Hasil untuk "Economic history and conditions"

Chamila Gamage

This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like infinity, area, motion, and continuous change slowly evolved through solving problems and cultural exchange. I argue that bringing this history into the classroom helps students see calculus as more than a set of procedures: it becomes a story of human creativity and persistence. By revisiting the questions early mathematicians struggled with, students can better appreciate and better understand the core ideas behind the formulas they use today.

Héctor Flores Márquez, Adrián Jiménez Gómez

La corrupción es un fenómeno social que tiene un profundo efecto en la región de América Latina, por esta razón, se plantea encontrar las causas que contribuyen a su desarrollo. Se utiliza la metodología del Promedio de Modelos Bayesiano con Variables Instrumentales (IVBMA, por sus siglas en inglés), para hallar determinantes robustos de la corrupción en 19 países latinoamericanos. Se consideran 23 regresores con observaciones de 2013 al 2020. El IVBMA efectúa 8,388,608 modelos, con el fin de extraer los determinantes más robustos. Se revela que elementos institucionales y económicos son mejores predictores de la corrupción en la región.

Marc-André Gagnon

Köz - gazdaság

Review of Economic Theory and Policy (RETP) interviewed Andrea Szalavetz, scientific advisor at the Institute of World Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, ELTE. Her research focuses on upgrading in global value chains, digital transformation and regional differences in technological development and innovation capabilities. In this interview, we discuss how Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) could transition from a development model dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI) to a more innovation-oriented and resilient trajectory. We also examine the technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the region, as well as the impact of developments in the defence industry and industrial policy on future growth.

N. Lamoreaux

Historical foundations for the “invisible hand” In 1975 the noted institutional economist Robert A. Gordon entitled his American Economic Association presidential address “Rigor and Relevance in a Changing Institutional Setting.” Gordon argued that “the mainstream of economic theory sacrifices far too much relevance in its insistent pursuit of ever increasing rigor.” “We economists,” he complained, “pay too little attention to the changing institutional environment that conditions economic behavior.” Gordon continued, “We do not often enough reexamine our basic postulates in light of changes in this environment, and, perhaps more important, we shy away from the big questions about how and why the institutional structure is changing – and where it is taking us.” In the history of economic thought, economists have not always ignored the “big questions.” Indeed the attempt to relate economic institutions to economic development was first taken up in a serious way in the late eighteenth century when Adam Smith inquired into the “nature and causes of the wealth of nations.” Writing on the eve of the world's first industrial revolution in an era when ownership and control of the manufacturing enterprise were a proprietary affair, Smith emphasized how the growth of economic individualism would benefit the growth of the economy. And, indeed, as I shall outline in Chapter 1, Britain's rise to its position of industrial leadership in the nineteenth century did rely on highly specialized proprietary firms, the activities of which were coordinated by market relations.

Christopher M. Graney

This paper provides an overview of recent historical research regarding scientifically-informed challenges to the idea that the stars are other suns orbited by other inhabited earths -- an idea that came to be known as "the Plurality of Worlds". Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century, Jacques Cassini in the eighteenth, and William Whewell in the nineteenth each argued against "pluralism" based on what in their respective times was solid science. Nevertheless, pluralism remained popular despite these and other scientific challenges. This history will be of interest to the astronomical community so that it is better positioned to avoid difficulties should the historical trajectory of pluralism continue, especially as it persists in the popular imagination.

D. Lichter, D. McLaughlin, G. Kephart et al.

Ryan B. Edwards, R. Naylor, Matthew M. Higgins et al.

Abstract The economic costs of Indonesia’s 2015 forest fires are estimated to exceed US $16 billion, with more than 100,000 premature deaths. On several days the fires emitted more carbon dioxide than the entire United States economy. Here, we combine detailed geospatial data on fire and local climatic conditions with rich administrative data to assess the underlying causes of Indonesia’s forest fires at district and village scales. We find that El Nino events explain most of the year-on-year variation in fire. The creation of new districts increases fire and exacerbates the El Nino impacts on fire. We also find that regional economic growth has gone hand-in-hand with the use of fire in rural districts. We proceed with a 30,000-village case study of the 2015 fire season on Sumatra and Kalimantan and ask which villages, for a given level of spatial fire risk, are more likely to have fire. Villages more likely to burn tend to be more remote, to be considerably less developed, and to have a history of using fire for agriculture. Although central and district level policies and regional economic development have generally contributed to voracious environmental degradation, the close link between poverty and fire at the village level suggests that the current policy push for village development might offer opportunities to reverse this trend.

Dekkiche Djamal, Laila Oulad Brahim, Hadj Khelifa

This study's primary goal is to examine Saudi Arabia's performance from 2000 to 2022. In order to accomplish this, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was employed along with a limits test. The study's findings indicate that oil exports impact short-term and long-term outcomes during the specified study period. On the other hand, non-oil exports initially contribute positively to the country's domestic product in the short term, but this contribution diminishes quickly and becomes negative and statistically insignificant in the long term. As a result, Saudi Arabia is dependent on the export of a single commodity, making it vulnerable to the effects of market volatility on the price of oil. To escape the excessive dependence of Saudi Arabia on oil and encourage non-oil export activities in order to stimulate long-term economic growth, the research recommends expanding into other productive sectors, such as agriculture and industry. These two sectors are vital for economic diversification, to obtain improved growth, and to limit the ramifications of the negative effects caused by international changes in oil prices. It is essential to take this strategy to prevent excessive reliance on this one-of-a-kind resource, this diversification is crucial for promoting exports beyond hydrocarbons and reducing reliance on oil. improve its level of investment in its thriving domestic sectors and take steps to lower the country's high production costs by constructing infrastructure that would enable the growth of non-oil exports, especially because Saudi Arabia will become a member of the BRICS group of countries beginning in January 2024.

Qian Zhang, Apurv Shukla, Le Xie

Scenario generation is an effective data-driven method for solving chance-constrained optimization while ensuring desired risk guarantees with a finite number of samples. Crucial challenges in deploying this technique in the real world arise due to the absence of appropriate risk-tuning models tailored for the desired application. In this paper, we focus on designing efficient scenario generation schemes for economic dispatch in power systems. We propose a novel scenario generation method based on filtering scenarios using ambient wind conditions. These filtered scenarios are deployed incrementally in order to meet desired risk levels while using minimum resources. In order to study the performance of the proposed scheme, we illustrate the procedure on case studies performed for both 24-bus and 118-bus systems with real-world wind power forecasting data. Numerical results suggest that the proposed filter-and-increment scenario generation model leads to a precise and efficient solution for the chance-constrained economic dispatch problem.

Shiro Armstrong, Danny Quah

This paper casts within a unified economic framework some key challenges for the global economic order: de-globalization; the rising impracticability of global cooperation; and the increasingly confrontational nature of Great Power competition. In these, economics has been weaponised in the service of national interest. This need be no bad thing. History provides examples where greater openness and freer trade emerge from nations seeking only to advance their own self-interests. But the cases described in the paper provide mixed signals. We find that some developments do draw on a growing zero-sum perception to economic and political engagement. That zero-sum explanation alone, however, is crucially inadequate. Self-serving nations, even when believing the world zero-sum, have under certain circumstances produced outcomes that have benefited all. In other circumstances, perfectly-predicted losses have instead resulted on all sides. Such lose-lose outcomes -- epic fail equilibria -- generalize the Prisoner's Dilemma game and are strictly worse than zero-sum. In our analysis, Third Nations -- those not frontline in Great Power rivalry -- can serve an essential role in averting epic fail outcomes. The policy implication is that Third Nations need to provide platforms that will gently and unobtrusively nudge Great Powers away from epic-fail equilibria and towards inadvertent cooperation.

Antulio N. Bomfim

Credit default swaps (CDS) are the most common type of credit derivative. This paper provides a brief history of the CDS market and discusses its main characteristics. After describing the basic mechanics of a CDS, I present a simple valuation framework that focuses on the relationship between conditions in the cash and CDS markets as well as an approach to mark to market existing CDS positions. The discussion highlights how the 2008 global financial crisis helped shape current practices and conventions in the CDS market, including the widespread adoption of standardized coupons and upfront premiums and the increased reliance on centralized counterparties. I also address CDS indexes--focusing on their growing role as key indicators of investors’ attitudes toward credit risk--and briefly examine their behavior during periods of acute financial or economic dislocations, including those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

P. García-Llamas, S. Suárez‐Seoane, Á. Taboada et al.

Abstract The increasing occurrence of large and severe fires in Mediterranean forest ecosystems produces major ecological and socio-economic damage. In this study, we aim to identify the main environmental factors driving fire severity in extreme fire events in Pinus fire prone ecosystems, providing management recommendations for reducing fire effects. The study case was a megafire (11,891 ha) that occurred in a Mediterranean ecosystem dominated by Pinus pinaster Aiton in NW Spain. Fire severity was estimated on the basis of the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio from Landsat 7 ETM +, validated by the field Composite Burn Index. Model predictors included pre-fire vegetation greenness (normalized difference vegetation index and normalized difference water index), pre-fire vegetation structure (canopy cover and vertical complexity estimated from LiDAR), weather conditions (spring cumulative rainfall and mean temperature in August), fire history (fire-free interval) and physical variables (topographic complexity, actual evapotranspiration and water deficit). We applied the Random Forest machine learning algorithm to assess the influence of these environmental factors on fire severity. Models explained 42% of the variance using a parsimonious set of five predictors: NDWI, NDVI, time since the last fire, spring cumulative rainfall, and pre-fire vegetation vertical complexity. The results indicated that fire severity was mostly influenced by pre-fire vegetation greenness. Nevertheless, the effect of pre-fire vegetation greenness was strongly dependent on interactions with the pre-fire vertical structural arrangement of vegetation, fire history and weather conditions (i.e. cumulative rainfall over spring season). Models using only physical variables exhibited a notable association with fire severity. However, results suggested that the control exerted by the physical properties may be partially overcome by the availability and structural characteristics of fuel biomass. Furthermore, our findings highlighted the potential of low-density LiDAR for evaluating fuel structure throughout the coefficient of variation of heights. This study provides relevant keys for decision-making on pre-fire management such as fuel treatment, which help to reduce fire severity.

Nagy Erika, Lux Gábor, Timár Judit

Ram Sagar

The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), a premier autonomous research institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has a legacy of about seven decades with contributions made in the field of observational sciences namely atmospheric and astrophysics. The Survey of India used a location at ARIES, determined with an accuracy of better than 10 meters on a world datum through institute participation in a global network of Earth artificial satellites imaging during late 1950. Taking advantage of its high-altitude location, ARIES, for the first time, provided valuable input for climate change studies by long term characterization of physical and chemical properties of aerosols and trace gases in the central Himalayan regions. In astrophysical sciences, the institute has contributed precise and sometime unique observations of the celestial bodies leading to a number of discoveries. With the installation of the 3.6 meter Devasthal optical telescope in the year 2015, India became the only Asian country to join those few nations of the world who are hosting 4 meter class optical telescopes. This telescope, having advantage of geographical location, is well-suited for multi-wavelength observations and for sub-arc-second resolution imaging of the celestial objects including follow-up of the GMRT, AstroSat and gravitational-wave sources.

Murray Gell-Mann, James B Hartle

This paper discusses the relation between the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics that is based on coarse-grained decoherent histories of a closed system, and the approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems, as in the Copenhagen interpretation. We show how the a classical world used in such formulations is not to something to be postulated but rather explained by suitable sets of alternative histories of quasiclassical variables. We discuss the general definition of measurement, the collapse of the wave function, and irreversibility from the perspective of decoherent histories quantum theory..

Michael Roos, Matthias Reccius

There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms that are at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. In order to solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense-making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling as an empirical strategy, we suggest that the complementary use of other canonical methods from the natural language processing toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and be able to move towards true empirical narrative economics.

R. Rothstein

A. Mingardi

The Impact of Health Conditionalities in Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes: the case of the AUH in Argentina, Santiago Poy, Ianina Tuñón

The Universal Child Allowance (AUH) is an Argentine cash transfer programme that conditions payment to parents on the fulfilment of health and education conditions for their children. While the impact of the AUH on education is well known, its effects on health have been less explored. This paper assesses the direct effect of the programme on children attending routine medical exams and receiving scheduled vaccinations, the health conditions of the programme, along with indirect health-related outcomes to explore the wider potential effects on child health. Using microdata from the Argentine Social Debt Survey (EDSA), a quasi-experimental design is implemented to determine the average treatment effect on AUH recipients. The AUH is found to have no effect on the behaviours on which it is conditioned or on dental visits, but it does increase food security. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of programme conditionalities.