Reorganization of Guilds and State Control of Small Business: A Case Study of the Teahouse Guild in Early 1950s Chengdu

This paper attempts to investigate the decline of Chinese guilds in the early 1950s and to show how political change altered economic life in China. Although the socialist transformation of private ownership started in 1954, the new government used state power to gradually weaken private ownership far before that time, building a foundation for the full-scale socialist transformation later. The reorganization of the Teahouse Guild in Chengdu reflected the general policies of the Communist Party that changed traditional social and economic organizations. The new guild almost became a representative of the government in the teahouse profession, which no longer maintained the nature of the traditional guilds. Actually, the guilds existed in name only after the reorganization of the early 1950s, and the teahouse guild disappeared after 1953. The death of the guild was a result of decline among social organizations and the growing strength of state power.     

Exploring Nonlinear Spatial Dependence in the Tails

In many instances it is of interest to measure the degree of similarity between neighboring regions. Spatial autocorrelation measures are the most popular means of doing it. However, such measures only capture a global linear relationship between regions, whereas in many circumstances a more general instrument is required. For instance, in economic poverty analysis or environmental applications (and in other cases where we are interested in extreme events and threshold exceedances) we should be more interested in the spatial pattern in the tails of the joint distributions. In this article we introduce some exploratory tool that focuses on the bivariate joint tails behavior to detect a pattern of spatial regularities. The method will be illustrated with reference to simulated environmental data.     

Do Workers Benefit from Industrial Agglomeration?*

Abstract. This paper provides an empirical investigation of the advantages accruing to workers in industrial clusters. Using a unique data set based on the Cluster Mapping Project of the Italian National Statistical Institute, we examine whether industry agglomeration leads to wage and labor mobility differentials. We estimate complete Mincerian wage equations, investigating whether returns to seniority and education are a possible source of differentiation. We find that working in an industrial cluster reduces the returns to education, does not affect the returns to seniority, and does not provide average wage premia. On the other hand, industrial agglomeration positively affects the likelihood of being employed, of starting a business, and of making a transition from payroll employment to entrepreneurship; it also increases blue‐collar worker mobility across jobs.     

The case of specialized towns in Guangdong,China

The illustration of some preliminary results of an ongoing research on the industry in Guangdong, China, is the core of this article. In particular focus is on the so called ‘specialized towns’ and the industries that characterize them as complex actors of Chinese industrial development. The evidence on these specialized towns is quite interesting as such, being not yet well acknowledged in the international literature. However, it is also believed that an investigation of these realities may contribute to the understanding of new engines of industrial development in the context of contemporary global economic relations—what is called the ‘new industry’. Furthermore, some light is shed on the nature of the competitive challenge that China poses to traditional European industry: it is not only cheap labour, cheap land, dumping, and the like. In the new emerging China government visions, policies and industrial organization architecture seem to play a central role. In this context, the authors conclude proposing a framework of questions relevant to some of the most industrialized areas of Europe, that is the Italian regions characterized by a great diffusion of industrial districts.     

新疆龟兹钱币的金属学初步研究

龟兹是位于西域“丝绸之路”上的一个绿洲国家 ,活跃于汉代至唐代 ,主要包括现在新疆天山南麓的库尔勒至巴楚一带 ,其中心在今库车县附近。龟兹不仅物产丰富、人口众多、经济繁荣 ,是西域诸国中的大国 ,而且地处交通要冲 ,在吸收和融汇外来文化因素的基础上 ,产生了灿烂的物质文明。龟兹钱币是反映其发达文化的一个侧面 ,本文选择了几件典型的龟兹钱币 ,进行了组织检验和成份分析 ,以期进行初步的研究。1 龟兹钱币的发现龟兹钱币作为一个整体的概念 ,包括仿汉小五铢、汉龟二体钱、龟兹文一体钱、铸剪边钱、无字小钱等 ,以汉龟二体钱作为主…     

The politics of metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on utopia and immortality

The hypothesis underlying this article is that any narrative of the emergence of modernity—as the one developed by Blumenberg, for example—that leaves behind the eschatological component is incomplete, since it removes from the tradition of modernity a great deal of the Protestant religious experience which shows deep obsession with the thought of the end of the world. Through a confrontation between Adorno and Bloch, the article argues that the notions of utopia and human liberation imply logically the idea of immortality.

For Adorno and Bloch the dream of immortality is the dream of matter; both of them believe that the act of human transcendence must cling on to the bodily stuff out of which we are made. Yet, whereas Bloch postulates the positive existence of a transcendent space, Adorno eschews any ontological commitment. The article argues in favour of Adorno's negative approach, showing that, after Auschwitz, what both philosophers take as the truth‐content of theology cannot be automatically transferred into dialectical materialism.     

教育资源配置对住房价格影响的时空差异研究——以35个大中城市为例

本文以2002-2017年35个大中城市为数据基础,借鉴Rosen-Roback城市空间均衡模型,测度大中城市教育资源对住房价格的影响差异性。研究发现：①控制其他变量后,教育事业费支出水平每提高1%,住房价格水平平均上涨0.156个百分点;②空间维度上,沿海城市的教育资源对住房价格的影响,显著小于内陆城市;而政治级别的差异在大中城市间的影响较小;③时间维度来看,教育资源对住房价格的影响在各时期都是显著存在的,表明教育资源的影响具有长期累积特征;从影响程度绝对值来看,影响系数具有随时间递减的特征。