Eastern Donors and Western Soft Law: Towards a DAC Donor Peer Review of China and India?

The international system is still governed by a normative framework designed mainly by OECD countries, especially with regard to soft‐law standards in the field of development co‐operation. However, the growing relevance of ‘Eastern donors’ is weakening its efficiency and raises the question of how compliance with these standards can be assured in a changing donor landscape. Despite efforts to integrate emerging countries into the traditional approach of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to monitoring compliance through peer reviews, the aid architecture of the future might turn out to be a synthesis of established and new approaches.     

Editorial des geschäftsführenden Herausgebers

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Soziale Beziehungen: Freundschaft, Partnerschaft, Geschwisterbeziehungen

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A REVIEW OF SYSTEMS COINTEGRATION TESTS

The literature on systems cointegration tests is reviewed and the various sets of assumptions for the asymptotic validity of the tests are compared within a general unifying framework. The comparison includes likelihood ratio tests, Lagrange multiplier and Wald type tests, lag augmentation tests, tests based on canonical correlations, the Stock-Watson tests and Bierens' nonparametric tests. Asymptotic results regarding the power of these tests and previous small sample simulation studies are discussed. Further issues and proposals in the context of systems cointegration tests are also considered briefly. New simulations are presented to compare the tests under uniform conditions. Special emphasis is given to the sensitivity of the test performance with respect to the trending properties of the DGP.     

Discussion on On the role of data,statistics and decisions in a pandemic

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - The authors make an important contribution presenting a comprehensive and thoughtful overview about the many different aspects of data, statistics and data...     

The Impact of Complexity on Knowledge Transfer in Manufacturing Networks

Coordinating knowledge transfer within multi‐plant manufacturing networks is a challenging task. Using a computational model, we examine when it is beneficial to create production knowledge within a central unit, the “lead factory,” and transfer it to geographically dispersed plants. We demonstrate that the knowledge transfer generates a trade‐off between a positive cost‐saving effect due to fewer adaptations in each plant, and a negative transfer cost effect due to the costly knowledge transfer itself. The complexity of the production process moderates the performance implications of the knowledge transfer because it determines the relative strength of these two effects. For production processes with low complexity, knowledge transfer can engender superior network performance. Here, an optimal extent of knowledge transfer exists, and thus, a complete knowledge transfer is not performance maximizing. For production processes with medium and high levels of complexity, performance is reduced rather than enhanced through knowledge transfer so that it is optimal not to transfer any knowledge from the lead factory to the plants. While we analyze knowledge transfer within a manufacturing network, our results are transferable to other settings that consist of a knowledge sending and receiving unit.     

Locally robust correlation coefficients

Robustness of correlation coefficients is studied in the framework of testing for independence, robustness being measured by the minimum asymptotic power over a suitable class of local alternatives. A minimax result is derived; the robust correlation coefficient is computed from suitably transformed and truncated observations. Moreover, the related approach of Huber (1977) is analyzed, and inadmissibility of his minimax solution is shown.