2,981 research outputs found
The effect of demographic changes on saving for life cycle motives in developing countries
No full textIf developing countries follow the same paths that industrialized countries have followed, saving for retirement will initially become more important as the population growth rate declines. To calculate the potential importance of life-cycle savings (saving for retirement), the paper presents a simulation model that translates demographic projections into savings-rate projections. It simulated aggregate rates for life-cycle savings for Brazil, China, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey. The savings rates increase 5 or 6 percentage points when the last baby boomers enter the work force and begin to save after their children leave home. The effect on life-cycle savings is dramatic; the effect on total savings rates which are often three or four times as high, is not. Simulated life-cycle savings rates peak at an absolute 10 percent or less in all cases. The patterns of these projections seem robust with regard to assumptions about productivity growth, interest rates, and age-specific participation in the labor force.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Inequality
Fiscal responsibility laws for subnational discipline : the Latin American experience
No full textThis paper discusses fiscal responsibility laws in Latin America, with special attention to their provisions for fiscal discipline by subnational governments. It discusses why and when such laws might be useful-to help resolve the coordination problem in getting diverse governments to avoid overusing the common national credit market and to help individual governments make a time-consistent commitment for fiscal prudence. It examines the cases of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, as well as the case of Mexico where other types of laws and regulations aim to achieve the same objectives of solidifying incentives for fiscal discipline at all levels of government. Fiscal responsibility laws are found to be useful in some cases, although the experience is not long enough to be certain, but they are clearly not necessary in every case, nor always sufficient to assure fiscal stability.Urban Economics,Banks&Banking Reform,Public&Municipal Finance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Urban Economics,Public&Municipal Finance
Bargaining for a new fiscal pact in Mexico
No full textThe authors consider the malaise with the present set-up of fiscal federalism in Mexico from the points of view of the main players-the federal government, the states, the municipalities, and the citizen voters-in order to identify the areas of potential common interest as well as the direct conflicts. There is a zero-sum game on some issues, like the size of aggregate transfers, but not on others, likeraising tax collection and improving accountability for service delivery. The authors consider bargain packages that combine mutually beneficial changes and thus might obtain broad enough political support. They analyze the bargaining packages in two main tracks-one concerning tax assignments, revenue sharing, and tax administration, and another concerning the conjunction of earmarked transfers and accountability for service provision. An important result is that almost all states would find it fiscally attractive to impose a sales tax that replaced part of the federal value-added tax (VAT), even if the federal government reduced revenue sharing enough to cover half the cost of reducing the VAT rate to make room for the state tax.National Governance,Urban Governance and Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Regional Governance,National Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Regional Governance
Mathematics
No full text"Inservice education"--Final (unnumbered) p. of each document.; Includes bibliographical references.T. Teaching mathematics : elementary & middle grades / prepared by Steven P. Meiring (19 p.) -- K. Kindergarten mathematics / principal authors, James B. Wesson, Steven P. Meiring (18 p.) -- 1. First grade mathematics (18 p.) ; 2. Second grade mathematics (15 p.) ; 3. Third grade mathematics (18 p.) / principal author, C. Winston Smith, Jr. -- 4. Fourth grade mathematics (21 p.) ; 5. Fifth grade mathematics (19 p.) / principal author, James B. Wesson -- 6. Sixth grade mathematics (19 p.) ; 7. Seventh grade mathematics (23 p.) / principal author, William R. Speer -- 8. Eighth grade mathematics (19 p.) ; 8E. Eighth grade enrichment mathematics / principal author, James E. Schultz.A series of eleven monographs describing mathematics learning in the elementary and middle grades. These documents identify appropriate outcomes for each grade level and discuss teaching methods for helping students achieve those outcomes
Political economy of policy reform in Turkey in the 1980s
No full textTurkey's adjustment experience was a tremendous success in terms of structurally reorienting the economy. The share of output for export rose from 5 percent in 1979 to 23 percent in 1989, and real output roughly doubled. The financial markets opened and have developed depth and sophistication. The program failed to reduce fiscal deficits, inflation, income inequality, and the size of the inefficient public enterprise sector, but the transformation of trade and finance fundamentally altered the context of the problems, changing their effects on the private sector and changing the government's options for dealing with them. The first phase of economic adjustment was sustained, although not initiated, in an authoritarian context, but the Turks restored democracy when the agenda for reform was incomplete. The Motherland Party (ANAP) won office on the platform of economic success and eventally lost partly because of the failure of economic policy. ANAP's electoral defeat in 1991 did not mean, however, the demise of the pro-structural adjustment or the pro-liberalization coalitions. The long period of ANAP rule helped consolidate reforms to such a degree that all of the principal parties agreed on a broadly similar economic program. The ideological differences between the left and the right - a state-directed versus a marked-oriented economy - substantially diminished. The reforms of the early 1980s greatly reduced the importance of rent-seeking, particularly through foreign trade, but patronage politics became widespread again in the second half of the decade. The initial strength ANAP derived from privileged access to state resources progressively became a disadvantage, creating resentment and reaction among the populace. One source of discontent was the over-invoicing of exports (that is, fictitious exports), designed to take advantage of favorable export subsidies, and the government's failure to discipline or penalize the companies involved. This jeopardized attempts to build a pro-export coalition, and some key features of import substitution continued. The authors attribute the failure of Turkey's macroeconomic policies in the late 1980s to the government's failure tocultivate popular support for macroeconomic stability; to the top bureaucrats'lack of autonomy to counteract political pressures to expand the fiscal deficit; and to the continuation of top-down individualistic linkages between policymakers and key economic interests.National Governance,Parliamentary Government,Politics and Government,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research
Laws for fiscal responsibility for subnational discipline : international experience
No full textFiscal responsibility laws are institutions with which multiple governments in the same economy -- national and subnational --can commit to help avoid irresponsible fiscal behavior that could have short-term advantages to one of them but that would be collectively damaging. Coordination failures with subnational governments in the 1990s contributed to macroeconomic instability and led several countries to adopt fiscal responsibility laws as part of the remedy. The paper analyzes the characteristics and effects of fiscal responsibility laws in seven countries -- Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, India, and Peru. Fiscal responsibility laws are designed to address the short time horizons of policymakers, free riders among government units, and principal agent problems between the national and subnational governments. The paper describes how the laws differ in the specificity of quantitative targets, the strength of sanctions, the methods for increasing transparency, and the level of government passing the law. Evidence shows that fiscal responsibility laws can help coordinate and sustain commitments to fiscal prudence, but they are not a substitute for commitment and should not be viewed as ends in themselves. They can make a positive contribution by adding to the collection of other measures to shore up a coalition of states with the central government in support of fiscal prudence. Policymakers contemplating fiscal responsibility laws may benefit from the systematic review of international practice. One common trait of successful fiscal responsibility laws for subnational governments is the commitment of the central government to its own fiscal prudence, which is usually reinforced by the application of the law at the national as well as the subnational level.Debt Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,Subnational Economic Development,Public Sector Economics,Access to Finance
Unified mathematical treatment of complex cascaded bipartite networks: The case of collections of journal papers
No full textIn this study, a mathematical treatment is proposed for analysis of entities and relations among entities in
complex networks consisting of cascaded bipartite networks. This treatment is applied to the case of
collections of journal papers. In this case, entities are distinguishable objects and concepts, such as papers,
references, paper authors, reference authors, paper journals, reference journals, institutions, terms, and term
definitions. Relations are associations between entity-types such as papers and the references they cite, or
paper authors and the papers they write. An entity-relationship model is introduced that explicitly shows
direct links between entity-types and possible useful indirect relations. From this a matrix formulation and
generalized matrix arithmetic are introduced that allow easy expression of relations between entities and
calculation of weights of indirect links and co-occurrence links. Occurrence matrices, equivalence
matrices, membership matrices and co-occurrence matrices are described. A dynamic model of growth
describes recursive relations in occurrence and co-occurrence matrices as papers are added to the paper
collection. Graph theoretic matrices are introduced to allow information flow studies of networks of papers
linked by their citations. Similarity calculations and similarity fusion are explained. Derivation of feature
vectors for pattern recognition techniques is presented. The relation of the proposed mathematical
treatment to seriation, clustering, multidimensional scaling, and visualization techniques is discussed. It is
shown that most existing bibliometric analysis techniques for dealing with collections of journal papers are
easily expressed in terms of the proposed mathematical treatment: co-citation analysis, bibliographic
coupling analysis, author co-citation analysis, journal co-citation analysis, Braam-Moed-vanRaan (BMV)
co-citation/co-word analysis, latent semantic analysis, hubs and authorities, and multidimensional scaling.
This report discusses an extensive software toolkit that was developed for this research for analyzing and
visualizing entities and links in a collection of journal papers. Additionally, an extensive case study is
presented, analyzing and visualizing 60 years of anthrax research through a collection of journal papers.
When dealing with complex networks that consist of cascaded bipartite networks, the treatment presented
here provides a general mathematical framework for all aspects of analysis of static network structure and
network dynamic growth. As such, it provides a basic paradigm for thinking about and modeling such
networks: computing direct and indirect links, expressing and analyzing statistical distributions of network
characteristics, describing network growth, deriving feature vectors, clustering, and visualizing network
structure and growth
Extensions to behavioral genetic programming
No full textThesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (page 55).In this work I introduce genetic programming [5] as a general technique to produce programs with arbitrary behavior. I discuss genetic programming and its application the task of symbolic regression. I introduce behavioral genetic programming [6] as an extension to genetic programming and explore various extensions to it. The codebase that I build is made sufficiently flexible to easily accommodate future adaptions to the behavioral genetic programming methodology. I test the performance of the implementation of behavioral genetic programming along with several extensions.by Steven B. Fine.M. Eng
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