This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to China as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. We first summarize a number of issues facing China, including the possibility of slower growth, global imbalances, and a number of domestic...

Most countries have suffered from the global financial crisis. Some eurozone countries—the so-called PIIGS—are now facing debt crises that could conceivably threaten the entire euro project, a situation that has spurred the Chinese government to worry about its high governmental deficit,...

Pelletization of torrefied sawdust from a fluidized bed reactor was investigated to quantify the energy consumption and pellet properties, including moisture adsorption, pellet density and Meyer hardness. Energy consumptions in compaction and extrusion for torrefied sawdust were significantly...

To select items from a uni-dimensional scale to create a reduced scale for disease screening, Liu and Jin (2007) developed a non-parametric method based on binary risk classification. When the measure for the risk of a disease is ordinal or quantitative, and possibly subject to random censoring,...

Mental health is likely to be influenced by contextual variables that emerge only at the level of the group. We studied the effect of two such group-level variables, within-state income inequality and alcohol tax policy, on symptoms of current depression and alcohol dependence in a US national...

The outstanding economist Hyman Minsky was always skeptical of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It assumed, he wrote, that economic growth itself would be adequate to eliminate poverty. But Minsky believed that there were structural problems that always left too many people without jobs or with...

Modern governments with a floating currency face no inherent financial constraints. Unfortunately, most modern macro-theorists continue to write as if these nations were financially constrained by (1) the magnitude of current tax "revenue" and (2) the private sector's willingness to "finance"...

This economist thinks that private debt got too far out of hand in the 1990s to make a recovery and economic expansion easy to achieve. He wants the federal government, among other things, to bail out the states and perhaps loosen its fiscal posture well beyond the short run.

Many economists, journalists, and public policy officials have argued that speculation has had little to do with the recent rapid run-up in the price of oil. If true, a case for regulation of oil markets would be more difficult to make. But the author examines the evidence in detail and finds it...