved individual level choices substantially exacerbate adverse selection in our setting leading to an overall reduction in welfare that doubles the existing welfare loss from adverse selection jel d82 g22 i13 a number of potential impediments stand in the way of efficient health insur ance markets the most noted of these is adverse selection first studied by akerlof 1970 and rothschild and stiglitz 1976 in insurance markets prices reflect the expected risk costs of the insured pool whether the reason is price regulation or private information when insurers cannot price all risk characteristics riskier consumers choose more comprehensive health plans this causes the equilibrium prices of these plans to rise and healthier enrollees to select less comprehensive coverage than they would otherwise prefer

effective housing demand in mumbai bombay metropolitan region housing policy formulation should be informed by a careful understanding of the behaviour of the urban housing market as reflected by housing demand behaviour such basic information is important not only for improved project design but also for the development of better sector wide policies the overall analysis in this paper stresses the importance of prices and income on the demand for housing in mumbai metropolitan region estimates of housing demand function are given in our analysis we account for rent control in mumbai which distorts rents the results indicate that housing demand is elastic with respect to income and price the income and price elasticities are around 1 and 1 respectively we also estimate income and price elasticities for different income classes the paper concludes with policy prescriptions

adverse selection and an individual mandate when theory meets practice we develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms an individual mandate using data from massachusetts we estimate the parameters of the model in the individual market for health insurance we find that premiums and average costs decreased significantly in response to the individual mandate we find an annual welfare gain of 4 1 per person or 51 1 million annually in massachusetts as a result of the reduction in adverse selection we also find smaller post reform markups