245 research outputs found
Beyond Planning and Mercantilism: An Evaluation of Pakistan’s Growth Strategy
No full textThrough the nineties Pakistan remained preoccupied with crisis management. All debate and policy was, as a result, involved with current policy and our coping with the IMF programmes. Adjustment was the main theme leaving little room for growth initiatives.1 A lively debate has raged on the distributional impacts of adjustment policy on which the government and the thinking community have adopted opposing stances, often with much emotion. With this focus of economic and political discussion on critiquing of the current government and its policies, there has been little effort put in understanding and reviewing the country’s growth strategy. This paper attempts to assess the evolution of Pakistan’s long-term growth strategy.2 It is my contention that the growth strategy remains inertia-ridden because of the lack of an academic community and debate.3 The paper will also attempt to identify the actors who influence and shape this strategy. This will be followed by what changes should be made in that strategy, based on more recent developments in economic thinking and experience in the world. For long-run sustained growth that will lead us to join the club of the more advanced countries, a new strategy based on the latest research findings will be needed. Finally, I shall point to the factors that impede the adoption of such a strategy, and especially to our owning such a strategy.Economic Growth
RETHINKING INDUSTRIAL POLICY
No full textDespite the hold of the neoliberal orthodoxy on policy making in developing countries, industrial policy remains important for the promotion of industrial development. However, the context for the design of industrial policy has profoundly changed as a result of new rules governing international trade, the rise of global value chains and marketing networks, and other aspects of globalization. Traditionally, the case for industrial policy has been framed in terms of “market failures” but the paper argues that that is not a sufficient basis. After addressing the traditional points of criticism, an attempt is made to outline the “domains” of industrial policy in the current circumstances, especially for industrially lagging countries. As country contexts differ widely there are no satisfactory blueprints for policy making that countries can readily adopt. As in production decisions, considerable ingenuity and innovation is needed in designing policies. This is all the more necessary as the WTO rules have become increasingly stringent and the rise of international trading networks has created new barriers for young firms to enter the world market. These developments have changed the context but not the importance of policy in industrial development. The paper identifies areas where government intervention is needed and can still make a positive difference.
Poisoning the Mind: Arsenic Contamination of Drinking Water Wells and Children's Educational Achievement in Rural Bangladesh
No full textBangladesh has experienced the largest mass poisoning of a population in history owing to contamination of groundwater with naturally occurring inorganic arsenic. Prolonged drinking of such water risks development of diseases and therefore has implications for children's cognitive and psychological development. This study examines the effect of arsenic contamination of tubewells, the primary source of drinking water at home, on the learning outcome of school-going children in rural Bangladesh using recent nationally representative data on secondary school children. We unambiguously find a negative and statistically significant correlation between mathematics scores and arsenic-contaminated drinking tubewells at home, net of the child's socio-economic status, parental background and school specific unobserved correlates of learning. Similar correlations are found for an alternative measure of student achievement and subjective well-being (i.e. self-reported measure of life satisfaction), of the student. We conclude by discussing the policy implication of our findings in the context of the current debate over the adverse effect of arsenic poisoning on children.subjective well-being, Madrasa, drinking water pollution, Bangladesh
RGB-W Dataset
No full textAbstract
Inspired by the recent success of RGB-D cameras, we propose the enrichment of RGB data with an additional quasi-free modality, namely, the wireless signal emitted by individuals' cell phones, referred to as RGB-W. The received signal strength acts as a rough proxy for depth and a reliable cue on a person's identity. Although the measured signals are noisy, we demonstrate that the combination of visual and wireless data significantly improves the localization accuracy. We introduce a novel image-driven representation of wireless data which embeds all received signals onto a single image. We then evaluate the ability of this additional data to (i) locate persons within a sparsity-driven framework and to (ii) track individuals with a new confidence measure on the data association problem. Our solution outperforms existing localization methods. It can be applied to the millions of currently installed RGB cameras to better analyze human behavior and offer the next generation of high-accuracy location-based services.
Conference Paper
PDF: http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_iccv_2015/papers/Alahi_RGB-W_When_Vision_ICCV_2015_paper.pdf
Metadata
+----------------+-----------------+-----------+-----------+--------------+----------+
| Sequence Name | Length (mm:ss) | # Frames | # People | # W Devices | Download |
+----------------+-----------------+-----------+-----------+--------------+----------+
| conference-1 | 01:53 | 1,697 | 5 | 5 | 116 MiB |
| conference-2 | 05:18 | 4,782 | 12 | 12 | 379 MiB |
| conference-3 | 23:31 | 21,165 | 1 | 2 | 1.3 GiB |
| conference-4 | 06:27 | 4,832 | 1 | 2 | 357 MiB |
| conference-5 | 06:03 | 4,525 | 2 | 2 | 290 MiB |
| patio-1 | 07:22 | 6,636 | 4 | 4 | 474 MiB |
| patio-2 | 04:36 | 4,144 | 2 | 2 | 258 MiB |
| Full Dataset | 55:10 | 47,781 | -- | -- | 3.2 GiB |
+----------------+-----------------+-----------+-----------+--------------+----------+
Citation
If you would like to cite our work, please use the following.
Alahi A, Haque A, Fei-Fei L. (2015). RGB-W: When Vision Meets Wireless. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). Santiago, Chile. IEEE.
@inproceedings{alahi2015rgb,
title={RGB-W: When vision meets wireless},
author={Alahi, Alexandre and Haque, Albert and Fei-Fei, Li},
booktitle={International Conference on Computer Vision},
year={2015}
What macroeconomic policies are"sound?"
No full textMost people agree that the soundness of macroeconomic policies should be judged by their efficacy in meeting the objectives of steady growth, full employment, stable prices, and a viable external payments situation. What people debate about are the links between macroeconomics and economic structure--and in the current environment, the openness to foreign capital flows. As developing countries become more integrated into international financial markets, volatility may become an increasing fact of life. Faced with such volatility, how should these countries frame their macroeconomic policies? What broad principles should guide their macroeconomic management? In many developing countries, the openness of the capital account has been significant. Many countries have made the transition toward an open-economic paradigm. As a result, fluctuations in international capital and currency markets, as well as shifts in foreign investors'attitudes and confidence, have greatly affected local stock market prices, the level of foreign exchange reserves, and the scope for monetary and interest rate policy. Capital controls and foreign exchange restrictions have been significantly dismantled in a number of developing and transition economies. In 1970, only 34 countries--or 30 percent of the International Monetary Fund's membership-had assumed Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement, declaring their currency convertible on current account transactions. By 1997, this figure had increased to 77 percent. Does financial integration make it more difficult to achieve macroeconomic stability? Apparently not, on the whole, although at times large short-term capital flows can lead to misaligned asset prices, including exchange rates. What financial integration does do is limit how far countries can pursue policies incompatible with medium-term financial stability. The disciplining effect of global financial and product markets applies not only to policymakers-through pressures on financial markets-but also to the private sector. Rather than constrain the pursuit of appropriate policies, globalization may add leverage and flexibility to such policies, easing financing constraints and extending the time during which countries can make adjustments. But markets will provide this leeway only if they perceive that countries are undertaking adjustments that address fundamental choices.Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Macroeconomic Management
POLICY SPACE: WHAT, FOR WHAT, AND WHERE?
No full textThe paper examines how developing countries can use existing policy space, and enlarge it, without opting out of international commitments. It argues that: (i) a meaningful context for policy space must extend beyond trade policy and include macroeconomic and exchange-rate policies that will achieve developmental goals more effectively; (ii) policy space depends not only on international rules but also on the impact of international market conditions and policy decisions taken in other countries on the effectiveness of national policy instruments; and (iii) international integration affects policy space through several factors that pull in opposite directions; whether it increases or reduces policy space differs by country and type of integration.
THE CONCEPT OF ODIOUS DEBT IN PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW
No full textThe concept of “odious debt” regroups a set of equitable considerations that have often been raised in the context of political transitions. This paper explores the grounds of the “odious debt” concept in international law and points out that obligation to repay debt has never been accepted as absolute, and has been frequently qualified by a range of equitable considerations, some of which may be regrouped under the concept of “odiousness.” Due to the complexity and variety of transitional contexts, there is no single legal forum for the adjudication or settlement of claims of odiousness. Depending on context, such claims might appropriately be raised in bilateral or multilateral negotiations, or they could be adjudicated in domestic litigation. However, invocation of the concept of odious debt in multiple forums risks inconsistent decisions. Thus, the examination of considerations of odiousness by a single special transitional tribunal may be an attractive solution.
SHARE OF LABOUR COMPENSATION AND AGGREGATE DEMAND – DISCUSSIONS TOWARDS A GROWTH STRATEGY
No full textEconomic growth strategies of developing countries have focused in the last decades on expanding their exports. In that scheme, wage compression seems necessary in order to compensate the observed slow productivity pace achieving, therefore, “competitiveness”. The core of this discussion is, undoubtedly, how the national product is appropriated through wages and surplus, i.e. the factorial income distribution. From that viewpoint, this paper discusses the long-term impoverishment of Argentinean workers through two key aspects of the economic process: on one hand, the way in which labour force is allocated, by analysing the relationship between real wage and productivity. On the other, how income is used in the acquisition of consumer goods and capital formation. In order to fully comprehend those trends, this paper recourses to an international comparison with two types of countries: the developed ones (United States of America, France and Japan) and the largest Latin American economies (Brazil and Mexico). As these processes take place in the long run, this paper’s analysis period will start from the 1950s.
The macroeconomics of the public sector deficit : the case of Morocco
No full textThis paper tries to uncover the reasons underlying the performance of the Moroccan economy. The author argues that wage moderation and judicious monetary policies were instrumental in restraining inflation. With one brief exception in 1983, monetary authorities remained firmly committed to eschew any inflationary financing of the budget deficit. This strategy could only succeed however because of the wide ranging system of credit and monetary regulations which worked to channel domestic funds toward the Treasury at relatively low costs. The prospects for the continuation of such a strategy are not favourable however. As far as the growth performance is concerned, it appears that it can be attributed to an outstanding export response to the new trade regime on the one hand and a set of favourable supply shocks, including a string of recordagricultural harvests and the collapse of real oil prices, on the other. The paper studies the evolution of the budget and its different components and argues that the reluctance by Morocco's policy makers to monetize existing budget deficits is well explained by the sharply unfavourable trade-offs between higher monetization and inflation existing in Morocco. It analyzes the implications that continuing budgetary disequilibria has on investment and saving decisions and finds that such implications may be substantial, even though they may not work their way exclusively through traditional interest rates channels.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Financial Intermediation
THE SCOPE FOR FOREIGN EXCHANGE MARKET INTERVENTIONS
No full textThe discussion on exchange rate policy is dominated by the so-called “impossible trinity”. According to this principle an autonomous monetary policy, a control over the exchange rate and free capital movements cannot be achieved simultaneously. In this paper, a strategy of managed floating is developed that allows transforming the “impossible trinity” into a “possible trinity”. If a central bank targets an exchange rate path which is determined by uncovered interest parity (UIP), it can at the same time set its policy rate autonomously. As a UIP path removes the incentives for carry-trade, it is also compatible with capital mobility. The approach can be used unilaterally to prevent carry trade as a central bank can always prevent an appreciation of its currency. But it can also be applied bilaterally or multilaterally. Successful examples are the European Monetary System and the exchange rate policy of Slovenia before its EMU membership.
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